All language subtitles for Jane Austen The History Makers.s01e01

Macaulay called Jane Austen
"a prose Shakespeare".

Charlotte Bronte called her
"shrewd and shrewish".

Sheridan thought Pride and Prejudice

one of the cleverest things
he ever read.

Madame de Stael thought Jane Austen
simply "vulgar".

Oscar Wilde adored and imitated her.

Mark Twain was consumed by "animal
repugnance" at the thought of her.

And a 13-year-old Greek girl
who had never heard of Macaulay,

Sheridan or Madame de Stael,
spent a large part

of a very hot June in Athens
reading Sense and Sensibility,

and she loved every minute
and every page of it.

MUSIC: Pictures of an Exhibition
(Promenade I) by Modest Mussorgsky

That was in 1963.

I, of course, knew nothing

about Jane Austen's supposedly
restricted appeal.

All I knew was that although
her world was both literally

and metaphorically thousands
of miles away from my own,

neither the social setting
nor the social customs

gave me any trouble.

When I went back to her
seven years later,

during my second year at Cambridge,

I realised even more fully
that Jane Austen transcends

all limits of space,
time and nationality.

Both she and her characters
are universal.

Mrs Palmer is a universal fool,

Darcy and Elizabeth,
universal lovers,

Mrs Norris, a universal villain,

and Miss Bates, a universal bore.

In the decade following the year
I first read her,

there appeared 31 full-length
studies of her,

while between 1952 and 1972,

794 items of all kinds
were published about her.

Every year since her death in 1817,

the applause of posterity
has grown louder.

Her novels are read and reread
by millions of devotees.

But Jane Austen herself
is practically unknown.

In fact, the most
that most people know

is that there is nothing
or very little to know.

That she spent her days sitting in
the drawing room of the parsonage,

which was her home,
sewing, gossiping, writing,

and, when visitors called,

hurriedly slipping the pages
under the blotter.

Three people are responsible
for this image -

James Austen-Leigh, who wrote
a very idealised memoir of his aunt,

her sister Cassandra,
who destroyed all the letters

that threw a different
and less soft light on Jane,

and, most important,
Jane Austen herself,

who began to work out fairly early
on the role of dear Aunt Jane.

And she was to play that role
for most of her life.

And she turned out to be
as masterly an actress in her life

as she was a dramatist
in her novels.

What I want to do is to go behind
the myth of the homely spinster

and try and discover the reality
of the woman

who wrote six novels of such
extraordinary, ironic moral vision,

and who died at the age of 42
of a mysterious disease.

But it's not an easy job.

Like Elinor
in Sense and Sensibility,

Jane Austen was a marvellous
screen-maker

and, by the end of her life,
she had become quite expert

at screening off parts of herself.

Jane was born on 16th December,
1775, in Steventon,

where her father was rector.

With seven children
and a number of paying pupils,

the house was stretched to bursting,

so while the boys stayed at home
to be tutored by their father,

Jane and her elder sister Cassandra
were sent off to boarding school.

Jane was only six but,
as Mrs Austen explained,

if Cassandra was going to
have her head cut off,

Jane would insist on
sharing her fate.

From the time they returned home
six years later,

they had a kind of education
Jane Austen preferred

for her own heroines -

plenty of books, plenty of time
and plenty of good talk.

Jane learned to play the piano and
to sew and embroider beautifully,

being particularly good
at satin stitch.

Cassandra learned to draw.

In fact, she's responsible for
the only existing portrait

of Jane Austen.

She may have been very effective
at censoring most sharp things

from her sister's letters,

but she didn't manage to keep the
sharpness and the wistful sadness

out of her sister's eyes
or the tension from her lips.

The portrait is much truer
to the other, the hidden Jane,

who was driven to writing
at the age of 12,

who went through deep moral despair

before she reached her
ironic vision of the world

and whose famous sunshine optimism
was much more real and vital

for acknowledging
life's dark shadows.

Her teenage years were happy years,
with hours spent reading

the poetry of Crabbe and Cooper,
the novels of Richardson,

and the works of her
beloved Dr Johnson.

But more and more time was spent
writing rather than reading,

with every piece dedicated
to some member of the family

in parody of the fashion
of the time.

The first piece she ever wrote - at
least the first piece that survives,

which was called
Frederic and Elfrida,

is dedicated to her cousin
Martha Lloyd

"as a small testimony
of the gratitude I feel

"for your late generosity to me
in finishing my muslin cloak."

In 1793, she took a step
that was a turning point.

She stopped writing
for the whole family

and started writing for herself.

The first novel she wrote
was an early version

of Sense and Sensibility
called Elinor and Marianne,

and I believe that this is the novel
that holds the key to understanding

Jane Austen's personality
and her philosophy of life.

Throughout the 19th century,

we find many writers
using brothers and sisters

as ways of projecting different
aspects of one total individual,

and through Elinor and Marianne,
the one strong on sense and reason,

the other on passion
and sensibility,

Jane Austen, just entering her 20s,
was beginning to explore

the parts of herself
that were at war with each other.

The Elinor part of her abhorred
chaos and was drawn to order,

even if it meant imprisoning
social conventions.

It was the part of her that gave her
that strong sense of family duty

and her instinct for arranging
and keeping up appearances.

The Marianne part of her was that
part that felt isolated in society

and stifled by civil falsehood
and polite evasions.

It was the source of all
her passionate intensities

and much of her energy and vitality.

In the novel, where Jane Austen
was trying to work out

the relationship between
these two parts of herself,

Elinor and Marianne are accorded
equal status as heroines.

We may laugh at Marianne's follies
and at her passion for dead leaves,

we may think to ourselves
that she needs to grow up

and leave behind some
of her self-indulgence,

but we respond to the dimension
of warmth and generosity

that she adds to the world
around her.

In fact, we love Marianne,

and, more to the point,
so does her creator.

What Jane Austen is in effect saying
is that both sense and sensibility,

both reason and passion,

both a social and an inner life
are necessary

for a whole and integrated
human being.

But she could see no way
of reconciling these two,

so she declared them
mutually exclusive

and decided that Marianne
had to be sacrificed

for the sake of social order.

In the novel, Marianne, drained
of all life after her illness,

is brusquely disposed of.

She dwindles into marriage
with Colonel Brandon.

In real life, by suppressing
the Marianne in her,

Jane Austen condemned herself
to a fatal one-sidedness.

It is the greatness of Jane Austen
that at the same time

that she was stressing the
importance of social values

and conventions, she was fully
aware of how empty they could be

and how little they often had
to do with happiness and truth.

Take marriage - a subject
so central to Jane Austen,

it might be thought to be
the only thing that really matters.

Yet her novels are full
of references to marriage

that seem designed to convert
the world to celibacy.

In Mansfield Park,
she wrote of Maria Bertram...

"In all the important preparations
of the mind she was complete,

"being prepared for matrimony
by a hatred of home, restraint

"and tranquillity, by the misery
of disappointed affection

"and contempt of the man
she was to marry.

"The rest might wait."

In Pride and Prejudice,
she wrote of Charlotte Lucas...

"Without thinking highly
either of men or of matrimony,

"marriage had always been
her object.

"It was the only
honourable provision

"for well-educated young women
of small fortune,

"and, however uncertain
of giving happiness,

"must be their pleasantest
preservative from want."

The irony hides quite a lot
of personal bitterness.

Jane Austen was herself
a well-educated young woman

of small fortune.

To be precise,
a £20 annual allowance.

So prudence would certainly
have dictated any marriage,

especially as the alternative,
if a family had dried up,

would have been to take
a position as a governess,

for which position she had
effectively disqualified herself

by her total inability to spell.

She couldn't even be self-consistent
in her misspellings

from one day to the next.

Then why didn't she marry?

Mrs Mitford, an old friend
of the family,

wrote that she was
the prettiest, silliest,

most affected husband-hunting
butterfly she ever remembered.

The description
is yet another tribute

to Jane Austen's acting talent.

Having decided to conform
to society's expectations,

she did so with a vengeance.

Her first major flirtation
was with Tom Lefroy,

a nephew of her friend Mrs Lefroy,

who soon afterwards
vanished to Ireland.

Some time later, she writes
in a letter to Cassandra

about a meeting with Mrs Lefroy,

who never mentioned
her nephew's name,

and she adds, "I was too proud
to make any inquiries."

That was in November 1878.

Jane was 23,

and, by now, she had decided
that her answer to all questions

of emotion, whether they
were jealousy, hurt,

resentment or anger,

would be suppress,
conceal, control.

Her heroines conform
to the same rule.

"Elinor forced herself,
after a moment's recollection,

"to welcome him with a look
and manner that were almost easy

"and almost open,
and another struggle,

"another effort still improved them.

"Marianne said not a word.

"A thousand inquiries sprang up
from her heart,

"but she dared not urge one.

"Elizabeth tried to compose herself
to answer him with patience."

Jane, like her heroines,

was forever composing herself

and knowing and feeling
more than she let on.

There is a clear undertone
of unhappiness in her letters

during this period, but the nearest
she gets to admitting it

is when she writes to Cassandra
that she is by no means unhappy.

Another admirer,
more shadowy than Tom Lefroy,

was the Cambridge don,
the Reverend Samuel Blackall,

but he turned out to be
just as elusive.

But in 1801, during a seaside visit,
she fell really and deeply in love.

We know nothing of the man

except that Cassandra approved
of him as worthy of Jane.

The love was mutual and he intended
to follow up their brief intimacy

with a visit.

But Jane's family soon received not
the visitor but news of his death.

We can guess at the measure
of Jane's pain and suffering

by the fact that Cassandra
destroyed all letters

from May 26th, 1801,
to September 14th, 1804.

The next crisis in her life
was in 1802,

when Jane and Cassandra
were staying at the estate

of a Mr Bigg-Wither -
a rich widower.

Jane received and accepted
a proposal from his son,

spent an agonising night
during which she realised

she didn't love him, and in the
morning withdrew her acceptance.

She's now 27,
the same age as Anne Elliot

at the beginning of Persuasion,

and she has projected herself
into Anne Elliot

more clearly than into any other
of her characters.

Anne is of no consequence.

The consciousness of mattering,

necessary even to the humblest
person, is denied her.

Jane Austen,
in describing Anne's situation,

sums up her own predicament.
She writes...

"Anne, with an elegance of mind
and sweetness of character,

"which must have placed her high
with any people

"of real understanding, was nobody
with either father or sister.

"Her word had no weight, her
convenience was always to give way.

"She was only Anne."

And Jane was only Jane.

For a woman of her time,
she was a failure.

She was poor, unmarried, dependent
on the goodwill of her brothers

and her sisters-in-law, and tied
to a mother who was, every year

that went by, suffering
from new imaginary complaints.

And on the literary front
there were only disappointments,

right until 1811,

when she published Sense and
Sensibility at her own cost.

She was then 36, and the first
refusal of Pride and Prejudice,

which was then called
First Impressions,

had come 14 years earlier.

There is little doubt
that the silent endurance

of many of her heroines
had its roots in the fortitude

that she invariably displayed
in her own life.

When her mother announced
that her father was retiring

and that they were moving from
Steventon to Bath, Jane fainted.

It meant not only leaving the place
where she had lived all her life,

but selling her piano

and all the books she had been
collecting since childhood.

Yet less than a month
after the sad news,

staying with her aunt and uncle
in Bath,

she threw herself with
a slightly unconvincing gusto

into their social life,
describing parties

"not quite so stupid
as the two preceding ones",

calls, clothes
and, of course, people.

There were plenty of people
to be observed.

There was no better,
no more undeceived observer

of other people's deceptions
than Jane.

No ridiculous phrase,
no affected sentiment,

no foolish pretension
escaped her notice.

Jane Austen said G.K. Chesterton
may have been protected from truth,

but it was precious little truth
that was protected from her.

Nearly 200 years later,

her novels are a perfect mirror,
where I see reflected

not only the absurdities
of my friends and acquaintances,

but, more important, my own
foibles and self-deceptions.

For example, take Mrs Charles
Musgrove in Persuasion,

and her complaint
that her sore throats

were worse than other people's.

I don't know about you,
but I have always thought

that mine were worse, too.

And I have,
in the last couple of years,

become rather concerned
about the food we eat,

about how healthy
and wholesome it is.

Well, in Mr Woodhouse,

I have found a most marvellous
caricature of myself.

"'Mrs Bates, let me propose your
venturing on one of these eggs.

"'An egg boiled very soft
is not unwholesome.

"'Serle understands boiling
an egg better than anybody.

"'I would not recommend an egg
boiled by anybody else.

"'But you need not be afraid.
They are very small, you see.

"'One of our small eggs
will not hurt you.

"'Miss Bates, let Emma help you
to a little bit of tart.

"'A very little bit.

"'Ours are all apple tarts.

"'You need not be afraid
of unwholesome preserves.

"'I do not advise the custard.

"'Mrs Goddard, what say you
to half a glass of wine?

"'A small half-glass
put into a tumbler of water?

"'I do not think it could
disagree with you.'"

This is a true genius.

Her ability to create
three-dimensional living characters

and to make her very noodles
inexhaustibly amusing,

yet meticulously real.

Could it have been anyone but
Mrs Elton talking with Emma here?

"'When you have seen
more of this county,

"'I'm afraid you will think
you have overrated Hartfield.

"'Surry is full of beauties.'

"'Oh, yes, I'm quite aware of that.

"'It is the Garden of England,
you know.

"'Surry is the Garden of England.'

"'Yes, but we must not rest
our claims on that distinction.

"'Many counties, I believe,
are called the Garden of England

"'as well as Surry.'"

"'No, I fancy not,' replied Mrs
Elton, with a most satisfied smile.

"'I never heard any county
but Surry called so.'

"Emma was silenced."

Jane Austen laughs at man,

and because she's so irresistibly
entertaining,

it is tempting at times to forget
that she laughs at him

precisely because
she takes him seriously.

There was, it is true,
plenty of amusement at first.

After her first ball in Bath,
she wrote to Cassandra,

"I am proud to say that I have
a very good eye at an adulteress."

But the more she observed,
the more she perceived,

and gradually she began to feel
less of the spectator's joys

and more of his pains.

And there was that special pain,
if you cared, as she did,

for the opinion of others,
of knowing from their every look

and every word precisely what
they were thinking about you.

And hard though it may be
for us to believe this today,

they weren't thinking much of Jane.

"Till Pride and Prejudice
showed what a precious gem

"was hidden in that unbending
case...", wrote Miss Mitford,

"..she was no more regarded
in society than a poker

"or a fire screen, or any other
upright piece of wood or iron

"that fills the corner
in peace and quietness.

"The case is different now,"
she concludes.

"She is still a poker, but a poker
of whom everyone is afraid."

Being thought of as a fierce
poker might be better

than being thought of as a mere
poker, but not all that much better.

And in any case, when Pride and
Prejudice was finally published,

she only had another
four years to live.

So little importance beyond
their entertainment value

did her family attach to her works.

But when she was buried in 1817
in Winchester Cathedral,

they paid tribute to
the benevolence of her heart

and the sweetness of her temper,

but they didn't even mention
the six novels

that would bring people
from all over the world

to look at the plain stone slab
that marks her grave.

Two passages in her letters
that miraculously escaped

Cassandra's fire tell us how
she must have been feeling

all the family impositions,

despite her insistence
on selflessness and duty.

"I wanted a few days' quiet,"
she writes,

when her nephew Edward
has finally gone.

"Composition seems to me impossible
with a head full of joints of mutton

"and doses of rhubarb."

Then there is the letter
she wrote from London,

revealing the emptiness of her
relationship with her mother.

It's little wonder that mothers
don't come off too well

in her novels.

"I suppose...", she says,

"..my mother will like to
have me write to her.

"I shall try, at least."

And she did try.

She was, in fact, continuously
trying to be all the things

she passionately believed
man was meant to be -

sincere, unselfish, disinterested.

In one word, good.

But she underestimated
the difficulty of being good

not out of duty, but from
the impulse of the heart.

And she overestimated the importance
of being good-mannered

if you can't be good.

Especially as before
we can become good

in the deep sense that she meant it,

we have to face and not hide
under the cloak of good manners

everything that is not good in us,
every base emotion,

every false feeling,
every self-deception.

Four of her novels are about
this process of self-knowledge.

Relationships, and even marriage,

Jane Austen seems to be saying,
far from being ends in themselves

are means whereby our own
inner growth is precipitated.

This is why marriages in her novels
are invariably anti-climactic.

After the marriage
of Edward and Elinor,

the young couple, we are told,
had nothing to wish for

but the marriage of Colonel Brandon
and Marianne,

and rather better pasturage
for their cows.

And after the marriage
of Mr Knightley and Emma,

she assures us that despite
the ceremony's deficiencies,

the wishes of their friends
were fully answered

in the perfect happiness
of the union.

We are not convinced.

And, of course,
neither is Jane Austen,

which is why she never actually
shows us a perfectly happy marriage.

She knew that undeception and growth
do not end with marriage,

so perfectly happy marriages
are simply superimposed on the story

for the sake of symmetry
and the novel's formal design.

Jane Austen held up to the world
the ideals of reason,

sense and order,

but she was too wise not to realise
that reason and common sense alone

cannot account for all
of life's dimensions,

emotions and experiences.

She was feeling increasingly
world-weary and disillusioned

as the end of her life
was approaching.

She had put into the mouth
of Elizabeth

the feelings
she was now experiencing.

"'There are few people
whom I really love

"'and still fewer
of whom I think well.

"'The more I see of the world,
the more am I dissatisfied with it,

"'and every day confirms my belief
of the inconsistency

"'of all human characters, and
of the little dependence that can

"'be placed on the appearance
of either merit or sense.'"

In the spring of 1816,
when Jane was 41,

the Fowles - old friends with whom
she was visiting at Kintbury -

noticed a change.

A lack of vigour and life in her.

What was more, she went about paying
visits to her favourite haunts

as if for the last time.

Throughout the spring and summer
of that year,

she was suffering from fits
of fatigue and faintness,

but in her usual practical spirit,

she dosed herself and went
on working on Persuasion.

She seemed quite aware
of the psychosomatic nature

of most diseases.

Writing to Cassandra that summer,
she says,

"I have an idea that agitation
does me as much harm as fatigue

"and that I was ill at
the time of your going

"from the very circumstance
of your going."

In an article in the British
Medical Journal in 1964,

Dr Zachary Cope identified her
illness as Addison's disease

of the adrenal bodies
and attributed its beginnings

to the shock of her brother
Henry's bankruptcy.

We would do better to listen
to Jane Austen herself.

Three months before she died,
she wrote to an old friend,

"I think I understand my own case
now so much better than I did.

"I'm more and more convinced
that bile

"is at the bottom of
all I have suffered."

Now, bile is, of course,
a medical term,

but you don't need a degree
in advanced psychology

to recognise that it is much more
than that

and infinitely more revealing
of what Jane was suffering from.

Determined as she was
to live up to her high ideals

of selflessness and duty,

she chose to suppress inside herself
all the accumulated hurts,

bitterness and resentment
of a lifetime.

Some of this bitterness
was released through her novels,

through bitter irony.

"How horrible it is
to have so many killed

"and what a blessing
that one cares for none of them."

Some was released through
the letters that survive.

"Mrs Hall of Sherborne was brought
to bed yesterday of a dead child,

"some weeks before she expected,
owing to a fright.

"I suppose she happened unawares
to look at her husband."

Even more, no doubt,
was released through the letters

that Cassandra destroyed.

But the bulk of the suppressed
accumulated bitterness

became the bile
that effectively poisoned her.

When she was asked in the last
moments before she died

on the morning of July 18th, 1817,

if she wanted anything,
she replied, "Nothing but death."

The string of her life
had certainly got taut enough.

When it finally snapped,
this marked the end of two worlds -

her own and that of
the narrow rationality

and external morality of the century
in which she was born

and which she most gloriously
represented.

She had sought for the centre
that she knew was needed

to give direction and meaning
to man's life in the social order.

The trouble was that she didn't
really believe enough

in what Fanny Price said
to Henry Crawford.

"We have all a better guide
in ourselves..." she says,

"..if we would attend to it,
than any other person can be."

If she had really believed
in this inner wisdom

and had followed her own
better guide,

she would have discovered that
sustaining centre inside herself

instead of seeking it in society.

But she didn't,
and so she went on feeling

that the only way to escape
from a purely selfish existence

is to embrace a social conception
of duty and rigidly obey it.

Of course, like all humans,

she fell far short of her ideal
of selflessness and duty.

She knew it.

And like so many of her heroines,

she was full of guilt
and self-reproach.

The guilt and the resentment - these
two almost invariably go together -

weighed her down
until there was no energy left.

"I want nothing but death."

She called her book
Sense and Sensibility,

but she lived her life as though it
was a case of sense or sensibility.

It is because she shows such
deep insights into humanity

that I became greedy
and wanted more.

And it is because she has given me
such intense joy

that I wish she had
had more herself.

MUSIC: Pictures of an Exhibition
(Promenade I) by Modest Mussorgsky