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, she wants to make as much money as she possibly

can.

Jane often wants to be published, but with all her ambition, her ferocious

intelligence, even she might not have foreseen that this could 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... Jane Austen

was a writer teeming with new ideas.

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...

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 Austin 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 Austin.

Henry and Eliza are living in London, so they're right in the heart of society.

They have contacts in the publishing industry.

Austin 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, Austin returns to Bath.

Her father is ailing, and it falls to the women of the family to look after

him.

George Austin 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 Austin cares for her elderly father...

The idea for a new novel starts taking shape.

The Watsons.

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 older 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

but before jane

can finish her story events overtake her

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's 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.

often 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 Austin 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 been in 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 Object So

Beloved, and so fondly cherished as his wife and children ever were.

Gosh, that writing is just so emotional.

She's able to articulate something so universal in that moment.

It's 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.

The 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.

Losing the father, who is still very traditionally the head of the family,

has implications for the Austin women.

It's now that the economic realities are really laid bare, that he hasn't

prepared. at all for their welfare.

George Austin leaves his family with nothing.

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

Women are at the behest of the men. The Austin 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 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 dyeing your current

wardrobe black.

For Jane, poverty might be bad, but to be laughed at is far worse.

She writes to her sister.

As I find on looking into my affairs, that instead of being very rich, I am

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, but it may not overcome your spirit.

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.

The Austin 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.

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 have 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.

I'm besieged with doubt and fears about, you know, how long can this go on? It

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.

These are probably the hardest years.

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.

So Jonathan 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. I'm 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 who have been lost. And if that was the

case, I'm 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 period of Austen's life, but the fact

that she signs what becomes known as the mad letter, because she's really mad

about what's been happening, 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 anymore.

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 been part of their income and what has

sustained them.

This is just the most crushing blow.

Let down again.

She's feeling humiliated.

She could very mean 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 sister 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 hoped the return to her roots will re-energise 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.

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 households work 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.

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.

Sense and Sensibility.

All the experiences in her own life are getting reworked into this manuscript.

Eleanor 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 pounds.

The interest will provide them with a little extra income.

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

I have a question more than anything.

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

Of course, he did not stipulate a particular sum.

What's glorious is Austen uses the bad behaviour of her brothers.

She takes it almost verbatim.

and plonked it down in the start of Fenton Sensibility.

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...

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 themselves.

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.

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.

About to be made homeless, the two sisters respond very differently to

their predicament.

Eleanor is sense.

Marianne, sensibility.

Marianne, can you play something else?

Mama has been weeping since breakfast.

something less mournful, dearest.

What I love is the fullness of the female experience.

Marianne is not at all girdled by responsibility.

Eleanor sold us 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.

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...

And a horse rears.

His appearance on the scene is so highly charged.

Don't be afraid.

He's quite safe.

Shane Austin is not afraid to write a little bit of saucy steaminess.

Hearts would have been at flutter.

It is not broken.

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

Can you put your arm about my neck?

Allow me to escort you home.

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 is the cold when there is such a man? You will care very much when your

nose swells up.

You are right. Help me, Eleanor.

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.

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

Willoughby.

Willoughby. You feel it so vividly.

Often 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 fairytale 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 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.

Austin pioneers a groundbreaking 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's saying, oh, I did this, and the other person's 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 the narrator.

In this passage, Austen begins by describing the action as though

observing it.

Eleanor and her mother rose up in amazement at their entrance.

He apologized for his intrusion.

But then she slips into the perspective of Eleanor's mother and her emotional

response to the action.

Had he been even old, ugly, and vulgar, the gratitude and... She can give

you as the reader is sent quite, but the theme 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, often 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.

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 Edgerton.

Henry knows Thomas Edgerton from his time in the militia.

Thomas Edgerton publishes books about military manoeuvres and guns and

strategies. 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 was a crucial moment for Jane. She's been planning this moment all her

life.

Ultimately, it was Henry's connection with Edgerton.

But Eliza, just behind the scenes, played 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 Edgerton drives a hard bargain.

There's evidence that Henry and Eliza advanced money to Thomas Edgerton.

to persuade Edgerton 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.

Austin is not going to leave anything for chance this time.

She upsticks 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, no, indeed, I am never too busy to think of sense and

sensibility. I can know 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.

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

Finally, at the age of 35, she is a published author.

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 anymore. Not on someone else's desk. In

her hands, a real object in this world.

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 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 five and a half

million pounds 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 arts, music and literature all flourish.

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.

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 a thousand 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, Edgerton, is very, very keen to 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 up front 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 us.

We drank tea again yesterday with the Tilsons and met the Smiths. I find all

these little parties very pleasant.

Jane Austen discovers 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.

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 labor, and this demand has fueled

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.

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.

Her father, George Austin, had been a 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 Austin 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 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.

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's oppression, women

being silenced.

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 and 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

recognize 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.

Jane Austen 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.

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 for the

heroine. Fanny, he's here.

Austin explores inequality through the eyes of an outsider thrust into a world

of wealth.

Yes, ma. And you will write to tell me when I'm to return? Austin 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 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, Lord Norris?

What are you doing here?

I beg your pardon?

You are aware, surely, that the sewing wasn't cleared away from yesterday

afternoon?

Yes, you're quite right. It wasn't our... She's humiliated.

The fact that Fanny doesn't say a great deal leaves the reader with the anger.

The frustration the reader feels is angered on her behalf, and that's a much

more powerful way of 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 is a really important moment when the

very oppressed and silenced heroine makes this shocking observation.

It's 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.

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.

And I think it's kind of devastating because it's easy 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 the

large questions of class.

and movement in England, 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.

Austin ultimately shows us the consequences when those without power

try to stand up for themselves.

Fanny is banished from Mansfield Park, back to poverty.

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.

I must be exhausted from your journey.

No, it's a pretty short, really.

Look at you.

Betty,

get father up. Come in.

Fanny's homecoming is both deeply moving and deliberately unsentimental.

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

Betsy! I got him up yesterday.

This scene is a 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.

You see an author growing, I think.

This depiction of chaotic, working-class life is a departure from the genteel

poverty of Austen's previous story.

It is social realism.

There's this 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.

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...

A 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.

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.

Once more, here she is at the deathbed of someone that inspired and trusted her

and encouraged her. An early figure of inspiration and of female solidarity.

Another body blow for Austin.

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, Austin's most political work, is published.

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.

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.

But as she's attempted to tackle bigger themes and gain respect as an artist of

substance, the critics have ignored her.

Jane realizes 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 power.

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

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

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

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