Original subtitles

One of the things that's always clear about anyone who does anything, it's all

about the childhood.

These are the times when real art is created.

Jane Austen's childhood was scarred by a near-death experience.

When she was seven years old, she and her sister Cassandra were sent away to

boarding school.

It's a terrible thing.

What the girls faced.

An outbreak of typhus struck the school, and both girls fell gravely ill.

Entirely alone, Cassandra nursed Jane as her sickness worsened.

It's just Cassandra with her.

Being with her. Holding her.

That sibling power. That's love.

That's extraordinary.

Throughout her life, the support and sacrifices of her sister will enable

Jane Austen to fulfill her genius.

This is the most powerful relationship in either of those women's lives.

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, who revealed profound truths

about the world she lived in. There is writing before Austen, and there is

writing after Austen.

That achievement is...

in Norman.

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.

Jane Austen is 38 years old.

She has published three novels, Pride and Prejudice, Sense and Sensibility,

and most recently, Mansfield Park.

Although ignored by critics, it has sold well, and she is closer to having

financial freedom than ever before.

Jane Austen is now finally on the literary map.

There's a great satisfaction in the idea that finally it's her pen that's keeping

a roof over her head after the years and years of insecurity.

She's really in her stride now and she's feeling good about herself. And why is

she feeling good about herself? Because she's earning money.

But there's one thing still troubling her.

How to tackle big subjects.

and say something about the world without alienating readers and critics.

For the past five years, Austen has been living comfortably in a home provided by

her brother Edward, who had been raised by wealthy relatives.

He's the brother that gets given away to a rich family. They adopt him.

It's a way that rich people that didn't have sons could guarantee male

succession.

So Edward Austin grows up as Edward Knight and inherits 8,000 acres in

Hampshire, including the village of Chawton.

Chawton Cottage is Jane's sacred space that she has with her sister Cassandra

and their mother.

Since the death of their father, Cassandra has become Jane's greatest

supporter.

Jane's relationship with Cassandra is exceptionally close.

In one letter, Jane refers to themselves as the Formidables.

And Cassandra is very, very careful to make sure that Jane doesn't have to take

on too big a share of the management of the household to make space for her to

write.

But now, news arrives that throws Austin's life into turmoil.

Her brother Edward is threatened with a lawsuit that could strip him of his

fortune.

The action is brought by a local family who believe they are the rightful heirs

to the Chawton estate.

Should Edward lose, the Austin women will become homeless once again.

Austin suddenly faces grave uncertainty.

If this lawsuit goes against Edward, he could face having to sell off up to 80%

of his enormous estate.

Jane is facing homelessness if this lawsuit is successful.

Austin's modest earnings for her writing are nowhere near enough to protect her

if she was to lose her home.

So she turns to what she knows best, writing.

She needs profit.

She needs to make as much money as she possibly can out of her fiction.

She needs a crowd pleaser. She needs a real banger that's going to reach as

many readers as possible.

It's not just the Austen family facing hard times.

Following a peace treaty with France during the Napoleonic Wars.

Britain's economy falls into a deep recession.

The price of bread has doubled.

And as new technologies start to take people's jobs, riots begin to spread

across the country.

The money that was being spent on armaments and providing things for the

war against Napoleon in Europe, all of that stopped.

The Industrial Revolution was starting, meaning people were coming in off the

land. And they were all crammed together in terrible conditions, so there was a

social revolution in terms of living.

There's a growing sense of strife and hunger and increasing inequality.

Austin is witnessing a terribly unequal country that is increasingly divided.

The haves and the have-nots are so far apart, it's like a...

Cost of living crisis writ large, right there in the village where Austin is

living.

As Austin travels from her home in Chawton to the privileged world of her

brother Edward, she cannot help but notice the increasing divide between

rich and poor.

They're surrounded by poverty, by people being evicted from their houses, by

people being forced to pack up and trudge on foot to London to try to

survive. You know, people were starving around them.

As often as they can, the Austin women give food and clothes to the most needy

in their community.

She has a real sense of compassion for people around her and to imagine, you

know, that could be me.

Austin pours this feeling into the novels he is currently writing.

In this time of crisis, she decides to put the self-indulgent behaviour of the

rich under the microscope.

She's looking at rich people and thinking, you live in such a big, nice

house. Do you deserve to be rich? Are you just a better person? And of

course... You're not a better person. And this is what we meet in Emma.

Emma follows the matchmaking misadventures of the rich and self

-absorbed Emma Woodhouse.

Emma centres around a really spoiled and wealthy heroine who

has power.

This is one of the first...

heroines that she writes about that really fully has power. And why does she

have power? Because she has money.

Emma is vain, beautiful, shallow, irritating and very snobby.

She's a real monster. And Jane Austen says herself, nobody's going to much

like this heroine except for myself.

The central theme of the novel is Emma becoming

awakened to her thoughtless and selfish ways.

The key scene is a picnic at the picturesque Box Hill where Emma and her

friends have gathered, including the much poorer Miss Bates.

So Miss Bates is a generally happy person, but she also has verbal

diarrhoea that she cannot stop talking. It's always commenting on what she's

seeing, what she's experiencing, what she's thinking.

Shall we all play a game?

Emma finds Miss Bates irritating.

and mercilessly ridiculed her.

I command that we each tell Miss Woodhouse something entertaining.

You may offer one thing very clever, two things moderately clever, or three

things very dull indeed.

And in return, Miss Woodhouse will laugh heartily at them all.

I shall be sure to say three very dull things as soon as I open my mouth, can't

I?

There may be a difficulty.

Oh, I doubt that. I'm sure I never fail to say things very dull.

Yes, dear, but you'll be limited as to number. Only three.

Oh!

To be sure.

Yes. She's entirely humiliated, and everyone else can see it, and Emma can't

see it.

It's searingly cruel.

I will try and hold my tongue.

Oh, I must make myself very disagreeable.

Or she would not have said such a thing to an old friend.

There you have, in microcosm, an illustration of what actually is going

on in the country, this huge disparity between rich and poor.

She's chosen the romantic structure as her narrative structure, but her

books... are about everything so she's not just talking about love at all

just three jane would have known people like

this so there is a an exquisite sense of real life within

these characters and these characters are all understandable which is why we

still read the stories today because we know who these people are we have met

people like this

It falls to Mr Knightley to say he ought to be ashamed.

He really tells her off. He really gives it both barrels.

How could you be so unfeeling to Miss Bates?

How could you be so insolent to a woman of her age and situation? I've not

thought it possible.

How could I help saying it?

I dare say she did not understand me.

I assure you she felt your full meaning.

She cannot stop mentioning it.

Knightley pulls her aside and says, You can't act like that. That was wrong.

And sometimes you've got to not tell the joke, actually. You've got to hold back.

But she is poor.

Even more so than when she was born.

And should she live to be an old lady, she will sink further still.

A situation being in every way below you should secure your compassion.

And the famous line is, you know, it was badly done.

Badly done, Emma.

In Emma, Austen uses the same technique she pioneered in Sense and Sensibility,

blending the narrator and the character's perspective together.

But now she pushes it even further, playing with her readers and

deliberately misleading them.

There's an example of it here in Emma where Mr. Elton is described as the

lover of Harriet by the narrator.

We know that that's not true.

So what we have here is an unreliable narrator. It is the most remarkable

technique, and she invents it. It's such a mark of her genius.

Throughout the novel, Emma begins to see the error of her ways.

You want our friendship to remain the same as it has always been.

In this scene, she tries to convince Mr Knightley that she has changed.

I know I made mistakes, but had you been here the last few days, you would have

seen how I've tried to paint.

It's interesting that she names Mr Knightley, Mr Knightley, her knightly

and shining armour, particularly as her brother's name was also Edward Knight.

Jane is acknowledging the role of this older male figure, someone who

looks back with love and compassion, as Jane Austen's older brother does to her.

Please, tell me I'm your friend.

I do not wish to call you my friend, because I hope to call you something

infinitely more dear.

Marry me?

In the finale, Emma and Mr Knightley happily marry.

The enlightenment of Emma is a message from Austin that rich people

have to become aware of the impact of their lives on the rest of the world.

Emma is Austin's greatest work yet.

It's a combination of everything she's learnt so far.

It's commercial, funny, poignant and subtly political.

If it sells well, it could provide the Austin women with the financial security

they need.

Feeling let down by her previous publisher, this time Austin decides to

go to the top and approach the best in the business, John Murray.

John Murray is the most fashionable bookseller in London in 1814. He is the

publisher of Lord Byron. He is as glamorous and well-connected as a

bookseller can possibly be.

This unshakable self-confidence, this unshakable belief in her ingenuity is

what propels her to believe that she can be a John Murray author.

In October 1815, Jane's brother Henry negotiates a deal on his sister's

behalf.

Murray agrees to publish Emma, but on one condition.

He also wants the copyright.

What he's asking her to do is give up her intellectual property, her ownership

of these works.

So it's a real conundrum for her. Can she bear to let the ownership of her

works go to him?

Austin reveals her thoughts in a letter to her sister, Cassandra.

Mr Murray's letter has come.

He is a rogue, of course, but a civil one.

He sends more praise, however, than I expected.

It is an amusing letter.

A rogue but a civil one. It's such a characteristic Austin expression.

It captures his edginess, the fact that there's something potentially explosive.

which she's going to have to handle very, very carefully.

The prospect of a cash injection is too good to refuse.

Austin wants her brother Henry to accept the deal.

She obviously wants to be published by John Murray.

But Henry is prevaricating, and I think she's feeling really infuriated. I think

she's feeling, are you kidding me? This is John Murray.

So Henry's in danger of really messing this up.

Then, with the deal still hanging in the balance, Jane's brother falls gravely

ill. The talks with Murray grind to a halt.

The expectation is that it will be delayed and that everyone will wait for

Henry Austin to get better.

But no.

She takes over.

She thinks, I don't really need Henry. I can do this myself. I can take matters

into my own hands.

Austin takes personal control of the negotiations and rips up Murray's terms.

She's been burnt by deals like this before.

What she's doing is fighting for her own voice.

I really think that matters.

Which is a bold move. That's a boss move.

Austen negotiates her own contract.

She won't sell her copyright.

Instead, she will take on the cost of printing Emma herself.

Austen is thinking about the profit from her work and how that could function as

a pension for the Austen women.

So she's thinking about the long-term gain.

As part of this deal, Austen also pays for a second print run of Mansfield

Park.

She believes it never got the attention it deserved.

It's a huge risk, but if it comes off, she will keep 90% of the profit.

She's unafraid to meet this legendary John Murray and face him

out and advocate for herself.

She is ahead of her time, because men always make the deals.

And it's still, you know, if you look at the movie industry now, it's still hard

as a woman to stand up for yourself.

Austin is the first female novelist on Murray's book.

It's a real sign of her wanting to take back some of the control that she's not

had for most of her life.

With this new deal, Austin accepts... that she has no control over when Murray

will send the book to the printers.

It must have felt fantastic, but, you know, you can't actually make a

publisher do anything.

That is infuriating, because I've had delays in publishing that I've just...

Why are there delays? Why isn't it being published? You have no control over

that. With the lawsuit hanging over them, it is an absolute imperative for

her at this point that the process of printing... It happens as quickly as

possible.

Then, an unexpected opportunity falls into Austen's lap.

As in so many cases in Jane's life, an incident of misfortune turns into

something quite amazing.

It turns out that Henry's doctor is also the official physician to the Prince

Regent.

Jane hears at first hand how her novels are.

beloved by the Prince Regent, how he has multiple copies of them in his different

residences.

Dr Bailey makes a tempting suggestion.

He offers to arrange a date for Austen to have a private tour of the Prince

Regent's library, one of the most luxurious libraries in the country.

This is a slightly complicated coincidence because Jane herself is a

great enemy of the Prince Regent.

He's spending money and he's gluttonous.

And there are these caricatures in the shop windows showing him with

prostitutes.

He's made a figure of mockery and Jonathan certainly doesn't like him.

No doubt Jane will have been torn over what to do.

Jane must stand her moral ground or put her loathing of the Prince Regent aside.

for this once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.

This is a compromised invitation, but he's a pragmatist.

He would have been crazy not to do this.

You know, it's not the last time or first time that she's had to suck it up.

13th November, 1815.

Austen arrives at Carlton House, the Prince Regent's home.

A glittering palace at the heart of decadent London, the prince has spent

millions on its renovation, running up huge debt.

In 1811, he spent over £10 million in today's money on just one party,

as his people starved.

This is Jane Austen very far removed from Chorching Cottage. We're suddenly

seeing her in exalted circles.

Surely she's feeling to herself, I'm really making it.

She is greeted by James Stanier Clarke, the Prince Regent's personal librarian.

During the visit, Clarke makes an offer of a lifetime.

Why doesn't Austen dedicate her next novel to the Prince?

Jane is not 100% sure what to do with it.

She feels her principal's distrust of the Prince Regent kicking in.

But she might be able to use that dedication to the Prince Regent as

leverage almost against her publisher in order to get Emma published more

quickly.

Adding a dedication to the Prince Regent will drive the sales she needs.

Austen sees this as a unique...

marketing opportunity for Emma. It's just huge. This is a deal-breaker in

terms of her visibility as a writer.

Austin accepts the offer to force the hand of her publisher, Murray.

She rolls the dice and decides to go with it, thinking that I have had to

fight tooth and nail to get to where I am.

This time she's going to make the system work for her rather than against her.

She has been writing for 20 years about manoeuvring women, and here is Austen

performing a successful manoeuvre with the most fashionable publisher in

London.

Austen's plan worked.

Murray prints 2,000 copies of Emma, rather than the usual print run of 500.

Emma is split up and sold in volumes, as all novels are at the time.

Whilst driving greater profits, it also enables people to share and read the

novel at the same time.

On the 20th of December, 1815, Austen gifts the Prince Regent three

specially bound volumes of Emma.

This is Jane Austen's crowning moment.

The result of years of hard work and determination.

Emma is a blockbuster and flies off the shelves.

She's got a publisher who believes in her. She's got a stonking banger of a

book that's hitting the shelves and it's got a royal endorsement.

After so many setbacks, being scammed by publishers, being dismissed and

rejected.

She must feel amazing because also she's had a really integral part in

engineering its success.

One of the keys to John Murray's flourishing business is a new marketing

tool, the book review, where he pays famous authors to plug his latest books.

Murray asks his friend Walter Scott to write a piece on Emma and Austen's

previous works.

Walter Scott writes an extraordinarily perceptive, a real rocket boost of a

review of Emma.

To get good reviews is great.

It's really, it's great and those are moments you have to really savour. But

when the review is showed to Jane Austen, however...

This is not quite good enough.

The review lists Austen's previous novels, but fails to mention her most

personal work, Mansfield Park, which she had just paid to re-release.

It stings, Austen. You can't actually hear the praise, because that omission

is quite devastating to her.

And she immediately sends off a letter of complaint to her publisher saying,

how come someone so clever can fail to notice Mansfield Park?

A great number of novelists have an orphan child.

And the orphan child is the novel that came out that no one seemed to want.

I have a novel called The Story of the Night. And you haven't heard of it. No

one's heard of it because no one's read it. And yet I was pretty sure even the

eve of its coming out that I was going to do all these things.

And it simply shrunk, it simply disappeared.

I thought, if only people could read this book, they would love it.

But no, no, the answer to that is no.

But Austin's personal grievances are soon overshadowed.

In 1815, the peace with France collapses and fighting resumes at the Battle of

Waterloo.

British forces under the Duke of Wellington finally defeat Napoleon's

army. But Britain's victory comes at great cost to the economy.

The move from a wartime to a peacetime economy is very bouncy.

Well, the first thing with peace is you cut the size of your armed forces.

And the navy, which had had 120,000 men, was cut down to about 30,000 men.

And those men were put out on the streets with very little, ditto the

army. So suddenly there was an extra mass of people wandering around trying

to find jobs and things.

All these things together meant a perfect storm in terms of things going

wrong.

And that caused huge problems with banks going bust, with people losing huge

fortunes, very, very disturbed and disturbing times.

With the war over, Austin's seafaring brothers, Frank and Charles, return

home.

1816 begins as a period of prolonged peace for the first time in a really

long time. And yet, the Austen family are imploding.

Edward Knight's lawsuit is still going ahead over Taunton and Henry Austen's

bank has gone bankrupt.

The impact is huge because most of the family have invested in his bank and...

They all lose money.

The collapse of Henry's bank is catastrophic for the family.

Edward loses £2 million in today's money, and Frank and Henry can no longer

afford their small annual contribution to the Austin women.

The Austin women are at the behest of the men in their lives who control the

purse strings.

They have no power to extricate themselves from the financial place that

they find themselves.

Austin at least feels, well, hooray, I've got a stonking paycheck on the wing

because Emma has done spectacularly well.

Twelve months after Emma is published, Murray finally sends Austin her first

paycheck.

Austin receives a paltry £38.

That's just £3,800 today.

The second edition of Mansfield Park, which Murray has published at the same

time as Emma, has not been a success.

He had large numbers of copies still on his hands, and he's had to pulp them.

And Jane has still had to pay for the costs of producing those pulped volumes.

The failure of Mansfield Park has wiped out the profits from Emma, which would

have totalled approximately £40,000 today.

Had Austen not included Mansfield Park in that contract, Austen and her

sister and her mum would be safe for some years to come, regardless of their

brother's finances, and this costs her dearly.

She's made the wrong choice. She's backed the wrong horse.

Her great love of her child Mansfield Park has betrayed her

once again into making a commercial mistake.

This is a very dark time, and it really begins to tell on Jane.

The Austins are now in dire financial straits.

One brother is bankrupt, another faces a multi-million pound lawsuit, and Jane's

earnings have been swallowed up.

Meanwhile, Jane, aged 40, works on a new novel about the passage of time and

life's regrets.

What she does is she writes her way out of it. That's her life's line.

If I don't write, I feel weird.

but the act of doing it is really important.

In Persuasion, she's not thinking about business or her audience. She's just

writing from the heart.

The novel follows the story of Anne Elliot, who is persuaded to break off an

engagement to a young naval officer of lower social status, Captain Wentworth.

Wentworth is left heartbroken.

We have an older Austen writing about an older heroine who is herself looking

back on her life and is herself in a pensive state.

She's thinking about the choices that she's made in her life and that seeps

right into the narrative.

Despite him being away at sea for many years, Anne is still in love with

Wentworth.

And regrets not following her heart.

It's been seven years.

Eight.

You couldn't possibly still feel... I do.

Frederick Wentworth was the only person, save you and my mother, whoever really

saw me.

And understood me.

And loved me.

Anne and Wentworth meet again when he returns from the Napoleonic Wars a hero.

In a key scene when Anne is playing with her nephews, Wentworth removes a

clambering child from her back.

This act of kindness encourages Anne to question whether Wentworth might still

have feelings for her. Boy could have been hurt.

Austin writes his little sturdy hands were unfastened from around her neck.

And he was resolutely borne away before she knew that Captain Wentworth had done

it.

It's a beautifully simple gesture.

Very modern in its simplicity, I think.

She is really writing the ideal man here. He's not Darcy.

He's gentle.

He does what a partner should do. He relieves you of your burden.

She's really redefining the sort of male hero of her.

romance fiction in those little moments.

In one of the most moving scenes, Captain Wentworth overhears Anne

debating the differences between men and women.

You look a bit sad, Captain Harville.

In this conversation, Anne boldly declares it is women who love the

longest. We women do not forget you as soon as you forget us.

The only privilege I claim for my sex is that of loving longest.

Loving even when hope is gone.

Loving because you don't have a choice.

During this scene, Captain Wentworth remains completely silent.

It's two people talking, a third person listening, and the reader overseeing all

of this.

Wentworth is silent. Now, his silence is so active. It's so filled with things.

But you realize...

How much is listening?

Moved by what he is hearing, Wentworth writes Anne a letter, confessing he has

loved her all along.

The scratching of that pen has an enormous power in this moment.

The fact that he doesn't go to her to say it, he writes to her.

It's a letter which begins with these wonderful words.

I can listen no longer in silence.

I can listen no longer in silence.

Anne, you pierce my soul.

Dare not say that man forgets sooner than woman, that his love has an earlier

death.

I am half agony, half hope.

Tell me not that I am too late.

that such precious feelings are gone forever.

I offer myself to you again with a heart even more your own than when you almost

broke it eight years and a half ago.

You alone have brought me to Bath, for you alone I think and plan.

But of course you have not seen this, how could you?

Because your love has not lasted as long as mine.

I have loved no one but you.

You pierced my soul.

Half agony, half hope. This is almost a religious sound she's making.

I think it's the only time where one of her men actually speaks seriously from

the self, from a part that's normally held at bay or withheld.

And obviously he writes it rather than speaks it, because it would sound like

weakness.

But when you write this, you can see what's always at the heart of everything

she does, the inner life.

Here, you can really feel the simple, naked longing.

I mean, one of the great love letters in all literature.

Everyone who's loved and lost reads that and kindles the hope that the person

that they've...

loved all their life, might come to them at the end of it and say, I never forgot

you. I'm still here.

In the end, Anne gets a second chance at happiness.

She follows her heart, rejecting the life her family wanted for her.

Overcome with emotion, they confess their love.

One of the most exhilarating things I think about that novel is the way Anne

Elliot doesn't take fixity.

She doesn't take those nice, stolid English country houses that her other

heroines inherit or marry into. She chooses mobility, risk,

danger, and she chooses a completely different path for

herself, just like Jane Austen.

It was a sign that a woman that age, beyond what was considered marriageable

age. could actually find happiness.

I think it's a metaphor for Jane Austen's own life.

I doubt very much whether Jane Austen is thinking, oh, I might still meet

someone. I'm not going to be that person. I'm not going to be a married

woman. I am going to be a spinster, but I am going to make something of that.

There's no sense in her letters whatsoever that this is a woman who's

got any regrets, who's looking back and saying, wish I'd got married, wish I'd

had children, did I make the wrong decision?

It just doesn't feel like any of that.

In July 1816, as Austen writes the final chapters, she begins to feel

unwell.

I think reading the final chapters of Persuasion, it's hard to avoid

reflecting on the fortitude.

that Austen had to marshal to produce that perfect, that perfectly hopeful

resolution at a point where she herself was increasingly in physical pain.

Persuasion is the only complete Austen novel that has a surviving alternate

ending. It shows rushed scrawls and crossings out.

I mean, part of the problem of writing a novel is that you imagine an ending.

But then you put all the detail you're working on, you're working with so much

detail that when it comes to the moment you've imagined, it's not right.

And you need to go over and over and adding and adding and adding just to see

if there's any way you could bring this down naturally.

The only person who can judge it is you.

To have a document that shows exactly the process of revision, of rewriting.

of struggling for the perfect resolution of that narrative, is very precious

indeed.

We can see the process of a novelist who is entering a phase of

late mastery.

Aged just 41, Jane is at the height of her power.

In Persuasion, she has written what is widely believed to be her greatest work.

But her sickness has worsened. She is suffering from backaches and fainting

spells.

We do not know what illness Jane has. It is likely a form of tuberculosis.

Jane chooses to lay herself across three wooden chairs, saving the sofa for her

elderly mother.

I think this tells us an enormous amount about looking after...

the women in her family, and of always being the provider and the self

-sacrificer.

But Austen's mind is as active as ever.

She isn't slowing down, isn't stopping.

She's still got things to say.

Drawing on her experience of illness, she begins a new novel.

Here, and in great pain, she begins a new literary adventure.

But she's writing against the clock.

She's doing the only thing she knows, which is write. She's dying. She's going

to write about death.

And she's going to do it brilliantly, because she's got one last one in her.

In Sanditon, Austin creates a drama set in a fictional seaside resort.

The enthusiastic Mr Parker is keen to convince everyone of the town's healing

powers.

Sea air.

Better than any medicine or tonic. And there, there is the theatre.

Yes, the theatre.

Unlike Austen's previous novels, which focus on a single heroine, Sanditon

features a collection of characters and is written much like a sitcom.

There you are!

Are you surprised to see us?

How do you do?

Arthur and Diana Parker are two of Sanditon's most comical characters.

My sister, Miss Diana Parker, and my brother, Arthur.

We've all been very ill. Almost to death, too.

They constantly complain of illness, while strolling around Sanditon looking

the picture of health.

Only to learn you're on a cliff walk, so we thought we'd be brave and surprise

you. Our lodgings are closed. Come, take tea with us.

And let's all of us, for God's sake, get out of this howling gale.

Come, come.

Austin paints the characters as hypochondriacs who worry incessantly

about the weather.

You see, we were sure of a good fire. Poor Arthur feels the cold, though.

It takes some balls.

To mock a hypochondriac when you're on death's door yourself, it's quite an up

yours, isn't it? But I guess if we know nothing else of Austin, she was quite

bold and forthright.

I don't find the weather chilly at all.

Oh, what a constitution you must have.

In one witty scene, Arthur reveals his secret recipe for a healthy lifestyle.

If I were Billy, his wine would disagree with me. When I've always found it does

my nerves good. Do you know?

The more I drink, the better I feel. Often I wake up in the morning feeling

very groggy, but then after a few glasses of wine, I feel right as rain.

That's quite remarkable, don't you think?

Though I can take a little toast with butter on it. No more than six or seven

slices. Will you let me toast you a slice or two?

Please do.

Everyone uses comedy.

Austin does it. And everyone I've ever worked with who's any good does it. We

all use humour to get us through those tough times.

Do you like to have fun?

She's writing with this child's mind and being playful and being elastic and

being silly and wanting to make people laugh.

And in Sanderson, she's going to go out laughing.

Miss Phyllida Beaufort and Miss Lamb.

Austen also does something revolutionary.

She writes a wealthy black female character, Miss Lamb.

In this adaptation, she makes a glamorous entrance.

The ways in which she's writing black characters into her story, she's way

ahead of even our time, right? We think of things like Bridgerton now as radical

and revolutionary, but there was Jane Austen doing it in her time.

Despite her best efforts, Jane's illness worsens.

And she is forced to abandon the novel.

I just would love to have known what Jane Austen was going to do with this

beautiful, rich, powerful black woman. Where would she take that?

With Jane Austen, of course, there is no decline.

She is cut down at the very peak of her powers.

Austin knows she is dying.

She agrees to be taken to Winchester to see a specialist.

For Jane, the drama of real life gets in the way of the creative drama.

In a letter to a friend, Austin uses her unfailing humor to poke fun at her own

situation.

I am now a very genteel, portable sort of invalid.

If I live to be an old woman, I must expect to wish I had died now.

Blessed in the tenderness of such a family.

Genteel, portable, sort of invalid. Fantastic. Very funny.

You've got to be able to laugh at death.

Treat death in the way that you treat life.

Faith it front on with wit.

It's the only way to do it.

It's what she did.

By the 15th of July, 1817, Austen is being nursed in Winchester by her

sister, Cassandra.

She's in excruciating pain.

Austen dictates a poem to her sister.

24 lines of comic verse.

These are the last words she will ever write.

When once we are buried, you think we are dead.

But behold me immortal.

Set off for your cause.

I'll put you with my reign.

To use the D word, the word.

dead is pretty powerful.

The fact that it was able to come off the tongue of someone who knew that they

were at the end of life.

But Jane always tried to be truthful, didn't she?

And why should it be different on her deathbed?

On the 17th of July, 1817.

Cassandra cradles Jane's head throughout the night.

She remains in that position for six hours.

The detail of her death is incredibly moving.

She's at a sort of crooked angle and Cassandra's holding her head and her

head is bent in an awkward way and so her sister holds her and cares for her

in these last hours of intimacy.

There's a...

sort of very poignant echo of their childhood.

Where sisters care for each other, sisters look out for each other, and

this is its sort of final embodiment.

We have the most poignant end to a life of sibling love, a love that has been

present for 40-plus years.

The unbelievably fitting nature of the fact that it is just Cassandra with her

at her end.

I nursed my sister. I was at my sister's deathbed.

And it's exquisitely powerful.

and very tender.

And I can only think Cassandra would have had that self-same experience.

Cassandra then tends to her sister's body.

It's the last thing that she can do for her sister, who she describes as her

son, the son of her life.

In a letter to their niece, Cassandra writes of Jane's final moments.

I have lost a treasure, such a sister, such a friend. She was the

sun of my life, the gilder of every pleasure, the soother of every sorrow.

And it is as if I had lost a part of myself.

You couldn't get a better epitaph than that, could you?

The gilder of every pleasure, the soother of every sorrow.

That's... That's the most powerful relationship in either of those women's

lives.

Jane Austen is buried in Winchester Cathedral.

Only four people attend her funeral.

Her gravestone makes no mention of her career as a writer.

In her will, Jane leaves almost everything to her sister, including the

rights to all of her work.

I think that's so telling that she doesn't leave it to her brothers.

Because after all, it's Cassandra that's been there with her through thick and

thin, through all the ups and downs that they've had to face, both financially

and privately.

And I think it's right. You know, it's quite a beautiful thing.

25 years after Jane Austen's death, Cassandra burns thousands of Jane's

letters.

Only 161 survive.

It's really seen today as an act of literary vandalism. People are

horrified. How could she do this? Because the letters are so brilliant.

We do not know why Cassandra burnt them, but it is widely believed she did it to

protect Austin's legacy.

It's many, many years later when she's getting old herself that she makes the

decision that I cannot let these letters out into the world.

Jane always speaks the plain truth and Cassandra genuinely didn't want to hurt

the family's feelings.

It cannot have been easy for her to destroy.

the letters that had been a lifeline and really brought her close to her sister.

Aside from her novels, nearly all we know of Austen comes from the letters

Cassandra deemed acceptable enough to save.

If you want to date literary modernity at a particular point, it is 1815-16.

There is writing before Austen and there is writing after Austen. That

achievement is enormous.

The greatest writers in our language, the Brontes, Mary Shelley, Dickens, they

all come on the heels of this huge legacy given to them by Jane Austen.

She did it. She did it before anyone else.

She wasn't concerned with leaving behind money or even children or having a

husband.

She was concerned with leaving her voice.

This is a woman who is leaving the charge in, saying what literally nobody

had said before.

She did what she wanted to do.

She made a career as a novelist and made money out of it. And her work's still

being copied and stolen by people like me.

I feel I know her.

And considering she was born 250 years ago, it's like breaking bread with the

dead, isn't it?

Shaking hands across the centuries.

Gossiping. What's not to like?

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.