Jane Austen (Radio Edit)

0:01Hello and welcome to You're Dead To Me, the Radio 4 comedy podcast that takes history seriously. My name is Greg Jenner. I'm a public historian, author and broadcaster. And today we are donning our bonnets, seeking an eligible bachelor, and promenading back to Georgian England to learn all about literary icon Jane Austen for her 250th anniversary year. Happy birthday, Jane! And to help us explore her life with pride but no prejudice, we have two very special guests. In History Corner, she's a historian, curator, author and broadcaster. She's the host of the fantastic BBC Sounds historical true crime podcasts, Lady Killers and Lady Swindlers.

0:36She's the presenter of many wonderful BBC TV documentaries. She's the author of many best-selling books, including, lucky for us, Jane Austen at Home. And you'll remember her from our episode about another literary giant, Agatha Christie. It's Dr Lucy Worsley. Welcome, Lucy. Hello. Thank you for having me. Delighted to have you back. And in Comedy Corner, she's an award-winning actor, writer, sketch comedian and presenter. You will know her from all of the things, including the beloved Smack the Pony, Miranda, Green Wing, Taskmaster, I'm Alan Partridge, Veep, and, of course, the Bridget Jones movie franchise, which is basically Pride and Prejudice.

1:05And you'll definitely remember her from our episode about fairy tales. It's only Sally Phillips. Welcome back to the show, Sally. Hello, Greg. Thank you for having me back. Delighted to have you back. Sally, it's lovely to have you back in. It's lovely to be here. I mean, you're in a BBC sitcom called Austin. Different spelling. It's a lovely show. But it is not an adaptation. No. But you were in Pride and Prejudice, sort of, because Bridget Jones' diary is Pride and Prejudice. Yeah, Bridget Jones's Diary is basically Pride. The first novel is exactly the plot. I think Helen just took the plot of Pride and Prejudice and took her characters from the newspaper columns and put them into that structure.

1:44But that's what you always get told to do by movie executives. So they say there are books written about it, that all rom-coms have to be Pride and Prejudice. And consequently, I have developed a slight fear and phobia of Jane Austen. Oh, no! So, I mean, she is... When I read the books, I do absolutely love them. And she's also the sort of grandmother of a particular strain of female comedy that you sort of trace the line from her through E.M. Delafield, Helen Fielding, and then even on to Fleabag, I think this kind of ironic... Interesting. ...female protagonist. And you also, of course, were in Pride and Prejudice and Zombies.

2:23I was, and that was fascinating. So I was Mrs. Bennett in Pride, Prejudice and Zombies. Yeah, it was interesting to play Mrs Bennet in that context, because if there's a zombie apocalypse, you genuinely do want to keep your daughters safe in quite an expensive stately home with high walls. It's a lovely film. It's not necessarily a family-friendly film. I think it's the best Austen adaptation there's ever been, Greg. So, what do you know?

2:52This is the So What Do You Know, where I have a go at guessing what you, our lovely listener, might know about today's subject. and no guessing needed, it's Jane Austen. You know who she is. All six of her classic novels have been adapted for the screen multiple times. Maybe you swooned over a wet Colin Firth in BBC's Pride and Prejudice or you sighed over Keira Knightley and the famous Matthew McFadden hand flex. Perhaps you melted over Alan Rickman and Kate Winslet in Sense and Sensibility or rooted for Anya Taylor-Joy in Emma or Dakota Johnson in Persuasion or did you giggle and my personal fave, love and friendship with the brilliantly funny Kate Beckinsale.

3:23And of course, Jane Austen's life has also been dramatised in films like Becoming Jane and the recent BBC TV series Miss Austen. But was Austen's life anything like her novels? And how soon is too soon to break off an engagement? Let's find out. Sally, I'll start with you, see what the levels are. What sort of family... Low, low, Greg. What sort of family and class position do you think baby Jane was born into? I know her parents ran a school for boys. So she was surrounded with boys. So what does that make? Well, teachers or like parson kind of level? OK, so sort of middle class. I don't know what that is.

4:03Is that middle class? Yeah, middle class. Not aristocrats anyway. Not aristocrats. But they had some wealthy relations. I think that's a pretty good summary. Lucy, was Jane Austen ostentatiously wealthy at birth? Well, she belonged to this level in society that's called the pseudo-gentry. I love this term. It means that you want to belong to the landed gentry, but you don't actually have any land. So there's quite a lot of make-do and mend and keeping up appearances at this level in society. And like desperate longing for servants. Yes. Oh, this is very... Carriages. Sort of high-sint bouquet, is it?

4:37It's very... Yes, there's a bit of that going on. Right. And her dad was a rector, as you say, so he had money from a parish, but it was a rural parish, which didn't give him enough money to live in the style of a gentleman, which is what he wanted. So he had side hustles. He ran a school from the house. This is George, is it? George, Mr George Austin. And they also ran a farm. Let's talk about the siblings, because you said lots of boys running around. The boys are brothers. Jane has many siblings. She's got six brothers. Imagine that. And a sister. And it seems like part of the reason that she became a writer was to make jokes to entertain them all.

5:20There's a lot of children to be occupied. in this life. So the mother was Cassandra. So Jane's sister is called Cassandra and named after the mother. Is that right? Yes. And the father, George, had a bit of a reputation to Sally. He was known as the handsome proctor. Oh. So proctor. Sounds like he's like... It was from when he was studying at college. A proctor is a sort of university position and he was famous for his lovely hair. And when he got older he had this lovely head of white, silky hair. Leonine. He's Michael Hesseltine, basically. Lucy, tell us more about the childhood of Jane. It's a sort of agricultural childhood.

5:56We imagine her with quill in hand, but actually she's growing up on a farm. She's more likely shoveled in hand, sort of scooping up manure. She had to do actual work. We know that she had to help out in the dairy when they were shorthanded. She knows quite a lot about cooking and that sort of thing. Yes, it's not all balls and tea parties. What else do we imagine in terms of her education, Sally? I have no idea whether girls went to school. I imagine you had governesses. Did she have her own governess or did she have no education? It's interesting, this whole question. Her dad was quite progressive and he would let Jane and her sister read all of the books in the house, which included all sorts of trash.

6:35But he didn't let them study Latin and Greek with the male pupils for the very good reason that that would prevent them from ever getting married. Because once you could speak Latin and Greek, you were unmarriageable. But sometimes the girls were sent away for short periods at boarding school. This was never a great success. They had to leave the school because there wasn't enough money to pay the bill. And the schools that they went to were quite informal. And they did have lessons in girlish things like history and needlework and drawing and music and dancing. And they also would read trashy magazines together.

7:08It's been suggested that Jane got her sort of interest in writing not from the serious tomes by Fielding and Richardson and so on in her father's library. But perhaps just as much by reading the trashy magazines that the girls shared in the dormitory at the Abbey School. So 1790s, 1780s, she's in boarding school. And what is a trashy magazine then? Ghost stories, romances, pirates, that sort of thing. The sort of thing that Jane's own novels would be the complete antidote to in due course. So Jane started writing when she was 12. Sally, when did you find out you were funny? I think people were laughing at me.

7:46about that age I started writing stupid poems and things to make 11 or 12 that sort of age yeah yeah yeah well I suppose I started writing little plays for the family this is exactly the same this is it yeah I'm identical to Jane Austen you aren't the Jane Austen of your era I wish I wish I wish but um yes I started doing that plays for the parents and friends getting my brothers to They dress up as things, dressing up in mother's old clothes and putting football socks on our hands and pretending to be cats and doing Aladdin. I mean, that's almost exactly the Jane Austen story. It is, is it? They put on plays in the barn at Steventon.

8:25Wow. So tell us more about some of these spoofs then. Are they, is it in-jokes or is it sort of broader genre parody? The thing that I find so attractive about her juvenilia, her early short stories, is just how badly people behave in them. There's quite a lot of violence and people going mad and running amok. My favourite of the Austen films is Love and Friendship. And she wrote that at 15. Yes, it's not like one of the standard six novels, but it's an early... It's a novella, isn't it? It's very short. When did we get our first one of the classic six novels that people have probably read? Well, while she was still living at Steventon, so by the time she was 25, she'd already drafted the first three, the ones that would end up as Sense and Sensibility, Pride and Prejudice and Northanger Abbey.

9:16But they were described in her lifetime as gradual productions because they were produced so gradually. There would be many, many drafts and refinements. Oh, really? It's extraordinary to think that the bones of Pride and Prejudice were down there on the page when she was about 21. The one that would become known as Sense and Sensibility, you can see what a journey it went on because it was originally written in the form of letters between Eleanor and Marianne. It was an epistulary novel. Was that quite common at the time? It was. That's Dracula, isn't it? It was a well-known format. But, well, it limits you, doesn't it?

9:48It limits what can happen, really, if you've got to write to somebody else to describe it. Yes. Let's turn on to Pride and Prejudice because that's her most beloved novel. It's Truth Universally Acknowledged. Can we talk about Pride and Prejudice, how Jane created it, and how did she feel about it? Was she proud of it? Was it her favourite book? Was it her favourite book? I'm not sure that we know that. She loved Lizzie, didn't she? Yes. She was very proud of her Lizzie, calling her as delightful a creature as ever appeared in print. But in the world of the Georgians, Lizzie was actually a bit in your face.

10:24She seems recognisably modern in some of her attitudes, but it was quite shocking at the time. This was definitely a sort of a bold move to make such a sparkling, feisty heroine. And there's also some very snobby people in it, like Mr Darcy and Lady Catherine de Burr. And I think part of the background of this is that one of Jane's brothers had been adopted by richer relatives. And he'd actually gone into the proper landed gentry. And when Jane went to visit him in his new home, in his new luxury lifestyle, She felt a bit like an outsider. Oh, really? And being an outsider is definitely part of Lizzie Bennet's sort of core, isn't it?

11:06Pride and Prejudice was offered to a publisher, not by Jane, but by her father. I thought it was her brother. Her brother does a different book, her brother. Her father, he's sort of the proxy here. So Jane wasn't even allowed to go to the publishing meeting and say, I've written this book. It's the dad. We don't even know if Jane knew that he'd sent it off to the publisher. Yeah, we don't know that for a fact. But he got a pretty sharp refusal. No thanks. Oh, God, imagine being that guy. He turned down Pride and Prejudice. So Austen's third novel was written in her early 20s. That is Northanger Abbey, which has got a fantastic Gothic title.

11:40You can feel the moon is dark and the clouds are coming in and the owl is hooting. It's not her best-known novel, but it was her first success in terms of publishing. It's her technical debut in terms of how the publishing world saw her. It was her first novel that was successful in that a publisher actually bought it for£10. Oh! £10. Ka-ching! What is that in today's money? £10, no. It was not a lot. No. The only money that she had at that time was£20 a year pocket money that her dad gave her. And if she had been a governess, she'd have earned£35 a year. Right. So not a king's ransom. So it's a three-month salary, maybe.

12:21It's a bit of money. Yeah, and it's the first money she'd ever earned. Sure, but this is 1798-99 that she wrote it, but it doesn't come out then. For ages, for ages. Northanger Abbey was written in 1798-99, but it wasn't published until after her death in 1817 in a double volume with Persuasion. In her life, her brothers, her father are doing the negotiations for her. Why is this, Lucy? I mean, women have been writing novels for decades by this point. Yes, but it's a dirty business. It's a dirty business to be a lady, literally, to be a lady novelist. And it is possible there are role models like Francis Burney.

13:01Yeah. But often they had to present themselves as doing it because their husband had died or because their children were starving. You needed a really strong motive to do it. To do it as a member of the pseudo-gentry was just completely socially inappropriate. So that's why she used pseudonyms to correspond with her publishers. But she never published as Jane Austen. When she was alive, her name wasn't on the cover of her books. It was by a lady. A lady. By a lady. Jane Austen, by this point, had written a few things. The thing that's a constant with Jane Austen always ends with a happy ending.

13:34Does that mean she was drawing on happiness in her own life? Or is that simply the form that you had to do as a novelist? You've got to define happiness. All right. Because, you know... Marriage. Marriage at the end. It's exactly. In the stories, the marriage plot unfolds. There's always a happy ending in that she gets together with the hero and lives a comfortable life. There's also an element of happiness and completion in the fact that the heroine gets somewhere to live because all of them have nearly all of them have some kind of problem with their home. They've been chucked out of it. They've got no money.

14:08They've got no financial security. and it's just not clear whether Jane herself was, as generations have believed her to be, disappointed in love. I mean, because she was a spinster and because she died a spinster, people have thought, oh, well, she must have been, you know, kind of sad and dried up and lonely and screwed up, but she actually made decisions actively not to marry. All right, so she didn't marry, but she did nearly marry Sally. Do you know this story? No. All right, there was an engagement, Lucy, the gentleman in question, 1802, in sweeps, the wonderfully named... Mr Harris Big Wither.

14:51I know it's not funny to laugh at people's names, but that is a bit of a funny name. It's quite funny. That is hilarious. Harris Big Wither. Mr Harris Big Wither, that was never going to work. No, could you imagine... Can you imagine the wedding-like disappointment of Mr Big Wither? And the front cover of Pride and Prejudice, you know, written by Jane Bigwither. It just doesn't work, does it? No. Come on. So tell me about Mr Harris' Bigwither. Well, I mean, what is there to say, Lucy? It's a brief fling, let's put it that way. In fact, do you want to... Is he in Bath? Is she in Bath by 1802? Not quite yet in Bath, I don't think.

15:23She was visiting his sisters, who were good friends of her. Oh, OK. And he proposed and she said yes. And he came with a mansion and a fortune. They lived in this lovely house called Many Down Park, his family did. And she said yes until the next morning when she broke it off. She just couldn't go through with it. He was six years younger than her. He was quite physically unimpressive. And, of course, he had a silly name. I'm in there. And did she acknowledge to Cassandra that she just couldn't be called Mrs. Bigwood? No. How did she talk about it to Cassandra? It was a big drama. It was a big drama because the stakes were so high.

16:03because as well as Jane getting a home for the rest of her life and a fortune, everybody would get a home. Cassandra could come and stay. Exactly. And she was really good friends with his sisters. There was so much going for it, except for the man himself. Fascinating. So what did she say about it? She didn't say anything. No, no. She just broke it off. The 24-hour cooling off period, she just went, yep, no, sorry, sorry, no. Just can't do it. Just can't do it. But I think there's not an accident in the timing of this because the night she breaks off the engagement, Just before that, she'd made her first book deal.

16:35Do you think she had the hope, if I can, I will be able to support myself, I'm not going to need to be Mrs Bigwither? I do think that. There's no actual linked evidence for it, but it seems to me psychologically sound that she thought maybe I can make my living in another way. So it's a hinge moment and she never speaks of it again. How very discreet of her. Yes, she's a classy lady. Let's talk about her 20s, her late 20s, her early 30s. The family does move to Bath in 1801. Bath has been dining out on that ever since. But is it or is it not true that she hated Bath? There's quite a lot of evidence that you can build up to suggest that no, she had a terrible time there.

17:12Really? OK. There's another school of thought which is that the evidence is kind of hints and allusions. And is that sponsored by Bath tourism?

17:24in 1801 her father decides to move the family to bath basically because he knows he needs to get husbands for his daughters there's nothing for them to live on after he's died that's the marriage market that's the marriage market and jane is not really into this husband hunting thing and is no good at it and then when he dies the family begin so this is jane her sister and a mom they start a new life as poor relations they've got no money they have to live on handouts from jane's brothers One of the brothers says, I've got a plan. I've just got married. I'm a naval captain. I'm going to be away at sea.

17:54I'll rent a house for my mother, my sisters and my wife in Southampton. It turns out that Frank's new wife didn't want to live with her mother-in-law. Right. And this sort of fell apart as a plan and they couldn't afford the rent. And then Jane's other brother, Edward, the one who got adopted by the rich people, he comes up with a better plan because he owns a house back in Hampshire and he lets his mother and sisters live there without any rent for the rest of the... And this is Chawton. For the rest of their lives. So we do finally get sort of literary success for Jane. In 1811, Sense and Sensibility was published as the A-Lady.

18:28A-Lady publishes it. It sells well. She retains the copyright. That's good because she gets royalties. Then 1813, Pride and Prejudice. She sells the copyright. Yes. Lucy. Really silly move. Terrible error. So it was the publisher John Murray who got all of the cash from what turned out to be a big smash hit. So she just got paid once and that's it. No royalties ever. So one of the biggest novels of all time. Yeah. Ah, that's annoying. And then nothing published under her name until after her death. Emma was published before. Oh, it was Emma published, OK. And so was Mansfield Park. But not under her name.

19:01No, not under her name. So always a lady. Yeah. Book writing, Sally. Book writing. She's committed to her art. Do you know the next novel? So we've had Pride and Prejudice, Sense and Sensibility, Northanger Abbey. Is the next one Persuasion? No, it's Mansfield Park, 1814. Again, about a poor relation, Fanny Price, who goes to live with a wealthier family. It feels familiar, Lucy. I think people are really interested in this one now because of the possible critique of transatlantic slavery that's kind of hidden within it. The Bertram family have made their money in the New World. Yes, they have a plantation.

19:41Yeah, it's very distasteful. And the head of the family goes off and he visits this plantation and then he comes back again. And it's only poor little Fanny, who's shy as anything, who dares to ask him what's going on over there. Oh, OK. And there's this idea that Mansfield Park, this big grand house, is in fact corrupt. The people there are not good people. And like you were saying, it's Fanny who's the most humble character, who actually has the sort of moral purity and self-worth to clean the whole stable out, really, and make everybody behave better. Yeah. So we have Emma, then published in 1815.

20:17That's your favourite novel of the six, Lucy. We need to talk about Persuasion and obviously Sanditon, because sadly Jane became very ill in 1815, 16, and she was writing Persuasion, and she never finished Sanditon, Lucy. This is heartbreaking, because it was... Jane really loved going on holiday to the seaside. This was considered to be a place of health and happiness for her and for all Georgians. And Sanditon is a seaside romance and she wrote it when she was really ill and in bed and in the little fragment that survives. It's written in her sort of pencil and you can tell that she's ill, but she's clearly imagining a world where she's healthy and happy and by the sea.

20:56She's never going to get there. That's very sad. She died on the 18th of July, 1817. She was only 41 And she left everything to Cassandra. Yes, she did. Persuasion was published posthumously then, 1817. So straight, just after her death, the book comes out. Yes, her family just flogged everything. They said, OK, right, let's move on, sell the copyrights, we'll take the£500. And then Henry got the copyright back for Northanger Abbey. Yeah, and published it. OK, so it's an extraordinary life, Sally. It's tragic in some ways. It is sad, isn't it? It is sad. But what amazing books. One could view Austen's stories as sort of genteel bonnet fests.

21:36But she's living through an era of tremendous historical turmoil. You've got the French Revolution, the anti-Catholic Gordon riots, the Napoleonic Wars, the Abolition of Slavery Act. We have the changing rising of the classes, the Industrial Revolution. We have huge turbulence. Britain nearly goes into sort of revolution a couple of times. But critics have accused her of writing small books in a big time. Lucy, fair? Well, I don't think it is. This is a traditional criticism and you can read them as sort of defences of the existing order because things get resolved at the end. And there's a lot of concern about who's going to act properly and look after the countryside and the community.

22:15But if you look for the details of the great changes of her time, they're there. They're just done in a feminine, domestic way. One example I like is that in Pride and Prejudice, the silly girls, Kitty and Lydia, they go into the town and they come home and they say, oh, we had a great day. We went to a hat shop and we saw a soldier being flogged and then we had tea. And they come home and they say this really shocking thing. They saw someone being flogged in the street of their local town. And a soldier. But because they're silly girls, it's used to express their character. They're too silly to see what's happening.

22:49So that's how the Napoleonic War is present in Jane Austen in a subtle feminine way. I find it fascinating. Lucy was telling me just before we started recording that Winston Churchill said Jane Austen's books got him through the Second World War. I mean, there's a deep comfort and optimism, isn't there? Yeah. The Nuance Window!

23:13Time now for The Nuance Window. This is where Sally and I sit quietly and sip tea in the drawing room for two minutes, while Lucy sits at the pianoforte to serenade us with something we need to know about Jane Austen. My stopwatch is ready. You have two minutes, Lucy. Take it away. A lot of people have got the idea that Jane Austen was some kind of little old lady living in a cottage in the countryside, producing masterpieces kind of by accident. And this is what her family want us to think, because it was socially inappropriate for her to be this kind of ambitious, professionally successful female writer.