Original subtitles

1803 - 27-year-old Jane Austen dreams of being a published writer.

She has broken with convention,

turning down a marriage offer in order to pursue her passion.

Jane has gambled.

She's gambled everything on writing.

She's turned down the final,

the most plausible, offer to marry into wealth.

At this point, she has to commit herself to the life of a writer.

And the only question now is - how ambitious is she going to be?

She says herself that she's greedy. She wants profits.

She wants to make as much money as she possibly can.

Jane Austen wants to be published, but with all her ambition,

her ferocious intelligence, even she might not have

foreseen that this would come at a cost...

..and what that cost would be.

Today, few records of Jane Austen's life survive.

But now, with the help of writers, experts

and actors, we can piece her story back together.

Jane Austen was a writer teeming with new ideas,

who revealed profound truths about the world she lived in.

There is writing before Austen

and there is writing after Austen.

That achievement is enormous.

Jane Austen is the greatest comic novelist we have ever produced.

At a time when women were supposed to know their place,

Jane ripped up the rule book.

She's not just writing about romance.

We should see her as a political novelist.

She's telling young women, "I see you and I hear you,"

which I think is such a modern thing.

Austen's life is a tale of ambition, struggle and tragedy.

SCREAMS

A genius cut down in her prime.

She's really good at the light, the ironic,

the beautifully observed,

and then life drives a truck into that.

This is the story of how a self-taught country girl

from a Hampshire village defied the conventions of her day

to became one of the greatest novelists who ever lived.

Her voice is so strong and funny and perceptive,

and her work's still being copied and stolen by people like me.

She did what she wanted to do

and it makes me feel like I can always do what I want to do.

Jane Austen has already written Pride And Prejudice,

Sense And Sensibility

and Northanger Abbey.

But nobody outside her family has ever read them.

If she's going to survive in her new life,

she needs to get them published.

Jane Austen wants to be famous, be known as a writer,

and she's starting to feel impatient.

She's been writing brilliantly since her teenage years.

That's a decade of good writing in the bank.

She wants the next thing to happen.

She's ready for the next phase.

In Northanger Abbey, Jane believes she's written a brilliant novel.

Determined to find a publisher,

she enlists the help of her older brother, Henry.

One of the Austen brothers' star has been rising.

Henry has set up a bank in London,

now living with the incredibly hot wife, cousin Eliza.

Back from the moment when she walks through the door,

having lost her last husband...

..she gains Henry Austen.

Henry and Eliza are living in London,

so they're right in the heart of society.

They'd have contacts in the publishing industry.

Austen obviously has eyes on this as a route to a publishing deal.

Henry and Eliza, they're just a force.

They're like a power couple.

I can imagine him saying to Jane, "I'll get you this deal.

"Don't worry, leave it with me."

Henry and Eliza's London is a city awash with

the profits from empire and trade.

It is an age of glittering fashion, conspicuous consumption

and the relentless pursuit of profit.

At the heart of this new world,

Henry uses his contacts to approach famous publisher Benjamin Crosby.

Crosby agrees to buy the rights to Northanger Abbey,

and announces his plan to publish it in the press.

To get your first publishing deal is a rush like no other.

You just want to go out and scream in the streets

that someone wants to publish you.

She's thinking this is just all going so well for me.

This is just a whole new chapter in her life as a female author.

But the celebrations are premature.

Before her novel can go to print, Austen returns to Bath.

Her father is ailing,

and it falls to the women of the family to look after him.

George Austen is in his 70s.

He's an old man.

He's had a long life of very hard work indeed

and he is not in good health.

George has always been Jane's biggest supporter,

encouraging her to follow her passion

at a time when many fathers would not.

He is himself a scholar, he's a moralist

and he's someone who believes in her capacity.

He's prepared to go out and advocate for her writing,

encouraging the expansion of his daughter's mind.

It shapes her world, it shapes her writing.

So, she wants him to be with her

and to be cared for by her.

While Austen cares for her elderly father,

the idea for a new novel starts taking shape.

Mirroring her own life,

The Watsons features an ageing clergyman

whose daughters fear being left penniless when he dies.

She's playing around with the idea of auto fiction,

of using her own biographical background

to work its way into her writing.

This is a work where the family in it

are as close to her family as it gets in any of her writing.

The father isn't well, just as Jane's father wasn't well.

And if he dies, that's trouble,

because there are too many daughters and not enough money.

As fact and fiction collide,

Jane's fears pour out onto the page.

There's a particularly striking passage where an elder sister

in the story delivers a stinging verdict

on the fate of unmarried women later on in their lives.

And she writes, "I could do very well,

"single... A little company...and a pleasant ball now and then...

"..would be enough for me if one could be young forever.

"But my father cannot provide for us.

"And it is very bad to grow old and be poor and laughed at."

It's bad enough to be old.

It's bad enough to be poor.

But the final indignity would be to be laughed at.

Jane and Cassandra at this point

are conscious of the fact that they don't have dowries.

When their father dies, they will have nothing.

COUGHING

But before Jane can finish her story...

..events overtake her.

SAMUEL WEST: Her father becomes very ill.

She doesn't have enough distance...

..and it's all a bit too real.

It's all a bit too close for comfort...

..and she suddenly stops writing the Watsons manuscript.

The final page of The Watsons ends almost in mid-sentence

with a scene where the others are playing cards downstairs

and Emma goes upstairs and reads to her father...

..who is ill, just as Jane's father is upstairs ill.

There's no distance between fact and fiction

which would allow you to escape into make believe.

It's all too real.

We know that, actually, she was going to kill off the father

in this work.

One wonders if there is a sort of horrible sense for Jane Austen

that, you know, art is somehow bringing on life.

Austen spends this quiet, enclosed and very intense time

with her dying father, sitting and reading to him

as George gradually dies.

She loves her father deeply.

That moment of grief, I think, affected her profoundly.

George Austen dies aged 73.

Bereft, Jane must break the news of her father's death to her brothers.

"He was seized on Saturday with a return to the feverish complaint

"which he had been subject to for the last three years.

"To have seen him languishing long, struggling for hours,

"would have been dreadful, and thank God we were all spared from it.

"He did not suffer.

"He was mercifully spared from knowing that he was about to

"quit objects so beloved and so fondly cherished

"as his wife and...and children ever were."

Gosh, that writing is just so emotional.

She's able to articulate something

so universal in that moment,

yet so thoughtfully written

as to try and soften the blow for somebody else who wasn't there.

She is losing the man who, up until this point,

has been her great supporter as a writer,

and now he is gone.

A shadow of what is about to come

is cast very, very darkly over that moment.

The death of her father not only takes a devastating emotional

toll on Jane Austen, it also leaves her financially vulnerable.

BEE ROWLATT: Losing the father who is still very traditionally

the head of the family has implications for the Austen women.

It's now that the economic realities are really laid bare -

that he hasn't prepared at all for their welfare.

George Austen leaves his family with nothing.

The women are now completely reliant on their brothers for support.

Women are at the behest of the men in their lives

who control the purse strings.

They have no power to extricate themselves from the financial

place that they find themselves.

The Austen women are at the complete mercy of the brothers.

Henry and Frank must decide how much help they can afford to give.

"So you see, my dear Frank,

"she will be in the receipt of a clear �450 per annum.

"She will be very comfortable.

"And as a smaller establishment will be as agreeable to them,

"they will not only suffer no personal deprivation,

"but will be able to pay occasional visits of health and pleasure

"to their friends."

Very condescending, very patronising.

How little empathy they have

for what their sisters are living through.

And I think that just says everything about the power imbalance

between the brothers and sisters of this family.

Jane Austen is expected to wear mourning dress for up to a year.

For women who can't afford a new set of clothes,

this means dying your current wardrobe black.

For Jane, poverty might be bad,

but to be laughed at is far worse.

She writes to her sister.

CHARITY WAKEFIELD: "As I find on looking into my affairs that,

"instead of being very rich, I'm likely to be very poor,

"I cannot afford more than ten shillings."

"It is as well, however, to prepare you for the sight of a sister

"sunk in poverty that it may not overcome your spirits."

I find this really compelling.

Jane and her sister Cassandra are forced into kind of a poverty.

They're still doing better than the lower classes.

They are in the gentry class, but comparatively,

they're in a really, really difficult situation.

Without enough money to rent their own home,

the Austen women have no choice

but to lodge with their brother Frank, who serves in the Navy.

Still mourning her father and forced to live in a dirty,

crowded city...

..Jane has completely lost her moorings.

SAMUEL WEST: The death of her father seems to make her writing dry up.

She knows what she's really good at.

The light, the ironic, the beautifully observed,

the detailed, the fine.

And then life drives a truck into that

and she can't write.

With The Watsons still unfinished,

Jane finds herself in the grip of every novelist's nightmare -

writer's block.

She probably thought her life was over.

I can imagine that she would've sunk into a very deep depression.

"I can't write, what's my worth?

"Who am I when I can't do that?"

You're just like, "Well, there's...

"..there's nothing really to live for."

Besieged with doubts and fears about, you know,

how long can this go on

must have really worn her down.

It's as if she's as far away now

from being a writer as she's ever been.

She just feels adrift.

That's really hard. This is a...

These are probably the hardest years.

SCREAMS

She must now be thinking, "What can I do?

"What are my options?"

And she knows her writing gives her the way to do this.

I mean, otherwise she's going under.

Jane's not only struggling to produce new work,

she's also frustrated by her publisher Benjamin Crosby.

It's been six years since he bought the rights to Northanger Abbey

and it's still not in print.

DR PAULA BYRNE: So Jane Austen sits down to pen a letter to Mr Crosby.

There's no father to stand up for her now,

there's no brother that is doing that.

And almost feeling, "If I don't do it, nobody else will."

"In the spring of the year 1803,

"a manuscript novel in two volumes was sold to you

"and the purchase money �10 received at the same time.

"Six years have since passed and this work has never,

"to the best of my knowledge, appeared in print."

It's a wonderfully passive-aggressive letter.

This is a moment where we see Jane Austen really standing up

for herself. Like, she's really had enough.

"I can only account for such an extraordinary circumstance

"by supposing the manuscript, by some carelessness,

"to have been lost. And if that was the case,

"am willing to supply you with another copy."

She's almost incandescent with rage.

I feel the rage in that letter. I feel it.

"What has happened to this novel? It was meant to come out years ago.

"I've been sitting here waiting."

"Should no notice be taken of this address,

"I shall feel myself at liberty to secure the publication of my work

"by applying elsewhere.

"Mrs Ashton Dennis, M-A-D."

Silently seething, signs herself with a pseudonym,

"Mrs Ashton Dennis, M-A-D."

Mad. She's mad, she's angry!

"M-A-D."

There's not much to laugh about in this...

..in this period of Austen's life.

But the fact that she signs what becomes known as the Mad Letter,

cos she's REALLY mad about what's been happening,

erm, that can't be a coincidence.

And what she gets back in return is inelegant,

condescending and lazy.

Jane's publisher refuses to budge.

"Madam, it is true we purchased a manuscript and paid �10.

"But there was not any time stipulated for its publication.

"Neither are we bound to publish it."

When Crosby bought Northanger Abbey,

Gothic fiction was all the rage.

But nobody is interested in that any more.

If Jane wants the book back,

she'll have to pay �10 for the rights.

The reality is she doesn't have �10 to buy back her own manuscript

because they've had to live on it.

It's...It's been part of their income and what has sustained them.

This is just the most crushing blow.

Let down again.

She's feeling humiliated.

You could very easily just pack it in.

You could really just go, "What was I thinking,

"thinking I could be a writer?"

It must feel demeaning of her own situation

and of her own lack of agency.

But there is one ray of hope.

As a boy, Jane Austen's brother Edward was adopted by

wealthy relatives with no children of their own.

He's now called Edward Knight.

For the Austens, this was a chance to secure a better future

for one of their sons.

Edward still has a strong sense of loyalty to the Austen family,

and in 1809 he's given the opportunity to help them

when a house on his estate falls vacant - Chawton Cottage.

Edward, after years of not really supporting his sisters

and his mother in the way that he perhaps ought to have done,

finally steps up to the mark and reserves Chawton Cottage for them.

Finally, with Chawton Cottage, they have a point of safety,

they have a point of stability.

They have somewhere where they can settle.

The cottage is just 12 miles from Steventon,

Jane's beloved childhood home.

She hopes a return to her roots will reenergise her writing.

It's a household which is constituted entirely of women,

a republic in which the women can order their domestic space

as they wish.

That's very significant indeed.

DR LOUISE CURRAN: Chawton brings her stability,

allows her a kind of rhythm to the day that works for her.

And so they divvy up the chores so that the household

works around her writing.

They came up with a system whereby Jane would make the breakfast...

..but then she would be left to write

for the morning and maybe some of the afternoon.

I think it provides a space for her to think,

a kind of rhythm that probably all novelists need, actually,

to just be able to sit down each day and produce something.

Back in the countryside she loves so much, the words start to flow.

DR PAULA BYRNE: She has this incredible creative surge.

She gets her mojo back.

She's writing again.

Jane sets out to rework an old manuscript

she first began ten years earlier.

A tale of two very different sisters.

All the experiences in her own life

are getting reworked into this manuscript.

Elinor and Marianne Dashwood are left nothing

following the death of their father

and must now find security through marriage.

You must help them.

Of course. You must promise to do this.

The story opens with a dying father being reassured by his son

that he will look after the women in the family.

A promise he will later break.

Help them? What do you mean help them?

Dearest, I mean to give them �3,000.

The interest will provide them with a little extra income.

Such a gift will certainly discharge my promise to my father.

Oh, without question - more than amply.

One had rather, on such occasions, do too much than too little.

Of course, he did not stipulate a particular sum.

GREG WISE: What's glorious is Austen uses the bad behaviour

of her brothers.

She takes it almost verbatim

and plonks it down in the start of Sense And Sensibility.

It is better than parting with the 1,500 all at once.

But if she should live longer than 15 years,

we'd be completely taken in.

People always live forever when there is an annuity to be paid them.

KATE ATKINSON: It's some of her best writing.

It's subtle, but it's pointed.

And I think she's really good at those kinds of...

..those interactions with people where you see, erm,

viewpoints being changed very cleverly.

Although to say the truth, I'm convinced within myself

that your father had no idea of your giving them money.

They will have 500 a year amongst them as it is.

And what on earth could four women want for more than that?

Their housekeeping will be nothing at all.

They'll have no carriage, no horses, hardly any servants

and will keep no company.

Only conceive how comfortable they will be.

GREG WISE: The money is chipped away and,

at the end of a couple of pages,

they've literally got a packet of Smarties...

..and an Aldi voucher.

MELANCHOLY PIANO

About to be made homeless,

the two sisters respond very differently to their predicament.

Elinor is sense, Marianne, sensibility.

Marianne, can you play something else?

Mama has been weeping since breakfast.

LOUD, SOLEMN PIANO

I meant something less mournful, dearest.

What I love is the fullness of the female experience.

Marianne is not at all girdled by responsibility.

Elinor shoulders everything.

And so with these two characters,

she's really placed two sides of her own personality in opposition.

Who's going to rule? Is it the head or the heart?

Mirroring Jane's own experiences,

the Dashwood sisters are offered a cottage on the estate of a relative.

These women pressed together with no money, no space, no hope.

And suddenly this thing appears.

You must run and fetch help!

In this sweeping adaptation,

Marianne is saved by a heroic figure on horseback -

John Willoughby.

Pouring with rain, there's thick mists,

and you hear a... MIMICS A HORSE GALLOPING

..and a horse rears.

His appearance on the scene is so highly charged.

Don't be afraid, he's quite safe.

Are you hurt?

Only my ankle.

May I have your permission to ascertain if there are any breaks?

SHE WINCES

CHARITY WAKEFIELD: Jane Austen is not afraid to write

a little bit of saucy steaminess.

Hearts would've been aflutter.

It is not broken.

It's so sensual and would've driven young girls absolutely wild.

Can you put your arm about my neck?

Allow me to escort you home.

GREG WISE: The first moment they have of connection

is the ultimate physical connection

of her body weight in his hands.

That's pretty sexy.

Did you see him? He expressed himself well, did he not?

With great decorum and honour.

And spirit and wit and feeling.

And economy. Ten words at most.

And he is to come tomorrow.

Marianne, you must change. You will catch a cold.

What care I for colds when there is such a man?

You will care very much when your nose swells up.

You are right. Help me, Elinor.

In this scene, I think Jane's really

interesting in the way that she flips that situation

and she invites you to fall in love with this character.

And then later we discover that he's really not so good as a person.

Willoughby abandons Marianne.

THUNDERCLAP

In this dramatic scene, she's left alone and heartbroken.

Willoughby.

Willoughby.

BEE ROWLATT: You feel it so vividly.

Austen's gift is to take us right inside their human dramas

and their lived experience.

This wedding scene may look like a happy ending,

but both Marianne and Willoughby have had to give up on love

and marry for money.

This is not a fairy-tale ending.

We see Austen at her most subtle,

because we're not entirely sure that she thinks

this is a delightful ending either.

It's something that Austen looks at all the time is,

is what does it mean to settle?

What does it mean to sort of be OK?

Those compromises between money and love.

To make her readers feel vividly what her characters

are going through, Austen pioneers a ground-breaking technique.

The first draft of Sense And Sensibility

had been written in a simple style typical of the period,

taking the form of a series of letters

written between the protagonists.

It's a first-person exchange.

So one person saying, "Oh, I did this,"

and the other person saying, "I did this."

What she does is merge this into a novel with a narrator.

So a voice above that's describing the action

and the characters within it.

By fusing these two styles,

Austen keeps the individual perspective of the characters

but puts them in the voice of a narrator.

In this passage, Austen begins by describing the action

as though observing it.

"Elinor and her mother rose up in amazement at their entrance.

"He apologised for his intrusion."

But then she slips into the perspective of Elinor's mother

and her emotional response to the action.

"Had he been even old, ugly and vulgar,

"the gratitude and kindness of Mrs Dashwood

"would have been secured by any act of attention to her child.

"But the influence of youth, beauty and elegance

"gave an interest to the action

"which came home to her feelings."

COLM TOIBIN: I suppose we could call it the third-person intimate.

She can give you, as the reader, a sense that you're

actually in the room.

So that there is a fourth or a fifth person in that room

who is the reader, who's able to see each moment unfolding

in a way the characters themselves don't quite.

But the scene then is established not as a drama

between the characters,

but as a drama between the reader and the page.

This is what she's refining.

Austen's technique will become known as free indirect speech,

and it will change how novels are written to this day.

Like all the great advances, it's a huge change

that is so obvious that now we can't imagine not having this.

This is the way that literature is now written.

And, of course, Austen pioneered that technique.

Sense And Sensibility is Austen's third novel,

but as yet none have been published.

Determined to finally get into print,

she returns to London and seeks out her brother Henry.

DR PADDY BULLARD: Henry, he needs someone he can trust.

He has to use people with whom he has a certain amount of leverage.

And the person he turns to is Thomas Egerton.

Henry knows Thomas Egerton

from his time in the militia.

BEE ROWLATT: Thomas Egerton publishes books about

military manoeuvres and guns and strategies.

I mean, it's highly improbable

that he'll take on a book about two teenage girls

and their love travails.

And yet, there it lands.

The question is - will they be able to strike a deal?

This is a crucial moment for Jane.

She's been planning this moment all her life.

DR PAULA BYRNE: Ultimately, it was Henry's connection with Egerton,

but Eliza, just behind the scenes,

played just quite a silent but encouraging part in,

"This is really important, we really need this to happen.

"We really need to get her published."

Thomas Egerton drives a hard bargain.

There's evidence that Henry and Eliza advanced money

to Thomas Egerton

to persuade Egerton to publish Sense And Sensibility.

Finally, a deal is struck.

But Jane knows from experience

that getting a contract is only the first step.

She needs to make sure the book gets into print.

BEE ROWLATT: Austen is not going to leave anything to chance this time.

She ups sticks and moves in with Henry and Eliza in London

and bases herself with the manuscript.

She takes charge of the edits and the final proofs of the manuscript.

So she's actually there kind of almost guarding it

to make sure that nothing goes wrong.

"My dearest Cassandra,

"know indeed I am never too busy to think of Sense And Sensibility.

"I can no more than a mother can forget her sucking child.

"I have two sheets to correct,

"but the last only brings us to Willoughby's first appearance."

Austen has been waiting for this moment for over 17 years.

Finally, at the age of 35,

she is a published author.

KATE ATKINSON: To actually be given the first copy

of your first printed book

felt quite euphoric.

Now she knows she's a successful writer.

She's a successful, published writer.

Not in her mind any more, not on someone's else's desk -

in her hands, a real object in this world.

BEE ROWLATT: All of the delays, the rejections, the obstacles,

all of it. She's finally here.

Well, that feels amazing.

That feels really good.

And now that her book is out in the world,

Jane is about to discover she has readers in high places...

..no less than a prince.

The Prince Regent now sits on the throne

in place of his ailing father, George III.

He is the unlikely fashion icon of this indulgent age.

He celebrates the start of his regency with a banquet

so extravagant the guests eat off a gold dinner service

costing the equivalent of �5.5 million today.

The Prince Regent reigns over a culture of carnal and culinary

excess, where waistlines expand and necklines plummet.

For those with the wealth to enjoy it,

it is an exciting and glittering time

where art, music and literature all flourish.

DR PRIYA ATWAL: For Jane, this just absolutely

blows things out of the water.

Because if you've got the Prince Regent -

yes, a notoriously messy character,

but nevertheless the most trendy gentleman around.

If he is endorsing your book, then you officially have made it.

The ultimate celebrity reader, Prince Regent,

absolutely adores it, falls in love with it,

and the public fall in love with it as well.

Boosted by the royal endorsement,

Sense And Sensibility wins plaudits from the critics.

TAMSIN GREIG: "The characters are naturally drawn

"and judiciously supported.

"It reflects honour on the writer who displays

"much knowledge of character,

"and very happily blends a great deal of good sense

"with the lighter matter of the piece.

"A very pleasing and entertaining narrative."

Jane sells nearly 1,000 copies of the first edition,

double the usual print run.

She makes �140,

four times what an average worker earns in a year.

Now Jane Austen has been propelled to the very heart,

indeed the very pinnacle of London society.

I mean, this is so exciting.

Come on!

"My dear Cassandra, I have so many little matters

"to tell you of that I cannot wait any longer

"before I begin to put them down.

"I am getting very extravagant and spending all my money."

Naturally, her publisher, Egerton, is very, very keen to, er,

see what else she's got.

Here you go.

Bosh! Pride And Prejudice.

And this time round, it's Austen who's calling the shots.

She demands payment upfront

and pockets over ten times more than her first book.

The first edition soon sells out and a second print run is ordered.

It is the novel everybody's talking about.

It is THE novel of the day.

Now she has two incredibly successful books behind her.

She's basking in the glory.

We see this whole new side of her.

CHARITY WAKEFIELD: "We drank tea again yesterday

"with the Tilsons and met the Smiths.

"I find all these little parties very pleasant."

Jane Austen discovered a whole new side of herself.

She loves going to the plays.

She's going to parties.

She's a city girl.

I feel like she's living for the first time.

"Above 80 people are invited for next Tuesday evening,

"and there is to be some very good music."

CANDICE CARTY-WILLIAMS: She is having so much fun.

You feel this great sense of achievement.

When you're young and when you are good at something

and you feel passion and you feel excitement,

and you know that you have captured the world around you,

you think that you can do anything.

But as Jane revels in her new life at the heart of London society...

..she also turns her writer's eye

on some of the bleaker aspects of the capital.

Austen continues to scan her surroundings.

And she witnesses up close some of the

seedier aspects of London life,

and some of the people who are definitely not benefiting

from all this wealth.

While the rich indulge themselves,

the poor are crowded into urban slums

to feed the demands of the new factories.

Children as young as four work at the machines.

Disease and malnutrition run rife.

She's looking at the world now as a whole and she's like,

"Oh, these things aren't right."

In London, Jane is confronted by extreme social inequality.

One injustice in particular stands out.

Britain's booming economy is powered by the products of slavery.

Cotton, sugar and tobacco all rely on slave labour,

and this demand has fuelled an international trade in human life.

Guns and alcohol go to Africa.

Enslaved people are transported to the Americas

and the raw materials they produce are brought back to Europe.

DR PRIYA ATWAL: The country is benefiting from

a massive influx of wealth.

Money is flooding in from the slave plantations

as well as from trade networks in Asia.

It's transformed British society from the bottom up.

This inhumanity has sparked a growing campaign

to abolish slavery and stand up to the vested interests protecting it.

We have to remember at this point that Jane Austen

is no stranger to stories -

stories quite close to hand - of slavery.

Her father, George Austen,

had been trustee of a fund based on a sugar plantation in Antigua.

So there was family involvement with

the sugar plantations of the Caribbean

and with chattel slavery.

But we also know that Austen is

inspired by the abolitionist movement.

She's a particularly keen fan

of the greatest of the abolitionist organisers, Thomas Clarkson.

She says that he is a sort of hero to her at this point.

There are other sources as well.

Her brother Frank is writing to her with tales of his, er, disgust

at witnessing chattel slavery when he was sailing around the Atlantic.

It's there in her family, it's there in her reading.

This is a live issue for her.

CANDICE CARTY-WILLIAMS: It feels like now is the time to

talk about not just the small world around her,

but the politics of the world that she sees.

She understands that she has a voice and she's going to use it.

She's pushing herself.

She's testing the boundaries.

What can she do?

She thinks, "I'll do something really different.

"It's going to be quite serious.

"There aren't going to be quite so many jokes,

"and there's going to be shadows.

"This will be a book of shadows."

And the shadow is the slave trade.

The shadow is women, suppression, women being silenced.

Austen sets about writing her most challenging work to date.

A novel about an impoverished girl who comes face-to-face

with prejudice when she is sent to live with wealthy relations

on an estate called Mansfield Park.

Mansfield Park has been built on the spoils of the slave trade.

The head of the house has plantations in Antigua.

This is a novel of a whole different magnitude

to the bright and sparkling Pride And Prejudice.

Calling the house Mansfield Park is deliberately ironic.

Mansfield, to the people of that time,

means Lord Mansfield,

one of the foremost judges of his time.

Two of his judgments played a large part in the movement

that was beginning to recognise that slavery was not acceptable.

And he says that, "In England, we do not have slaves."

So, while the house has been built on slavery,

the name Mansfield is associated with the abolition movement

that opposes it.

BEE ROWLATT: Jane Austen's being very politically overt

by invoking Mansfield.

That's a huge klaxon, that's a ginormous flashing red light

going, "Slavery, slavery, slavery."

That's what it says to a contemporary audience

right there in the title.

DR LOUISE CURRAN: There's something very, very dark

and unsettling about this novel at the heart of it.

It's the only one of her novels

where she gives us the background to the heroine.

Fanny, he's here.

Austen explores inequality through the eyes of an outsider

thrust into a world of wealth.

Give my regards to my sisters. Yes, Mama.

And you will write to tell me when I am to return?

Austen shows us the childhood

and Fanny Price being uprooted from the home that she's known,

going into Mansfield Park.

Now, let us have a look at you.

Well, I'm sure you have other qualities.

And these terrible, really affecting scenes

are really powerful.

Dear Susie, it seems that mother has given me away.

This child completely bereft,

crying and sobbing.

Fanny Price grows up with her extended family,

but is never treated as an equal.

We see her constantly belittled and kept firmly in her place.

What do you think, Miss Price?

I'm sorry to disappoint Mr Crawford, but I do not have a ready opinion.

I suspect you're almost entirely composed of ready opinions

not shared.

Fanny.

Yes, Aunt Norris?

What are you doing here?

I beg your pardon? You are aware, surely,

that the sewing wasn't cleared away from yesterday afternoon.

Oh.

Yes, you're quite right, it wasn't.

I'll, er...

KEN LOACH: She's humiliated.

I'll see to it immediately.

The fact that Fanny doesn't say a great deal

leaves the reader with the anger.

The frustration the reader feels is anger on her behalf.

And that's a much more powerful way

of, erm, communicating

what Jane Austen wanted the reader to feel.

Part of Austen's genius is structuring a novel

so the reader knows that something is going on as undercurrent,

as something barely mentioned, is actually dominant.

But you as the reader are the only one to realise this.

At the heart of Mansfield Park,

there's a really important moment

when the very oppressed and silenced heroine

makes this sort of shocking observation.

Do tell us more about the negroes, dear.

Yes, the mulattos are in general well-shaped,

and the women especially well-featured.

I have one so easy and graceful in her movements and...

In this adaptation, Fanny Price confronts her uncle

in a highly charged scene.

Fanny, the person who's always been quiet, who's overlooked,

who's talked over, who's pushed in the corner,

she has the temerity to ask Sir Thomas about the slave trade.

Anyway, I've a good mind to bring one of them back with me

next trip to work here as a domestic.

Correct me if I am in error, Sir Thomas.

But I've read, sir, that if you were to bring one of the slaves

back to England, there would be some argument

as to whether or not they should be freed here.

If I'm not mistaken.

That silence is very deafening in the novel.

It almost mirrors conversations that we have now,

or I have now, around slavery.

No-one really wants to listen.

No-one really wants to engage in it.

Erm, and I think it's...

..it's kind of devastating.

Because it's easier to turn a blind eye because you are,

I guess, complicit in it, or...

..you benefit from it in some way.

I think there's one way we can read her, you see,

as a political novelist, as someone who's constantly alert.

Not merely to the day-to-day things,

but to the large questions of class and movement in England.

How, where money comes from.

And that she can find ways of describing this

or dramatising it which are not obvious.

That we can read this novel as being a private novel

about private life if we want,

but I think at our peril, because large questions are coming into it.

It's about a really, really broad spectrum of what slavery means.

And about people as commodities,

and treating people badly.

Austen ultimately shows us the consequences

when those without power try to stand up for themselves.

Fanny is banished from Mansfield Park back to poverty.

KATE ATKINSON: It's one of the great set pieces in her novel.

We see Fanny Price's awful home in Portsmouth - just awful -

and she realises that her idea of home

that had been so potent is again overturned.

She's re-traumatised.

Mother!

Fanny!

Come, come in.

You must be exhausted from your journey.

No, it's surprisingly short, really.

Look at you.

So...

Betsy, get father up! Come in.

Fanny's homecoming is both deeply moving

and deliberately unsentimental.

So, er, did you have a tiring journey? You must be exhausted.

Oh... Betsy!

I got him up yesterday!

This scene is really very realist sense of poverty.

Not with disgust, just really straight-up reported.

"Her eyes could only wander to the table,

"cut and notched by her brothers.

"The cups and saucers wiped with streaks.

"The milk a mixture of moats floating in thin blue.

"And the bread and butter growing every minute more greasy

"than even Rebecca's hands had first produced it."

It's quite striking in this description

of a small, humble family space.

It's just a straight-up telling of this is how this family lives.

Almost moving in the direction of Hardy or Dickens.

We see an author growing, I think.

This depiction of chaotic working-class life

is a departure from the genteel poverty

of Austen's previous stories.

It is social realism.

There's a sort of abrasion that she's writing about

that doesn't exist in the other novels.

There's nobody else writing this kind of prose at this time

and writing these kinds of scenes.

SOBBING

It feels very contemporary.

You know, she's already a great novelist.

She's on the cusp of becoming an absolute genius novelist,

I think, of pushing all the boundaries.

Jane is about to push even further into

uncharted creative territory.

But she will have to do it alone.

Her sister-in-law, Eliza, is dying.

Eliza has been this force of nature in Jane's world,

different from all the other women she knows.

More independent, more exotic, more glamorous.

But she has cancer.

DR PAULA BYRNE: The person that Eliza wants to nurse her in this

final, agonisingly painful battle

with breast cancer

is Jane Austen.

Her calming, soothing presence is required in her final hours.

BEE ROWLATT: Once more, here she is at the deathbed of someone that's

inspired and trusted her and encouraged her.

An early figure of inspiration and of female solidarity.

It's another body blow for Austen.

Eliza dies on the 25th of April 1813

with Jane at her bedside.

Jane has lost a close friend

and her loudest literary cheerleader

just at the moment in her career when she needs her most.

In 1814, Mansfield Park,

Austen's most political work, is published.

DR PADDY BULLARD: It's obviously a novel that she feels

immensely proud of.

She feels its weight, she feels its gravity as a fiction.

The thought of what her readers are going to feel

and think when they respond to Mansfield Park,

and there's so much to respond to in that novel.

Thanks to the popularity of her previous books,

the first print run sells out.

But her readers are left unimpressed.

And worse still, there's a deafening silence from the critics.

Even all these years later, there are still only some of us

who love Mansfield Park,

and critics just ignore the book.

TAMSIN GREIG: Jane gets no critical feedback -

no reviews, no critical acclaim, nothing at all.

A wonderful, terrible silence.

And in an echo of what, you know,

Fanny Price not having a voice,

the book doesn't have a voice.

No-one hears it.

You create something, a piece of art, a work of art,

and if nobody comments on it or there's no feedback about it,

it is as though you are invisible.

You don't exist.

Aged 39, Austen has published three novels

and earned enough to live independently as an author.

But as she's attempted to tackle bigger themes

and gain respect as an artist of substance,

the critics have ignored her.

Jane realises that, if she wants to pose big questions

and challenge social convention,

she must do it through a more engaging and entertaining character.

She will create a new heroine,

and she will call her Emma.

Jane is facing homelessness.

She needs profits.

She needs to make as much money as she possibly can.

And then she is cut down at the very peak of her powers.

Take an interactive journey through spaces

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