Jane Austen: the life of a Regency literary icon

This BBC podcast is supported by ads outside the UK.

When teams create without guardrails, mistakes slip through, but not with Adobe Express, the quick and easy app to create on-brand content.

Brand kits and lock templates make following design guidelines a no-brainer for HR sales and marketing teams.

And commercially safe AI, powered by Firefly, lets them create confidently so your brand always shows up polished, protected, and consistent everywhere.

Learn more at adobe.com slash go slash express.

A happy place comes in many colors.

Whatever your color, bring happiness home with CertaPro Painters.

Get started today at Certapro.com.

Each Certipro Painters business is independently owned and operated.

Contractor license and registration information is available at Certapro.com.

Hello, Greg here.

Just a reminder before we get going that episodes of You're Dead to Me are released on Fridays wherever you get your podcasts.

But if you're in the UK, you can listen to the latest episodes 28 days earlier than anywhere else, first on BBC Sounds.

Hello 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 Austin 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.

She'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.

And 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 are in Pride and Prejudice, sort of, because Bridget Jones's diary is Pride and Prejudice?

Yeah, Bridget Jones' Diary is basically Pride and Prejudice.

The first novel is exactly the plot.

I think Helen just took the plot Pride and Prejudice and took her characters from the newspaper columns and put them into that structure.

But 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.

A bit like Virginia Woolf, I was a bit frightened of her as well.

But when you read them, I absolutely love them.

I absolutely love them when I've read them.

The character is a second hand, she's hilarious, 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 Fleeberg, I think this kind of ironic

female protagonist.

And you also, of course, were in Pride and Prejudice and Zombies.

I was, now that was fascinating.

So I was Mrs.

Bennett in Pride, Prejudice and Zombies.

Yeah, it was interesting to play Mrs.

Bennett 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 Austin adaptation it's ever been, Greg.

So, what do you know?

This 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 Kiera Knightley and the famous Matthew McFadden Hand Flex.

Perhaps you melted over Alan Rickman and Kate Winslet in in Sense and Sensibility, or rooted for Anya Taylor Joy in Emma, or Dakota Johnson in Persuasion, or did you giggle at my personal fave, Love and Friendship with the brilliantly funny Kate Beckinsale?

And of course, Jane Austen's life has also been dramatised in films like Becoming Jane and the recent BBC TV series Miss Austin.

But was Austin'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...

What sort of family and class position do you think baby Jane was born into?

I don't know much.

I know her parents ran a school for boys.

So she was surrounded with boys.

So what does that make them?

Well, teachers or parson kind of level?

Okay, so sort of middle class.

I don't know what that is.

Is 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.

Like desperate longing for servants.

Yes.

Oh, it's very

sort of high synth bouquet, is it?

It's very.

Yeah.

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 and a house this is george is it george mr george austin and they also uh ran a farm yeah and we'll get to that later because it's got a charming name so we'll come to that later but let's let's talk about the the siblings because you said lots of boys running around the boys are brothers that's jane 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.

There's a lot of children to be occupied in this life.

But they did run this school with other people.

Other boys living there as well.

Yes, 10, 12 male pupils in the living with them.

Living in the house.

Oh, really?

A lot of kids running around.

So they had 18, she was living with 18 boys, her and Cassandra.

Oh, wow.

That's hardly surprising she didn't marry.

So the mother was Cassandra, and the sister, also Cassandra.

So Jane's sister is called Cassandra named after the mother, is that right?

Yes.

They're in Steventon and Dean.

That's the two.

Who are I, sorry?

Steventon and Dean.

These are small villages in rural Hampshire, which is a super rural county.

Today, we think Range Rovers and country houses, but then there were real sort of travel difficulties.

The roads around Steventon were considered to be particularly bad, particularly muddy.

So it was quite remote, actually, in a way that doesn't, it doesn't seem today.

And the father, George, had a bit of a reputation, Sally.

He was known as the handsome Proctor.

Oh.

So, Proctor, Proctor.

Sounds like he's like.

It was from when he was studying at college.

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.

Oh, really?

Leonine.

He's Michael Hesseltine.

That's an image, isn't it?

So he's tall, he's quite slim, he's got this sort of famous hair, he's got lovely hazel eyes, he's a hot priest.

You mentioned fleabag, Sally.

Here's our hot priest for the episode.

So early life, fairly quiet and uneventful, apart from the 18 boys running around trashing everything.

Strong stench of urine.

Lucy, tell us more about...

the childhood of Jane.

How was she raised and where was she spending her time?

Well, her mother, as was quite normal in the 18th century, sent the babies away to be wet nursed by another woman, a woman who was the wife of the person who ran the Austins farm.

Okay.

To us, that sounds a bit weird.

But you can imagine with all of those children to look after, she needed to spread the load.

And I think it's probably fair to say that this was a Georgian view of child rearing from which we could possibly learn the idea that children are brought up by the wider community, domestic staff, by by extended family, by aunts.

And you'll notice in Jane Austen's novels that the...

It works out very well for Jacob Reese Mogg, that's all.

Yes.

Point payment.

But you'll notice in Jane Austen's novels that the good mothers are not necessarily the biological mothers.

They're people like the aunts and the older female friends.

It's a sort of agricultural childhood, which I wouldn't necessarily have expected of Jane Austen.

Now, we imagine her with quill in hand, but actually she's growing up on a farm.

She's more likely shovel in hand, sort of scooping up manure.

And, you know, she had to do actual work.

We know that she had to help out in the dairy when they were short-handed.

Right.

She knows quite a lot about cooking and that sort of thing.

Yes, it's not all balls and tea parties.

I mean, Sally, can you guess what the farm was called?

It's a charming name for a farm.

What would you call your farm?

What did they, what was on the farm?

Dairy cows.

Dairy cows.

I don't know.

Moo?

House?

I'm just sorry.

It's early in the morning, so I can't think of anything.

Barley, something or other.

I like Moo House.

Moo House.

Moo Park.

It was called Cheesedown.

Cheesedown.

Cheese Down.

Well, I wasn't far off, actually.

I think you were quite good.

Cheesedown's quite charming, isn't it?

I feel that you're both slightly in danger of Disneyfying Austin's.

Which is the danger of seeing the feature films where everything is made rather beautiful and the sun's shining and there's lovely rolling country side.

Yeah, buconic.

It was a bit more nitty-gritty, harder-working, ordinary rural life than

the name suggests.

Okay, so cheese down/slash moohouse.

And 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.

So if they were running a...

I wonder if she was allowed to take part in the schooling with the twelve spare boys or not.

Was she allowed to join in with the boys or did she have her own governess or 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.

But

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.

Particularly, they went to a school called the Abbey School in Reading that's kind of still there.

Yes, yes.

They spent a bit of time there.

And it was run by a lady who'd been on the stage.

Oh, no.

Yes, yes.

And it seems like there was a sort of theatrical atmosphere there that perhaps is one of the ways in which Jane got interested in the stage and performance and plays and acting.

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.

It's been suggested that Jane got her sort of interest in writing not from the serious tombs 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.

What was a trashy magazine in 1820?

When are we talking?

Is this 1830, 1820?

No, no, no, back in the 1780s.

1780s.

Oh, so her first books were 18.

Yeah, I mean, it took her ages to get published.

Yeah.

She was writing them, and then there were decades of being in the wilderness trying to get the book together.

To get it published,

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.

The fact that her father, the hot priest, allowed her into his library.

That's quite rare for this show.

Quite often, we've got 12-year-olds being married off, so at least we've got a progressive father who's allowing his daughter to be educated.

So I'm taking that as a win.

So Jane started writing when she was 12.

Sally, when did you find out you were funny?

I think people were laughing at me.

Now, I used to write a lot of funny.

I mean, about 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 when I was

quite, yeah, I'm identical to Jane Austen.

You are the Jane Austen of your era.

I wish, I wish, I wish.

But yes, I started doing plays for the parents and friends, getting my brothers to dress up as things, and yeah, all of that, 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.

Is it?

They put on plays in the barn at Steventon.

Wow.

So, tell us more about some of these spoofs then.

Are they, you know, what genre are they in?

Are they family spoofs?

Is she taking the mick out of the teacher like Sally was?

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.

One of my favourite stories is called The Beautiful Cassandra.

And Cassandra is 16 years old, and her mother runs a hat shop.

And one day, Cassandra elopes.

Who does she elope with?

Is it a bewitching young gentleman?

No, it's not.

She elopes with a bonnet that she steals from the hat shop.

And they go off into London.

And Cassandra goes to the pastry cook's where she devours six ice creams.

Then, when she's asked to pay, she says, I'm not paying.

She knocks down the pastry cook and she walks away.

And she just runs amok in London for seven hours.

And eventually, she comes home again.

And her mother says, Where have you been?

Welcome home.

And Cassandra is nestled to her mother's bosom.

And the story ends with her saying, Cassandra smiled and whispered to herself, This was a day well spent.

That's amazing.

My favourite of the Austin films is Love and Friendship.

And she wrote that at 15.

Yes,

it's not well known.

It's not like one of the standard six novels, but it's an early novel.

It's a novella, isn't it?

It's very short.

It's a novella, yeah.

So at 15, she's already got herself,

she's written something that is going to stand the test of time, which is extraordinary.

Let's move on to the novels.

If Love and Friendship is a novella, which is a sort of short novel,

when do we get our first, you know, 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.

They were described in her lifetime as gradual productions because they were produced so gradually.

There would be many, many drafts and refinements.

It's extraordinary to think that the bones of Pride and Prejudice were down there on the page when she was about 21.

And was that 1811 or when is that?

When she was born in 1776.

So she was going to work on on it.

75.

75, thank you.

It being birthday, yeah.

Don't come to me for any date, obviously.

So Sense and Sensibility is the first of those novels that she starts on.

Yes, it was originally called Eleanor and Marianne.

And it was originally.

By the 1800s.

I'm bad at maths, but I think that's right.

Yeah.

She'd written the first three, the first three.

By 1805, I think?

Yes.

By the time they moved to Bath,

then they were all written.

And 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?

That was stracular, isn't it?

It was a well-known format.

Well, it limits you, doesn't it?

It limits what can happen, really, if you've got to write to somebody else to describe it.

Yes.

Okay, so Sense and Sensibility is the first novel that she begins work on.

Tell us about the themes.

We've got the sensible one and the passionate one.

It's about that sort of dichotomy.

It was a big big contemporary discussion between the passion and the romance of life versus doing things sensibly and in an orderly fashion.

And what it picks up immediately is the theme of women who don't have enough money to live the lives to which they aspire.

Because it's about disinheritance.

The family have been chucked out of their home.

They've got nowhere to live.

They've got very little upon which to live.

And right there, that's a theme that'll continue through most of her work.

Sally, why do you think Austin still resonates so much now in the 21st century?

These themes something like Pride and Prejudice and Sensibility is calling out good it's so I believe human character is also a work of art and I think it's up to us to make the best of our characters and there's something about Austin that engages with that as a proposal for life, you know who how d how do I try to be the best version of who I am?

How can I try and be a you know an honourable person?

Can I try and be an Elizabeth?

And I think that's what appeals really.

I don't think think it's the I want, you know, Netherfield, was it called Netherfield Hall, Netherfield, Mr.

Bingley?

What's his place called?

Yeah, North Hill,

yeah, exactly.

The big house.

You don't want the country state, you just want

to live a good life.

Yes.

The way in which they do test their characters is coming up against the rules of their world, which are weighted against them as women.

And that's what I think is still true.

Do you, do you, I mean, I think it is, yeah, I suppose it is slightly weighted against us, but really, to no definitely not the same extent.

But you think that we

identify wi it with it because we still know that we are being prevented, we're not given full access or treated equally.

I think that if Jane Austen were alive today she'd find the world disappointingly recognisable.

That's an interesting point.

Let's turn on to Pride and Prejudice because that's her most beloved novel.

Yes, Truth Universally Acknowledged.

That's the one that's been filmed I think the most.

That is the one that people probably say is their favourite.

I I know yours is not Pride and Prejudice, Lucy, yours is Emma.

But 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.

Okay.

But it's 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 to us.

She 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.

Oh.

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 Bennett's sort of core, isn't it?

Pride and Prejudice was offered to a publisher, not by Jane, but by her father.

I thought it's 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

sure.

But he got a pretty sharp refusal.

No thanks.

Oh god, imagine being that guy.

Turn down Pride and Prejudice.

That's like turning down the Beatles, isn't it?

Or, you know, not casting Julie Andrews in My Fair Lady.

It's an absolute blunder.

So Austin's third novel was written in her early 20s.

That is Northanger Abbey,

which has got a fantastic gothic title.

Northanger, it's sort of

like you can feel the kind of the moon is dark and the clouds are coming in and the owl is hooting.

Do you know what it was originally called, Sally?

Twit Two.

What was it called?

I don't know.

It was called Susan.

Susan?

Susan.

Susan.

It's just

Susan.

It's just Susan.

Susan.

Susan.

It's a lovely name, but it's the sort of thing that a man would shout at a wedding when his wife is dancing a bit drunk, you know, at the cousin's wedding.

It just doesn't come up with gothic.

It's not gothic.

No, it was our sort of go-to name in Smack the Pony for an ordinary person.

Ordinary person.

Oh, Susan was it.

Yeah, we did a video game fighter.

So there was

Vixen Bitch Warrior fights Susan

Susan driving stopping off at MS for a sandwich on the way so Lucy Susan is uh is the original title and then Jane thinks hang on this isn't that's not going to sell well there was a fashion for novels with a woman's name as the title like Camilla so she was fitting it into a kind of

all sorts of sort of traditional ones yeah okay but she does she changes the title um 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.

£10.

What is that in today's money?

£10, No.

Not a lot.

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 sort of three months' salary, maybe.

It's sort of, you know, it's a bit of money.

Yes, 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.

Wow.

1817.

1817.

Yeah.

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, to be, literally, to be a lady novelist.

And it is possible there are role models like Frances Burney.

Yeah.

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 or had her dad or her brother do it for her.

It was only later on once she got more confident that she would go in and do the deal herself.

Okay.

She did get to that point.

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.

I suppose a lady, Austin.

I mean, there is a tiny hint there, isn't there?

Maybe.

Once they got the...

The books were sold basically by publishing an ad in the newspaper.

And once they got the ad wrong, and it came out as by Lady A.

Ah.

And this was great because people thought, oh, it's by an aristocrat.

This is good for sales.

Oh, of course, yes, because immediately the moment you say Lady A, people are thinking,

Duchess, Countess.

Lady was that.

Yeah, exactly.

That's nice.

Northanger Abbey, I tend to read it as quite funny, which I think maybe I'm wrong, but it's a sort of

a young woman who's read too many gothic novels and then it sort of goes to visit her boyfriend's dad and she thinks he's a baddie and there's a sort of

hysteria to it that's quite funny.

Oh yes, I think it's great.

It's satirizing gothic fiction basically.

So you get all of the things that happen in gothic fiction, like a spooky mansion, an evil, villainous chap who might do something terrible to you.

And then there's just Bephos the whole time when she realises that the spooky mansion is actually really clean and comfortable.

And there's this famous scene where she opens a spooky chest and she finds in it a laundry list.

Dun-dun-dun-uh.

But there is this kind of serious point to it, which is that bad people exist in the real world.

They do exist in this what's supposed to be to readers the very familiar world of bath society and the marriage market.

And there is real danger there for the heroine.

So she's sort of fearing that her boyfriend's dad is sort of the evil villain, but you know, maybe he is a bit.

He is.

He's a genuinely bad man.

You don't want to hang around with her.

But he's not a gothic villain, is he?

He's not a gothic villain.

He's an everyday villain.

He's a man.

Is the heroine of that called Susan or called, I thought it was called Catherine?

She ends up being called Catherine.

Catherine.

And what I love about Catherine, and this is one of Jane Austen's innovations, is that Catherine is so ordinary.

She's even got slightly greasy hair.

And in Jane Austen's novels, ordinary girls start to feature as heroines because

she takes the world of fiction and she mashes it up with the world of reality so everyone can start to see themselves in these stories.

Fabulous.

Jane Jane Austen by this point had written a few things.

The thing that's a constant with Jane Austen, you know, when ostentatious do their live shows, it always ends with a happy ending.

Does that mean she was drawing on happiness in her own life or is that just simply the form that you have to do as a novelist?

You've got to define happiness.

All right.

Because, you know, marriage, marriage at the end.

Exactly.

In the stories, the marriage plot unfolds, there's always a happy ending in that she gets together with the heroine gets together with the hero and lives 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.

They'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.

She turned down many proposals.

That's right.

So we've got the first is an Irishman, Tom Lefroy.

Well, he never actually proposes, does the tasty Tom LeFroy?

He was a young law student from Dublin, and Jane danced with him at quite a few balls.

And then the reason that we think that there's a proposal's on the cards is because because Jane writes a letter to her sister saying, I'm really looking forward tonight.

I think it's going to happen.

I think he's going to make me an offer.

And then in the next letter, she says, oh no, when you read this, it will all be over.

And you think, oh, her heart's been broken.

But I think what Jane's actually doing in that letter to her sister is yet again spoofing contemporary romantic fiction that's all very mushy and it's about a heroine getting her heart broken.

So I'm not convinced that Tom LaFroy did break Jane's As a holiday fling, perhaps.

Heart.

He was just fodder for comedy, I think.

Aren't we all?

Speak for yourself.

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.

I know it's not funny to laugh at people's names, but that is quite a funny name.

It's quite hilarious.

Harris Bigwither.

Mr.

Harris Bigwither, that was never going to work.

No, can you imagine?

Your marriage, the wedding-like disappointment of Mr.

Bigwither.

And the front cover of Pride and Prejudice, you know, written by Jane Bigwither.

It just doesn't work, does it?

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 say that?

Is he in Bath?

Is she in Bath by 1802?

Not quite yet in Bath, I don't think.

She was visiting his sisters who were good friends of her.

Okay.

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.

Oh, 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 mean, I can't.

And did she acknowledge to Cassandra that she just couldn't be called Mrs.

Bigwood?

No.

No.

Did she?

How did she talk about it to her?

It was a big drama.

It was a big drama because the stakes were so high.

Because, as well as Jane getting a home for the rest of her life and a fortune, exactly her sister could have been a little bit more than a hundred Cassandra can 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.

So what did she say about it?

She didn't say anything.

No, no.

There was just a she just broke it off.

She just, the 24-hour cooling off period, she just went, yep, no, sorry, sorry.

No.

Just can't do it.

Just can't do it.

Sally, would you ever have turned down someone because their surname was so silly?

The surname?

No, I think I could have got over Bigwither.

I think so, yeah.

I might not have changed my name.

Sally, of course, we had the option.

Sally, Bigwither.

I mean, I'm in comedy.

You know what?

That would be...

I would sell out for the rest of my life.

Yeah.

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.

I think she had the hope of

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.

Yes.

And the woman who he did eventually marry

gave him 10 children.

So if Jane had become Mrs.

Harris Bigwither, there would have been no writing career.

She would definitely have been producing babies, not books.

Baby Bigwithers everywhere.

Baby Bigwithers.

And are there any descendants of Mr.

Bigwither?

There must be.

We must track them down.

If you are related to Mr.

Harris Bigwither, please get in touch.

Look what you could have won.

Mr.

Harris Bigwither went on to have 10 children, and five of them were daughters who never married.

And I think that's because they looked at their mum married to their dad and thought, oh, I'm not going there.

A very big wither.

Was not withered.

So it's a hinge moment, and she never speaks of it again.

How very discreet of her.

Yes, she's a classy lady.

With markets changing and living costs rising, finding a reliable place to grow your money matters now more than ever.

With the Wealthfront Cash Account, your uninvested money earns a 3.75% APY, which is higher than the average savings rate.

There are no account fees or minimums.

And you also get free instant withdrawals to eligible accounts 24-7.

So you always have access to your money when you need it.

And when you're ready to invest, you can transfer your cash to one of Wealthfront's expert built portfolios in just minutes.

More than 1 million people already use Wealthfront to save and build long-term wealth with confidence.

Get started today at WealthFront.com.

Cash account offered by Wealthfront Brokerage LLC, member FINRA SIPC.

Wealthfront Brokerage is not a bank.

Annual percentage yield on deposits as of September 26, 2025 is representative, subject to change, and requires no minimum.

The cash account is not a bank account.

Funds are swept to program banks where they earn the variable APY.

Tires matter.

They're the only part of your vehicle that touches the road, and they're responsible for so much.

Acceleration, braking, steering, and handling.

Tread confidently with new tires from Tire Rack.

Whether you're looking for expert recommendations or know exactly what you want, Tire Rack makes it easy.

You'll get fast, free shipping, free road hazard protection, and convenient installation options.

Try mobile installation.

They'll bring your new tires to your home or office and install them on site.

Tire Rack has the best selection of tires from world-class brands, and they don't just sell tires, they test them on the road and on their test track.

Learn how the tires you want tackle evasive maneuvers, drive and stop in the rain, or just handle your everyday commute.

Go to tirerack.com to see their tire test results, tire ratings, and consumer reviews.

And be sure to check out all the current special offers.

That's tirerack.com, tire rack.com, the way tire buying should be.

Did you know you can save up to 70% on the best brands just by shopping at fromrebel.com?

We're talking about strollers, car seats, high chairs, espresso machines, cookware, everything you need for way less.

Here's how it works.

Every single day, Rebel drops thousands of new products on the site for up to 70% off.

It is a constant stream of endless deals from top brands like Uppa Baby, Nuna, Baby Bjorn, Brevel, Nespresso, KitchenAid, Le Cruset, and more.

But you have to act fast because every deal is one of a kind.

So if you see something you love, make sure you add to cart fast.

So stop paying full price when you don't have to.

Whether it's baby gear, kitchen upgrades, or a treasure for your home you didn't know you needed.

Rebel has it for way less, up to 70% less.

Shop from Rebel.com and save big.

So the interesting thing for me, I think, is that Jane had a supportive family.

She makes this big decision and her father goes along with it, her brother goes along with it, her sister goes along with it, everyone goes, okay.

And they're great fans and advocates of her work and, you know, she's allowed to make that.

that decision is extraordinary.

Let's talk about her 20s, her late 20s, her early 30s.

The family does move to Bath, which I think you alluded to, Sally, in 1801.

Bath has been dining out on that ever since.

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.

Really?

Okay.

Yeah, there's another school of thought which is that she loved Bath.

The evidence is kind of hints and allusions.

And is that sponsored by Bath Tourism?

But I mean, in Bath, we see influences in persuasion and Northanger Abbey.

There are, you know, architectural and sort of societal links, we think, to those novels.

There's sooty rain.

She talks about the glaring white stone in Bath.

So the weather of the place can't even be right.

And clearly in Northanger Abbey it's this kind of obstacle course full of pitfalls for the younger

ingenue.

So 1805 her father, the hot priest, lovely George,

they're in Hampshire until 1805.

They are, they're in North America.

No, they've moved to Bath.

In 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 her mum.

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.

I'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 them.

Mrs.

Chawton, really, for the rest of their lives.

What is the house?

Have I confused this with one of her books?

Is there not a house where they go to stay with a cousin who owns a big house and he thinks that if they're sitting tenants, he's likely to get it.

He

does get it and then kicks them out.

Oh, I think you're talking about the Stoning Abbey business.

She did have lots of rich relatives kind of in the fringes of her family, and she would go and stay with them.

She would get her meals there.

And there was kind of lots of hanging around and hoping that somebody who was really rich would give a legacy.

But the trouble is that the mother and the two sisters, they're just so low down the pecking order that they never get anything.

It's amazing that Edward, this rich brother who's got a fortune, doesn't do anything better, sooner for his destitute female relations.

Amen.

So for the period between 1801 and 1804, we know very little about Austin's life because after her death, her sister Cassandra burned her letters.

So something in those letters has been destroyed by a protective sister.

And Sally,

what scandal do you think might have been in those letters?

I mean, we don't know what's in them, so feel free to go crazy with your imagination.

Yeah, maybe it's some love affair.

But I thought she burnt them after she died.

She burnt them.

Yeah, so she died.

So she burnt some of them

from that period.

Does Cassandra think she's going to get married and she doesn't want her husband reading?

Maybe it's Cassandra's responses she's trying to hide.

Well, maybe.

Of all the love affairs, because Cassandra was more sort of open to the boys in the boarding school, wasn't she?

Than Jane, as far as I know.

Is that right?

Have I made that up?

Cassandra did get engaged herself to Tom.

Yeah, and then he died.

A different Tom.

Oh, that's right.

He died because he didn't have any money, so he went, joined the Navy.

This is very good.

He went to sea as a chaplain, and then he died of disease.

He died of disease in the Caribbean.

We don't know what's in those letters, and it's such a specific period, such an interesting three-year period with the letters are burned, and you think, what is she protecting?

So, where is Tom at this point?

Cassandra's dead.

Fidenzata.

Already dead.

No dead.

So, Lucy, have you got any guesses on why that three-year period is censored later?

I'm pretty confident why Cassandra burned the letters.

Oh, okay.

I think it's because they contained horrible, rude, hurtful jokes.

You can see, even in the letters that survive, she's very funny, but you wouldn't necessarily want the person she's being funny about to read that letter.

I'll give you an example.

A lady in the neighbourhood has a miscarriage, Mrs.

Hall, and Jane writes to Cassandra, Poor Mrs.

Hall's lost her baby owing to a fright.

I suppose she happened unawares to look at her husband.

Oh, that's, I mean, that's maggie.

Yeah, okay.

It's funny, but it's in very poor taste.

Really poor taste.

That's a really sharp.

So you think perhaps they're a member of the family.

It's a pister chat.

It's private sister chat.

Private DMs.

Private sister chats.

And we're just going to go in there.

We're going to nuke those so that history doesn't know.

What had she said about their mother?

What had she said about the mean brothers?

I'm pretty sure that's why Cassandra destroyed them.

Okay.

So we do finally get sort of literary success for Jane.

In 1811, Sense and Sensibility was published as the A-Lady.

A lady publishes it.

It sells well.

She retains the copyright.

That's good because she get royalties.

Then 1813, Pride and Prejudice, she 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 really 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.

Oh, was Emma published?

Okay.

And so was Mary.

But not under her name.

Oh, no, not under her name.

So always a lady.

Yeah.

But her brother, which brother is this?

Was always quite happy to sort of say, my sister is a lady.

She wrote that one.

She had this slightly racy brother, Henry, who was involved in a bank scandal and who acted as her literary agent for her.

Okay.

And he was a bit of a blabber mouth, and he started showing off about his clever sister.

And so the secret gradually got out of it.

Was that pride or is that him just sort of using it to pick up chicks?

I think it was pride.

I think that he...

I've got a soft spot for Henry.

Okay, all right, okay, fair enough.

And so, you know, by this point, Jane is now just a professional writer.

That is her her job.

That is what she's doing with her life.

She's not marrying.

She's turned down the big willer.

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 Sensibility, Northanger Abbey.

Is the next one, Persuasion?

No, it's Mansfield Park.

Yeah.

1814.

Again, about a poor relation, Fanny Price, who goes to live with a wealthier family.

It feels familiar, Lucy.

Yes.

Again, it seems like it's the brother Edward who gets adopted by the rich folk.

Something of that situation is coming out in the story.

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.

Yeah, 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.

Okay.

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

you're right that's the kind of that's the moral middle classes isn't it sort of saying you've made your money in the most unethical way possible so we have Emma then published in 1815 that's your favourite novel of the of the sixth Lucy that's the Battle of Waterloo.

It's a big year for British history and French history.

It's about a rich young woman who's playing matchmaker.

And Emma is not a likable heroine for some people.

I mean, you like her.

That's why I like her.

She is dislikable.

She's very full of herself.

When Jane Austen was writing this character, she said, I'm writing a character now who nobody else will like apart from me.

Sally, where do you stand on the Emma debate?

I like Emma.

I like leading ladies with flaws.

Yeah.

I think it's it's important.

And

yes, exactly.

So I I really like Emma.

And you love the way she feels shame.

So when she shames Miss Bates is it Miss Bates she shames at the picnic?

She issues the guests at the picnic with a challenge.

You have to say something witty and then something or one witty thing or three dull things.

And Miss Bates says, Oh, well, you know, I'll say all the dull things at once.

She said, No, but you must limit yourself to three at a time.

And I I sort of get how that could accidentally come out of your mouth

in front front of a crowd.

I mean, I've been on stage and said, I was marched off stage by the late, great Sean Locke once

for having made a joke I won't say what it was because it shouldn't be repeated, a very funny but mean joke.

And in my memory, Sean Locke sort of marched down onto the stage, sort of got me by the collar, marched me outside.

I was about twenty-three

and it was up at the Edinburgh Festival and in the courtyard went, We don't do that, we don't say that.

You know, if you're a good comic, you you can make a joke about anything, and so you don't make it at the expense of other people.

Interesting, what a great man!

A very, very important lesson.

Yeah, but I completely understand how that might happen.

And then Mr.

Knightley comes over and says it was very poorly done, or something.

That was very poorly done, Emma.

And she feels great, great shame.

Yeah,

and

she grows, yeah,

she grows, but she's alive to that.

She doesn't go, oh, what a prat.

She doesn't think, oh, what a prat Mr.

Knightley is.

The way people so often do now, they immediately go on the defensive if somebody points out, holds up a mirror.

Yeah, I love her too.

Yeah, that's very interesting.

We need to talk about persuasion and obviously Sanderton, because sadly, Jane became very ill in 1815, 16, and she was writing persuasion, and she never finished Sanderton, Lucy.

Yes, a lot of people really love persuasion because they sort of graduate to it.

It's often described as having an autumnal quality.

And that's because it's about having a second chance.

The heroine thinks that she's never going to marry, but then her old love comes back.

What's really devastating about it is that all of this happens to her at the age of 28.

Oh, my word.

That's the point at which you're totally on the shelf in Jane Austen's England.

My word.

And then Sanderton, which never even gets finished.

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 Sanderton 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 and she's never going to get there.

It's very sad.

She died on the 18th of July 1817.

She was only 41.

It's really, you know, it's really tragic.

She was buried at Winchester Cathedral.

which suggests a level of prestige.

It was because she had all of these clergymen relatives.

Oh, really?

She was pretty low down in lots of things.

It wasn't the fame, it wasn't the books, it was the family.

It was the fact that she was kind of in the aristocracy of the Hampshire clergy.

Oh I see.

She's local royalty.

And she left everything to Cassandra.

Yes.

Her sister.

Persuasion was published posthumously then, 1817.

So straight just after her death, the book comes out.

Yes, her family just flogged everything.

They said, okay, 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.

Okay.

It's an extraordinary life, Sally.

It's tragic in some ways, but really interesting the way that the family became the kind of keepers of the flame afterwards.

Yes.

Yeah, I don't know what to say.

Yes, it's easy to say.

No, sorry, I'm putting a lot of burden on you there.

I'm finding it hard straight after the death to think of a joke immediately.

Well, you don't have to.

But yeah, no,

it is sad, isn't it?

It is sad.

But what amazing books.

I think that, I mean, you know, as a historian, the thing I'm, I mean, I love her writing.

I love it because it's funny.

You know, maybe that's because I love funny things.

But what's important to sort of get across, I think, is

one could view Austin's stories as sort of genteel bonnet fests with no hint of violence, there's no the jeopardy is about poverty, but there's no like, you know, crime, there's no murder, there's no gothic element to them, there's a parody of the gothic.

But 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.

But 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.

So that's how the Napoleonic War is present in Jane Austen in a subtle, feminine way.

And her brother was in the Navy.

Frank was in the Navy, Charles was in the Navy.

Right, two brothers, okay.

Henry was temporarily in the army.

So the Battle of Waterloo and the Battle of Trafalgar, these sort of landmark military-naval moments of great jeopardy where France, the mortal enemy, might invade.

Her brothers are fighting these wars.

Yes, Frank was too late to turn up to the Battle of Trafalgar, but he was really cheesed off about going somewhere.

He was cheesed down.

He was doing something very important elsewhere.

And I think that Nelson wrote

a lot of people who are in the middle of the shape related.

A Navy related.

Nelson wrote him a letter saying, I'm so sorry you missed the battle, but you did good work anyway.

Oh, no, that's.

That's gutting, isn't it?

At the Millennium Party, my friend was in the toilet at the countdown for the Millennium.

And so his great memory of the kind of the coming of the Millennium was just

flushing, looking for some toilet paper.

And you've already alluded to allusions to slavery, you know, allusions to sort of threat.

You know, we've got these slightly sinister, but we haven't necessarily got violence and turbulence in the stories.

There were no battles happening.

No.

Battles

or protests.

Or in literature, I would argue not.

No, no.

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.

Yeah.

I mean, there's a deep comfort and optimism, isn't there?

Yeah.

But there we go.

So Jane Austen, I think we're all admirers of Jane Austen.

It is a sad life in some ways in that she died so young, but what an extraordinary work.

And I'm quite pleased also that her family were there to support her and lift her up and then celebrate her afterwards.

It's quite nice she didn't have to battle against her loved ones.

And for other.

And I love her friendship with her sister.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah, amazing.

I mean, that's all you need, really, is a really close friend to send mean messages about you and all you two.

The nuance window!

Time 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 wants us to think because it was socially inappropriate for her to be this kind of ambitious, professionally successful female writer.

And when she was writing, she didn't have a proper study, she'd write on this wobbly little table in the corner of the drawing room, which had a squeaky door.

And she would never get this fixed because when the door squeaked, she would know to hide away her paper and to get on with whatever it was that her family wanted her to do.

So, here, kind of in secret, she was producing her late great books, Emma and Mansfield Park and Persuasion.

And to me, these are books with a really serious message, which is that it is so rubbish that women are expected to marry for money.

So kind of in secret, she was in fact writing the books that would blow the locks off the doors that were keeping women like her trapped in this subordinate position in society and in their families.

And that is why I think she's not just an important writer, but also, because of the risks she took to become a writer, an important human being.

I must say this is my interpretation.

And the great thing about Jane Austen is that she's such a rich artist.

You can see what you want to see.

You can make the case that she's a brilliant comedian.

You can make the case that she's defending the social order and she's all about doing the conventional right thing.

Or you can make the case, like I do, that she wouldn't have recognised herself as such, but that she was a feminist.

I loved reading that a letter she wrote to her sister where she talks about going around the galleries in London looking for portraits of the characters in Pride and Prejudice.

That, to me, is just so, because that's sort of what I do preparing a part.

I collect a load of

collect a life and an image and, you know, smells and all of that.

But the idea that she's, these characters live on, they live on for us, but they live on for her too.

And she's telling Cassandra, I haven't been able to find a portrait of Lizzie.

And I'm sure that's because Mr.

Darcy is

so proud of her.

He wouldn't want her portrait up in public.

But I found Jane, the very image of Jane, wearing a yellow dress, which confirms to me that Jane, that yellow was Jane's favourite colour.

It's just fascinating to me that when you do something good, they do carry, these characters do live on, and they do live on with you, you know.

Yeah.

and I love that they lived on with her.

So, what do you know now?

Well, it's time now for the what do you know now.

This is our quickfire quiz for Sally to see how much.

I have so many notes, and I can't read any of them.

My handwriting is just awful.

Extensive notes.

I'm counting eight, nine, ten, ten pages.

Ten pages with the drawing.

And drawings, I think that's very useful.

And the page before someone's written baby.

That's a previous episode, don't worry.

Okay, are you feeling confident, Sally?

No.

Okay, 10 questions.

Here we go.

Question one.

How many brothers did Jane Austen have?

Six.

She did.

She had six brothers.

And two became clerics and two went into the navy and one went into the army.

Very good.

Oh, swat.

Yeah.

Look at this.

I've been well taught.

Look how good you are at teaching, the pair of you.

There you go.

Actually, one of them, Henry, was both soldier and clergyman.

What?

The double.

It's the dream.

Question two.

What was the name of Jane's beloved sister?

Cassandra.

Also the name of her mother.

It was, absolutely.

We haven't talked about her beloved Jane much.

I think you might need to get one in a minute because, you know, if you keep up this tempo.

Question three.

What nickname was given to Jane's supportive clergyman father, George, relating to his attractiveness?

Oh, I'm thinking hot priest, but it wasn't hot priest, was it?

That was my nickname for him.

Famous hair.

Think of...

Famous hair, hot priest, George.

Oh, I don't know.

He was the handsome proctor.

The handsome proctor.

Yes.

The hot priest is what we called him.

So I'll give you half a mark because I think

we threw you off the scent there.

Handsome proctor.

Question four: Which of Austin's six novels was written first, initially as an epistolary novel?

I can't remember.

I think it's Sense of Sensibility.

It is.

Well done.

Very good.

Yeah.

And she rewrote it later on to take out the letters.

Question five, how long did Jane's engagement to Mr.

Harris Big Wither last?

One day.

Yeah, if that, I mean, an evening in a morning, maybe.

I don't know.

An evening in a morning, yeah.

Yeah, one day.

Brilliant.

Poor Harris.

Question.

Because he's obviously quite something in the sack, right?

It's 10 kids.

10 kids.

He's, you know.

She missed out.

Question six.

What name did Austin publish under pseudonymity?

A lady.

A lady.

And that was a publishing era.

It was Lady A.

Lady A.

Which was great for sales.

It was good for sales.

But her brother Henry was a blabber mouth.

And I can't remember what his job was, but he kept letting slip so the secret was out before too long.

Question seven, what was the original title of Norfang Abbey?

A gothic parody?

Susan.

Susan!

I love it, it's great.

Question eight, what happened to the letters Austin wrote between 1801 and 1804 to her sister Cassandra?

Cassandra burnt them and we think I'm with Lucy on this it's because

she was perhaps not as ladylike in what she wrote about friends and family.

Some messy DMs, yeah.

Messy DMs.

Question nine, what was the name?

Her tweet history.

Yeah, I mean that's it.

We should have downloaded that, shouldn't we?

If only.

Question nine, what was the name of the Austin family farm that Jane grew up on?

Cheesedown.

Cheese Down, isn't it nice?

Yeah, it's lovely.

I know I've over-becolicked it, but I just, I think it's lovely.

This for, I mean, I would say nine and a half out of ten, but I am going to give you a bonus point because you've been so good.

So this for 10 and a half out of 11, I think.

What?

Nine and a half out of 10.

Steve's being a stickler.

Yeah, I've got a question.

10 and a half out of 11.

This for 10 and a half out of 10.

Okay, Sally, I believe in you.

What novel was Austin working on when she died?

sanditon it was sanditon which was turned into a cv series if people want to watch it excellent sally phillips a perfect 10 and a half out of 10 and amazing mathematical impossibility but you found a way thank you very much well done sally thank you so much thank you for teaching me all about jane austen oh well we had a lovely time i mean you knew lots and lucy thank you so much as well for joining us um listeners if you want more of sally check out our episode on fairy tales it was an absolute treat you invented your own fairy tale

that was a yeah that you threw me with that like make up a fairy tale And you did, and it was incredible.

It was really, really good.

Did you get lack narrative structure?

No, no, there was plenty.

There was a three-act structure.

It was great.

Was it about a massive apple or something like that?

I think it was, yeah, yeah.

So listen, go listen to that because it's absolute who.

For more literary geniuses with Dr.

Lucy, seek out our episode on Agatha Christie, another formidable, brilliant writer.

And if you long for Regency romance, come dating with us on our episode about Georgian courtship with lovely Carrie Had Lloyd.

And remember, if you've enjoyed the podcast, please share the show with your friends.

Subscribe to your Dead to Me on BBC Sounds in the UK to hear new episodes 28 days earlier than any other podcast app i'd just like to say a huge thank you to our guests in history corner we have the wonderful dr lucy worsley thank you so much lucy a pleasure thank you and in comedy corner we have the sensational sally phillips thank you sally thank you very very much for having me And to you, lovely listener, join me next time as we dust off another favourite from the Library of History.

But for now, I'm off to go and rummage in the loft through my old teenage comedy sketches.

And fingers crossed, they'll be as funny as love and friendship.

But I suspect they're mostly just crap.

Bye!

Your Dead to Me is a BBC Studios production for BBC Radio 4.

Two months ago, I was just an ordinary mum.

From BBC Radio 4, as part of Limelight, this is mother cover.

Our system has identified you as a candidate for a position.

See this woman here in the photo.

She attends a mother and baby group at the town hall.

Can I sit here?

I'm Gwen, by the way.

Liz?

Is she dangerous?

Lives are at stake here, Gwen.

What do you mean, lives?

Gwen, what are you doing?

I want out.

I want out now.

Oh my god, Liz, that tree, look out!

Listen to the whole series right now.

First, on BBC Sounds.

What on earth is your mummy up to?

Big color, bigger savings.

It's Sherwin-Williams' biggest super sale.

Get 40% off paints and stains October 17th through the 27th with prices starting at $29.39.

Whether you're refreshing your interior or exterior, we've got the colors to bring your vision to life.

And with delivery, getting everything to your door is easier than ever.

Shop online to have it delivered or visit your neighborhood Sherwin-Williams store.

Click the banner to learn more.

Retail sales only, some exclusions apply, C-Store for Details delivery available on qualifying orders.

Tires matter.

They're the only part of your vehicle that touches the road.

Tread confidently with new tires from Tire Rack.

Whether you're looking for expert recommendations or know exactly what you want, Tire Rack makes it easy.

Fast, free shipping, free road hazard protection, and convenient installation options.

Go to tireraack.com to see tire test results, tire ratings, and consumer reviews.

And be sure to check out all the special offers.

TireRack.com, the way tire buying should be.