In this episode, I discuss the first of what I am treating as a series of humanities experiences that Jane Austen’s novels and ideas helps us understand and appreciate: the integral role of ignorance in the knowledge-acquisition process.

I consider Northanger Abbey and explore how Austen’s first completed novel dramatizes various ways in which we learn, come to knowledge, and recognize the limitations of our knowledge. In all these processes, I think through how Austen details ignorance as an important component of our learning processes—i.e. how we come to know if different ways and through different experiences, including painful and shameful experiences. I examine the integral link between knowledge and ignorance, the precarity and danger of knowledge, and some of the ways in which the humanities model this larger and enduring experience that Austen documents.