Original subtitles

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