Original subtitles

Jane Austen is Britain's most celebrated female novelist.

She left behind timeless masterpieces, including Pride and Prejudice, Sense and

Sensibility, and Emma, revealing the inner lives of men and women in a way

that still speaks to us today.

But getting into her own mind isn't easy.

In her lifetime, Austen wrote thousands of letters to her beloved sister,

Cassandra, sharing her innermost thought of Jane's death at the age of just 41.

Her sister burned them.

We had to ask Cassandra why.

What was at risk there?

In the letters, she could be a lot of upset.

But a handful of letters survived.

we can piece her extraordinary life 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 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 become 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.

1793.

King George III is on the throne.

It's an age of trade, slavery, and empire, where vast fortunes are being

made.

It's also a time of danger, with the risk of destitution and the poorhouse,

where your position at birth dictates the shape of your life.

But that world is starting to change.

Ideas of progress and equality are breaking down old assumptions.

And for those who take the risk, opportunities are there to be had.

Jane Austen is 17 years old.

She's grown up in the village of Steventon in Hampshire with six brothers

and one older sister, Cassandra.

Jane is in a sort of perfect Petri dish for a writer in that she's got a lot of

siblings, a lot of brothers.

So there's a huge amount of stimulation and fun.

Lots of things to talk about, things to see, things to watch going on.

And her siblings will become her first fully realised characters.

Her father, George, is the clergyman of the village.

The job doesn't pay well, but it does come with a home.

They don't own the place they live in. Nonetheless, as a rector, he has social

status. Doesn't have any money, though.

And he is using multiple jobs to try to make ends meet.

They have just enough money, but there's always the risk that they could sink

downwards.

This is the worry that hangs over the heads of the Austins.

The Austin family may not be rich, but they do have something of value.

It's a modest home, but most importantly, it's got a library.

It contains some 500 books.

This is unusual. It's remarkable for a family with limited finances to have

this many books.

And the library is full of these ideas.

You've got the great classics of the time, history, this world of literature,

this world of politics.

It's at her fingertips.

And there's an inspiring new kind of book on her father's shelf, the novel.

a form of writing which takes the reader into the worlds of vivid fictional

characters.

Of course, all of this is fuel for her future genius.

This is where she's made, in this library.

From childhood, Jane's love of reading fuels an obsession with writing stories

of her own.

We know that from a very young age, Jane is writing these exuberant, energetic,

satirical little skits.

She's very funny, she's very witty.

They're full of people falling down dead drunk, especially women.

They're just about what women should get up to or not get up to.

One of Austen's earliest known stories is titled... the beautiful Cassandra.

Jane hero-worships her sister.

Famously, her mother said if Cassandra was going to have her head cut off, Jane

would have her head cut off too. She's obsessed with Cassandra.

The heroine is a mischievous adventurer who storms around London causing

trouble.

When Cassandra had attained her 16th year, she was lovely and amiable.

She then proceeded to... Jane to have girls...

punching pastry chefs and watching people falling over drunk.

You can see that she is being playful at full.

But as a young woman in Georgian Britain, Austen's options are limited.

Women in the 1790s have no rights. What little education has afforded them is

really just training for being a wife.

Girls are expected to live a life of domestic obedience as wives and mother.

And so Jane finds herself a chess piece to be moved around the board to support

other family members, to help with birth, marriages and deaths, as is

convenient to the family.

16th of December, 1793.

Jane has been sent to Southampton.

Southampton is a very busy port.

It has that kind of rough and ready vibe.

You're seeing all sorts of different nationalities, people of colour, men and

women.

Sailors, soldiers, mercenaries.

All different classes mingling in these hustling, bustling spaces.

As a young woman and as a writer, this is incredibly exciting and she's storing

up these experiences like any creative person.

It's Jane's 18th birthday, but she's not here to celebrate.

She's here to help her cousin Elizabeth, who is going into labour.

To be dispatched to support the birth of a family member with no experience, no

real understanding of what's going on.

I mean, talk about being chucked into the deep end.

The reality of giving birth in Georgian England is messy, it's bloody, it's

dangerous. A woman can die and the baby can die.

Four of Jane's relatives die in childbirth.

To see that at 18 must have been mind-blowing.

She would not have discounted the fact that this was going to be her fate too.

Jane Austen is... probably looking at this woman and thinking about her own

life, thinking, is this what I want?

We know that Jane Austen can be very, very savage, very, very brutal.

There's an excruciating moment in one of the letters where there's a searingly

cruel comment about a woman who has a miscarriage. Jane Austen commented that

the woman miscarried because her husband was so ugly, she took one look at him

and aborted.

I mean, that's horrible.

You know, these are the kind of awful things that sisters would say to each

other in confidence.

Jane wants to be more than just marriage and childbirth material.

Then, in 1794, she encounters a new kind of role model.

Cousin Eliza is big news.

She's just this fabulous creature that swans into Stevenson, bringing with her

the whole hinterland of exotic, mysterious, fabulous and foreign

excitement.

Eliza had been married to a nobleman.

During the French Revolution, he'd been arrested and thrown into jail.

But worse followed.

Her husband has been guillotined.

And she relates this to Jane Austen.

It's one thing to know that the French Revolution has taken place and that it's

tipped over into bloodshed and chaos.

It's quite another to have that presence, that bloodshed, walk right

through your door and tell it to your face.

Can you imagine being told this news while Eliza's there?

It causes her so much fear, it sort of seeps into her subconscious.

As well as these tales of horror, Eliza brings radical new ideas.

Eliza gives Jane Austen books.

She said, women will not be put down any longer.

Statements that would have been such a huge influence on how Jane Austen

perceived women's rights.

And this is catnip for Jane Austen.

I mean, like any teenage girl, when a cooler, slightly older woman walks into

the room, that's kind of electrifying.

The unfortunate death of her husband leads to some interesting possibilities.

Jane sees a widow as someone with a certain amount of freedom. You are your

own woman with your own means and resources and you are able to do what

you would like to do with those.

And if that means you want to sleep with other men, you do it. It gives women of

the time a certain amount of freedom that maybe Jane had never witnessed

before or never thought existed.

I think we can't underestimate the excitement to her fizzing, curious mind

of this astonishing figure that's travelled around, that's been in a

revolution. She's had sex.

She's got money.

You know, could this be the beginnings of a character that she might want to

explore?

Inspired by the presence of cousin Eliza, Jane Austen writes her first long

-form work.

Lady Susan tells the story of a recently widowed seductress who is looking for a

new husband.

Lady Susan is beautiful, she's clever, she's manipulative, and she knows how

to get what she wants.

She is a force of nature, and she is just doing what she needs to do to

survive. Lady Susan.

Lady Susan has a problem.

A teenage daughter who she needs to marry off.

She arranges for a wealthy but dim suitor to visit them at Churchill Manor.

Churchill.

That's how you say it.

All together like that.

Churchill.

Oh, well, that explains a lot. You see, I'd heard church and hill, but couldn't

find either. All I could see was this big house.

I played Sir James Martin.

He's a fucking idiot, but he's a likeable fucking idiot.

He walks through life with his gold shoes on, going, isn't this marvellous?

How jolly.

Tiny green balls.

Mmm. Yes.

Good tasting.

Quite sweet.

What are they called?

Peas. Oh, yes. No, I knew that.

To honour means, among other things, to listen with respect to a parent's

sincere counsel.

When her daughter tries to reject Sir James, Lady Susan callously ignores her

feelings and piles on the pressure.

An offer as splendid as Sir James's is not likely to come around again.

He has offered you the one thing he has the value to give.

His income.

It's very funny, because her attitude to her daughter is just so awful, and she

is the world's worst mother.

The destitute.

Is that what you want?

No.

I can see Sir James is a kind man, and if it weren't a matter of marriage, I'm

sure I could like him.

But marriages were one's whole life.

Not in my experience.

Lady Susan is the hand grenade that Jane Austen is lobbing into Georgian society.

Women are meant to present in a certain way.

And she did away with all of that. And she created complex, three-dimensional

characters who had massive flaws, massive contradictions.

And this... was written by a teenage girl.

It's unfathomable.

Lady Susan's plan fails, and she shows her true nature as she rails against her

own daughter.

If my daughter were not the greatest simpleton on earth, she'd be engaged to

him now. What?

She refused him.

A baronet with 10,000 a year feels so provoking. This is your daughter.

It's one of the moments where we go...

Oh, no, she isn't. No, she is a nasty piece of work, actually, isn't she?

In the end, Lady Susan marries her daughter off happily to another

aristocrat.

And she takes the risk. Precocious talent is not the word for it.

She is a rebellious modern spirit.

She's just standing up for women as human beings.

and refusing to bow to the oppressive stereotype.

It will be years before Lady Susan reaches a reading public.

For now Jane's only audience is her family.

Girls like her aren't expected to have careers.

unlike her brothers.

War brings opportunities for the Austin boys.

Henry joins the militia, while Frank and Charles serve in the Navy.

The Navy, of course, supported you and made all your provisions.

The other great joy of the Navy was it opens people's horizons.

And as a young officer, you were part of it.

The Royal Navy at that stage was charting the world.

We were leading this scientific research.

But even better than that, if you were lucky and competent, you could make an

immense amount of money.

Jane Austen, of course, was privy to all of this life at sea because of the

letters from her brothers. This was like a window, a ray of light, showing her

what was going on in all these places. And being as bright as she was, she

absorbed this and understood it and learnt about it, and I think she used it

in what she wrote.

But it must have been quite frustrating sometimes for Jane Austen. The

opportunities available for a genteel middle-class woman were about zero.

But Jane has one person who believes in her, her father.

I do think that George Austen recognised that his daughter was something special.

She is writing in a different way. She is thinking in a different way to

everybody else.

He clearly valued her for who she was and for her intelligence.

There is that total acceptance and support for her.

To encourage his daughter, on Jane's 19th birthday, he buys her a special

gift. He gives her a... portable writing desk that he's bought from a

cabinetmaker in Basingstoke.

An investment in her talent for writing.

I mean, she's only 19.

It's almost impossible to imagine what this would have meant to her.

It gives her permission to be an author. That's what he gives her.

Despite her father's approval, with no family money to fall back on, Jane is

still expected to find a husband to support her.

And a traditional place for meeting a man is the ballroom.

The Georgian marriage market is a very ruthless place. It was important for

people to like one another in a marriage, but more important was their

social standing.

and courtship will be watched, eagle-eyed, by both families.

I think the pressure was enormous.

Balls aren't just for husband hunting.

They are also an opportunity for young people to let loose.

The party goes on until the candles burn out, sometimes until 6am.

The dancing can be so relentless, guests bleed through their shoes.

Ladies use their fans as cheat sheets, concealing the latest dance moves.

To get ready for one of these balls is a real deal.

You've got to wear corsets, you've got to have your hair done in a certain way.

You are there to be seen.

If you look at their dresses, they're really low-cut with heaving bosoms.

And the dancers were... I mean, no-one was grinding or twerking, but they were

very sexual.

Jane wants to be a writer, but she also loves going to balls.

And she's a wonderful dancer.

Men want to dance with her.

She's just excited and happy.

So she's having the time of her life.

In December 1795, at the Hampshire County Christmas Ball, Jane locks eyes

with a handsome Irishman.

His name is Tom LaFroy.

He's connected to one of her best friends, Madame LaFroy. So he's not a...

And I think she really genuinely has a big crush on him. And he has a crush on

her.

Austin writes about her feelings to her sister, Cassandra, in her earliest

surviving letter.

This is a really exciting moment.

We hear her voice. We're inside her head for the first time.

It's such an intimate conversation she's having.

My dear Cassandra, I'm almost afraid to tell you how I behaved.

Imagine for yourself everything most profligate and shocking in the way of

dancing and sitting down together. He is a very gentleman-like, good-looking,

pleasant young man.

I think Jane's being very naughty here.

Sitting with someone for a long time was one thing. Sitting too close with them,

holding their hands, touching wasn't done at all, so it sounds like it's

getting all a little bit heady.

She definitely fancies him.

There's just one problem.

The LaFroy family don't think Jane's family come up to scratch. They don't

have enough money, they're not going to make a good match and therefore they're

forced to part.

When Tom's family decided this was not a good idea, she

feels that she's perhaps not good enough.

She's not even there to say, I reject you.

The choice is taken away from her.

And she has a strong sense of pride.

She feels the fact that she doesn't have a lot of money. She feels it deeply.

All sorts of emotions would have been running around her at this particular

moment.

Feeling a lack of voice, a lack of autonomy.

That she's powerless in this situation.

She writes this really beautiful letter to Cassandra.

The first thing we see is her amazing sense of tragic irony.

At length, the day has come on which I am to flirt my last with Tom LaFroy.

And when you receive this, it will be over.

My tears flow as I write at the melancholy idea.

My tears flow at the melancholy idea.

I love the fact that she's so dry and ironic in the way she describes her own

reactions.

This is typical Jane Austen, sort of expressing something and then putting it

in perspective and slightly laughing at herself.

So we see her here aping the sentimental heroine who's been let down.

She's mocking herself.

But I really do believe that behind that there is a genuine sense of hurt and

disappointment.

Bruised by the Tom LaFroy affair, Austen channels her frustration into a new

novel that she calls First Impressions.

She finishes a draft at the age of just 21.

Her father, George, is captivated.

He decides it's time to approach a publisher.

George Austin is making a great vote of faith in the abilities of his daughter.

He's very ambitious for her.

He realises that this is a publishable novel. He realises that it could be a

success.

That must have been a huge boost, because up until that point, she has

read to her family, they've all listened to these first novels, but he is the

person.

In the captioning techniques and rising literacy rates mean business is booming.

To drive profits, books are sold in multiple volumes, so readers have to pay

to read each new instalment.

and publishers are on the lookout for the next big hit.

Rejection. All writers keep their rejection slips, those first knockbacks.

It's despicable to be rejected.

The publisher has sent George Austin's letter back with a line saying, declined

by return of post.

They haven't even read it.

I think that that's going to be the thing.

She feels angry because she knows she's good.

There is something about knowing that you're good and the world around you not

understanding yet.

That is going to drive her.

And I think it's critical that they are outsiders.

They're outsiders to the publishing and cultural elite and the power that's held

by London.

Although stung by the rejection, Jane has the unfailing support of her sister,

Cassandra.

Deemed the pretty sister, Cassandra had been engaged to marry a young chaplain.

But in early 1797, more bad news arrives.

Cassandra knows that very well when she sees the black seal on the letter,

on the notice of death.

She knows what that represents.

Cassandra's fiancé has died on a voyage to the West Indies, his body buried at

sea.

Jane Austen is heartbroken for her sister. She sees the pain her sister is

going through.

And Jane says, I've never seen anybody behave with such grace

and such fortitude and such courage in the light of this absolutely

heartbreaking news.

Cassandra resolves from this point on she's not going to find another love and

that's it for her.

Cassandra's vow to remain unmarried will have a profound impact on the lives of

both women.

I think there is a part of her that also feels a sense of relief.

She's not going to be parted from me. We can be together. We can stay together.

It's an absolutely pivotal moment in the life of Jane Austen. It

opens the doorway for Jane Austen to think about a life in which she may not

get married.

It's almost as if they're in it together now.

So she must now be thinking, writing.

How can I be secure and independent through my writing?

That's her project.

And every project needs a great idea.

From her own extensive reading, Jane knows what makes a bestseller.

The real fashion for Gothic novels at the time. The racy Gothic novels with

the shivering, shuddering, swooning heroines.

Gothic fiction features beautiful heroines.

often trapped in mysterious settings and facing terrifying dangers.

For some, these racy page-turners are a cause for concern.

There's lots of quite stiff writers in the 18th century, male writers usually,

who are very worried about the influence that these terrible, trashy things are

going to have on women's imagination. The idea that a young woman might read

this and...

think that all these things are going to happen to her.

Austen comes up with a masterstroke.

She takes the idea of the novel as a bad influence and runs with it.

In Northanger Abbey, Austen creates a teenage heroine, Catherine Morland, who

is obsessed with reading gothic horror.

Both Jane and the character of Catherine Morland's father were rectors, and you

could really see that Jane is putting a lot of herself into this character.

She's plain. She comes from a large, undistinguished family. Her father's not

rich.

Her mother's sensible, but not particularly anything else.

And yet, she's the one we're going to follow, and proudly.

Jane is holding a standard for her and says, come with me, this person's worth

watching. Austen is subverting the idea of what a heroine is, or should be. For

when a young lady is to be a hero... Wept up in her gothic novel obsession,

Catherine is prone to dramatic daydreams. The tumult of emotions

stirred in the bosom of Adeline and fear gripped her heart, that at any moment

ruffians would fly upon the carriage and return her to the ignominy of her

captive state.

Back in the real world, Catherine is invited to the family home of her

suitor, Henry Tilney.

Arriving at Northanger Abbey, a looming Gothic pile, Catherine's imagination

runs riot.

Catherine is always looking for the Gothic horror. She's looking in the

cupboards, in the drawers.

You know, she wants...

all the horror of the typical Abbey.

The night was dark and the rain still beat violently against the windows.

Catherine's heart beat quick, but her courage did not fail her.

With a cheek flushed by hope and an eye straining with curiosity, her fingers

grasped the handle of a drawer and threw it forth.

It was entirely empty.

Stylistically, this is the high Gothic style.

I think what...

What makes me laugh about this is the sort of main character energy that

Catherine stars in the film of her own life.

You know, everything she does.

To marry Henry Tilney, Catherine must win the approval of his sinister father,

General Tilney.

Miss Morland, welcome to Northanger Abbey.

When she finds out the general's wife died, she concludes he murdered her.

Catherine's imagination is running absolutely wild here. She says to Henry

Tilney, he is a murderer. I cannot help believing it. There's always this

monstrous, barren figure in these romances.

And she thinks that General Tilney has murdered his wife.

And there'll be corpses hanging up in his bedroom. But actually what he does

is much more monstrous.

My father insists on your leaving immediately.

As soon as you can make yourself ready.

The carriage will take you to meet the public stagecoach.

No servant will accompany you.

I'm to travel all night.

Alone.

General Tilney had believed Catherine was rich.

When he learns she's a penniless clergyman's daughter, he ruthlessly

casts her out of the Abbey.

That's it. She's out.

She has no money, she has no means of getting home.

She's completely betrayed by what should have been his duty of care.

So it turns out it is a book full of monsters, but actually, you know, they

live amongst us.

In Northanger Abbey, Austen uses the Gothic fantasy to expose an

uncomfortable truth about society.

She's played with a very, very popular literary movement, and she's looked

behind.

the spooky velvet curtain of chivalry horrors, and she's shown us a real

monster, which is the kind of man that would treat women that way.

Austen gives her heroine a fairy tale ending.

Catherine and Henry Tilney marry and live happily ever after.

But her own future is far from settled.

And in the winter of 1800, her world is turned upside down.

Jane's father is growing old.

He has decided to give up his position as the village clergyman.

She comes back from staying with a friend and she walks into her home and

her mother blurts out that they're going to leave.

She's turfed out of the family home.

And it's such an overpowering shock.

Her father passes a living at Stevenson to his eldest son, James.

The rectory will now be his home.

She's being uprooted, and Jane cannot conceal her resentment about this.

She writes, The whole world is a conspiracy to enrich one part of our

family at the expense of another.

This is about the unfairness of male inheritance that her elder brother James

gets the house.

It's just this wonderfully succinct, angry comment.

She feels at this moment that sense of powerlessness.

Does nobody ever consult my feelings?

Am I important or am I just dispensable?

It's a move by the family that really doesn't consider her needs at all.

And it screws her up.

Worse, to pay for the move and help fund her father's retirement, the library is

sold.

I just can't begin to imagine what that represented for her.

The pain of not being able to have those books around you, not being able to find

that refuge that she's always had. It's like it's one body blow after another.

She had to pack up and move on.

Jane and her sister are forced to move with their parents to Bath.

It is hoped here the two girls will find husbands.

At this point, she's 25, which seems very young to us, but at that time,

she's getting to the end of marriageable age. It's sort of a bit like the Circus

Panic in Bridget Jones.

That's not an easy time for her.

It's potentially humiliating.

A daily occurrence in Bath, going to a visitation, attending things in public

with a very strong sense of urgency about finding a marriage match.

Jane writes about the social engagements she's made to attend.

Another stupid party last night.

Perhaps if larger, they might be less intolerable. I cannot anyhow continue to

find people agreeable.

She's starting to have difficulty in crowds in general. This is too much.

She's shy, she's introverted.

Having to make conversation with a few people in intense ways really tires her

out, and her situation becomes intolerable.

We associate Jane Austen with bath, but the fact is she hates it.

In the summer of 1801, Jane manages to escape to the seaside.

Invited by family friends, she spends several weeks in Sidmouth.

Sidmouth is a beautiful, genteel, Georgian beach town.

It's just gorgeous. It was known as the English Riviera.

So it's a great place to go, and she's really happy to be there.

And she meets a man.

And she falls in love.

We know he was a clergyman.

It's pretty serious, and he makes his intentions pretty clear.

What's infuriating for us is we just don't know anything about him. We don't

know what his name was.

He's very shadowy.

The only source of information about the romance is from Austen's sister,

Cassandra.

Cassandra tells us later this might have been the love of her life.

She said he had the charm of person, mind and manners that made him worthy to

possess her sister's love.

We think that this could lead to a proposal.

To meet someone she falls for at that point in her life is...

The pair agree to meet again.

In the meantime, Jane returns to Bath.

Something awful has happened.

The love of her life has died.

It's probably making her think that she's lost all her chances now.

This could have been the last one.

It's clearly huge for her.

But the sense of pain that she must feel.

That's the sort of fuel that a writer needs, and it candles itself into one of

the greatest novels ever written.

So the opening line of Pride and Prejudice is one of the most famous

opening lines in literature.

It is a truth universally acknowledged that the single man in possession of a

good fortune must be want of a wife.

That's already funny.

It also is the painful truth behind the whole novel that if your family doesn't

have any money and you're a woman, you have to marry a rich man.

When the wealthy and single Mr Bingley arrives in the neighbourhood, the five

Bennet sisters are thrilled.

Bingley! Bingley, what have I told you about listening at the door? Never mind

that. Mr Bingley arrived from the north.

Bingley!

Mr Bennett owns an estate, but when he dies it will pass down the male line.

With no inheritance in sight, the Bennett girls face poverty unless they

marry well.

When you die, Mr Bennet, which may in fact be very soon, our girls will be

left without a roof over their head nor a penny to their name.

It's ten in the morning.

Pride and Prejudice. It's full of an abundance of females that no-one knows

what to do with.

How on earth do you get shot of them all?

I mean, it's almost like a send-up of her own life so far. What do we do with

these women?

The novel's heroine is the proud and fiercely independent Elizabeth Bennet.

Another young woman who loves reading.

I always imagine Elizabeth is the closest to actual Jane of all of her

heroines. She's funny, she's smart, she's kind, she's full of spirit, she's

modern, she's independent.

And so you're gunning for her from the start.

the evening in love with you that I'm no judge of beauty.

Or men.

No, they are far too easy to judge. They're not all bad.

Humorous poppycups in my limited experience.

One of these days, Lizzie, someone will catch your eye and then you'll have to

watch your tongue.

In this particular scene, we see the dance from Elizabeth's perspective.

Hears.

Remembers. that you as the reader will slowly be pulled in, in sort of an

immersive way, into that person's consciousness.

But that takes extraordinary skill.

Lizzie is determined to marry for love.

Enter the dangerous Mr. Darcy.

Come from your dreams, the sense that somehow or other...

There's no reason to speak because the aura that's been given off by this male

figure is so filled with her pungent sexuality that it doesn't really matter

what he says.

With his sex appeal, fortune and sprawling ancestral mansions, Darcy

seems to have everything.

But he's far from perfect.

He needs fixing, you know, he's rude, he's arrogant, and crucially, he's rude

to her.

But her sister Elizabeth is very agreeable. Fairly tolerable, I dare say.

She's not handsome enough to tempt me.

You'd better return to your partner and enjoy her smiles. You're wasting your

time with me.

And they both need to learn some things.

So Jane Austen plots the dynamic between Darcy and Elizabeth really precisely,

and that's the narrative drive of the book.

The arrogant Mr. Darcy and the proud Lizzie are in denial over their intense

mutual attraction.

While they smoulder, an obstacle arrives.

Mr. Collins at your service.

Mr. Collins is the male heir to the Bennet estate.

He shows up at their home, hoping to choose a wife from one of the Bennet

daughters.

What a superbly featured room, and what...

Excellent boiled potatoes.

Many years since I've had such an exemplary vegetable.

To which of my fair cousins should I compliment the excellence of the

cooking?

Yeah, Mr Collins is another one of Austin's idiots.

But he is not lovable.

He is a proud, boastful, odious, charmless little toad of a man.

After dinner, I thought I might read to you all for an hour or two.

I have with me four dice's sermons, which speak very eloquently on all

matters moral.

Are you familiar with four dice's sermons, Miss Bennet?

And you can see what he's trying to do. He believes, literally, it is his God

-given right to go round to this house and pick a daughter.

What a prick.

Later on, of course, Mr Collins will ask Lizzie to marry him.

And now...

Nothing remains but for me to assure you in the most animated language of the

violence of my affection. Mr. Collins!

And that no reproach on the subject of fortune will cross my lips once we're

married. You are too hasty, sir. You forget that I have given no answer.

Please understand me. I cannot accept you.

Lizzie is affronted by Mr. Collins' proposal and abruptly turns him down.

Then Darcy makes his move.

Please do me the honour of accepting my hand.

He is actually trying to propose to her at this point, and Darcy says... Could

you expect me to rejoice in the inferiority of your circumstances?

And those are the words of a gentleman.

It's a bit of a cack-handed proposal.

He is very open about his awareness of her inferiority, but Lizzie responds

with usual fire and wit and defiance.

From the first moment I met you, your arrogance and conceit, your selfish

disdain for the feelings of others made me realise that you were the last man in

the world I could ever be prevailed upon to marry.

You have money, you have class over me, but you can still never be the person

that I am.

Lizzie will never, ever be told that she's not as good as anyone else.

She's amazing.

Jane Austen is doing something brilliantly subversive here because

she's going against the hierarchical nature of society, of class, of class

divide.

Jane Austen's project was to make public the idea that women's imagination

and that women's minds were not just subtle and graceful, but sharp with

enormous integrity and seriousness.

There were no other images available of how women thought.

and felt it wasn't as though it was happening in opera.

You know, it wasn't happening in poetry.

But she managed to create an extraordinary sense not only of life in

the protagonist, but also of sharp intelligence, tact, wit, knowledge.

Despite her defiance, Lizzie seemed truly devastated.

As a writer, you always want your characters to be like Lizzie and Darcy

in a place where you think, we're not coming back from this, there is no way.

But we always need a journey to go on.

In the end, Darcy proves himself worthy of Lizzie's love.

They finally surrender to their feelings.

I would have to tell you.

You have bewitched me, body and soul, and I love and love.

I love you.

I'll never wish to be parted from you from the day on.

It's a really beautiful ending.

We all have to have someone who sees us and loves us.

He is probably the only person that sees Lizzie.

Jane has written for us a character and a story that we need as readers.

She's writing the happy ending that she needed.

Jane Austen is about to turn 27.

She's still living with her parents.

One suitor's family rejected her. The man she loved has died.

And nothing she's written has been published.

Then, in December 1802, Jane and her sister are invited to stay with some

family friends.

wealthy members of a landed gentry.

During Austin's day, he does receive an offer of marriage from the

improbably named Mr Big Wither.

It's straight out of one of her novels.

She doesn't love him and he clearly doesn't love her.

It's hard to have to marry someone you don't love because that's the only way

you can survive.

And she thinks, I'll be rich.

How tempting is that?

Why shouldn't she have security and respectability and money?

Jane accepts Big Withers' proposal.

And then that night, she thinks about it.

And she must have thought, you know, were they up and down? Could I feel

right? At what cost would it come out?

This is a real fork in the road for her.

She speaks with her sister.

And she decides, I cannot go through with this.

She just couldn't.

make herself marry someone that she did not or could not imagine herself loving.

And that is the mantra in the novels.

Her herons say, I will not marry without love. So she's actually living what

she's preaching.

This is a defining moment, and it determines the rest of her writing life.

She chooses to take the route of being an independent woman to pursue

her dream of being a writer.

That is the moment when she says, my life's going to be different.

And I think there was almost a real pledge, an internal pledge to the life

that I am choosing.

for myself

jane

has gone she's gambled everything all right all of her chips are down

this is just a whole new chapter in her life

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

Then suddenly everything goes wrong.

This is an absolute gut punch.

What was I thinking?

Thinking I could be a writer.

Take an interactive journey through spaces that shaped Jane Austen's life

and work.

and explore how her influence extends across time, place and cultures.

Scan the QR code or visit bbc.co.uk forward slash austingenius and follow

the links to the Open University.