Original subtitles

August 1806.

Jane Austen found herself squeezed alongside her mother,

her sister and a lawyer, rushing into Warwickshire in her cousin's carriage.

It's like a scene from one of Jane's own stories.

She was full of expectation,

about to play her part in a real-life Austen family drama.

Jane's destination was the ancestral home of the Leigh family.

It was Stoneleigh Abbey.

It's a story about money and inheritance and marriage -

the very things at the core of Jane's novels.

The honourable Mary Leigh, reclusive mistress of the house,

had just died, unmarried and childless.

Who was going to get the house and the cash?

Jane's elderly cousin,

one of the possible heirs, rushed over to stake his claim,

bringing the Austens along for support.

When Jane arrived here, she was 30 years old.

She was unmarried and unpublished, despite her best efforts.

And she was homeless.

She'd just been forced out of the city of Bath through lack of funds.

She was really hoping that some of the riches of this place would come

in her direction.

She needed an inheritance.

But for Jane, the aspiring novelist,

Stoneleigh Abbey also promised bounty of another sort -

inspiration. Fragments of the Abbey made their way into her books.

In Pride And Prejudice, Elizabeth Bennet is shown around Pemberley by

the housekeeper, just as Jane was shown around Stoneleigh.

And Mansfield Park gained Stoneleigh Abbey's chapel.

"The profusion of mahogany and the crimson velvet cushions appearing

"over the ledge of the family gallery above."

In the end, Jane went away without an inheritance,

but Stoneleigh Abbey left its legacy in her work.

Jane Austen's novels revolve around homes lost and mansions gained,

the threat of poverty and the promise of wealth.

And Jane's own life gave her a unique insight.

In her 41 years, she stayed in many houses.

At times, she was tantalisingly close to riches.

At others, a step from destitution.

I'm going to follow where Jane stayed.

I'll visit the scenes of her romantic adventures and see where

she struggled with her social obligations.

This is the parlour with drawing room where the women would come after dinner.

I'll try out some home economics, Austen style...

Amazingly, that does look like real ink.

..and explore the houses where she flourished as a writer.

I think that knowing where Jane lived can tell us who Jane really was.

I'm travelling to where it all began for Jane - Hampshire.

In 18th-century England,

your prospects for wealth and security were typically set from the moment

of your birth.

But Jane Austen wasn't raised in a typical home.

Jane spent 25 years,

more than half of her life, living in the house where she was born.

Let's go and see what's left of it.

Jane grew up in the sleepy village of Steventon,

where her father was rector of the local church.

She was born in 1775, in the reign of George III.

The Austens were a bit unusual in that Jane's father was considered to

be a gentleman.

But the family still struggled on a limited income.

The Steventon that Jane knew has almost vanished.

Its cottages were demolished in the 19th century.

Jane's home, the rectory she shared with her parents,

sister and six brothers has gone, too.

But luckily for me,

archaeologist Debbie Charlton has been investigating the site and

building up a picture of Jane's first home.

So, Debbie,

let's pace out the plan of the rectory and find out roughly where it was.

Right, so we're at the front, which was north-facing.

So if you were to stay about there...

- This is the corner of the building? - In the west. - It goes off like that?

- Yes. - OK, and how far that way does it go?

I'll just try and walk over there.

Hey! So that's the other corner?

- That is, yes. - Where's the front door? Is it in the middle?

- It's in the middle. - Meet you there.

OK, then.

- Is this it? - This is it.

Let me open it up. Is that right?

- Yes, indeed. - Let's step inside.

- In we go. - Where are we now?

We've come into the lobby. It was a lobby-entry house.

What were the other rooms?

You had the front kitchen and then you had the back kitchen.

The back kitchen's where all the work went on, all the cooking.

- What about over here? - Over here, you've got the main parlour,

so you'd have the dining parlour and then the sitting parlour.

What about Mr Austen's study?

That was at the back, so he was looking out over the cucumber gardens.

- Yeah, out over the gardens there. - Is that cos he was hiding away?

Yeah, he was, he was hiding away from the rest of the household.

Oh, OK, lots of kids.

A lot of activity.

You need somewhere to go if you've got eight children.

You did. I think it was a very busy house, a lot going on.

It may seem like a big house, but it was crowded.

Jane's father supplemented his income by running a boys' boarding school,

so the rectory was also packed with his pupils.

Mr Austen even had a third job as a farmer and the family kept cows,

ducks and chickens.

Debbie, I imagine a lot of people would think of Jane Austen growing up in

some lovely country house situation, but that's not right, is it?

No, no, I think she was definitely doing a bit of work on the farm.

There is an instance where she's overjoyed that the new dairy maids

arrived, which gives you the impression she was probably having to do it.

- Until that point? - Yeah. - Ah!

Tell me about some of these little finds that you've excavated.

Right, so obviously, when you're doing an excavation,

- a lot of it is the rubbish - what's been discarded or broken. - Yes.

So, we've built this back together, but it's a lovely little egg cup.

Look at that.

- It's beautiful. - So this is the Willow Pattern.

- So it's blue and white transferware. - Yes.

They'd just come out, they'd just learnt to do the transfer print.

- Everybody who was anybody had to have transferware. - Yes.

They're from the perfect time, so about 1770.

Now, Debbie, we don't have any evidence, do we,

that Jane Austen didn't eat an egg out of this egg cup?

We don't, no. So she may well have done.

Jane Austen's egg cup!

It's pretty, but it's mass produced.

The Austens may have aspired to the latest tableware,

but there wasn't that much money for luxuries.

Jane's letters give a detailed account of everyday life at Steventon Rectory,

with its unfashionable mealtimes,

but a wealth of intellectual sustenance.

We dine now at half after three and have done dinner, I suppose,

before you begin.

We drink tea at half after six.

I'm afraid you will despise us.

My father reads Cooper to us in the evenings, to which I listen,

when I can.

Reading was a big part of life at Steventon, and Jane had free access

to her father's library, which contained many works of fiction.

I think that this room set Jane on her path as a writer.

The books here inspired her.

From the age of 11, she wrote plays, satires, poems and novels.

But how could her talent thrive in such a crowded house?

Jane Austen's father realised that his daughter was becoming a serious writer.

So he marked this by getting her, as a 19th birthday present,

this expensive and beautiful mahogany writing desk.

It hinges open like this so you can write on the slope of it.

Now, for millions of Jane Austen lovers, this item is a holy relic

because, under this flap, she would have kept drafts of all of her novels.

Until the very end of her life, everywhere that Jane Austen went,

this box went, too.

Think of it as a tiny little office -

the only space in her crowded home that Jane had completely to herself.

But she didn't spend all of her time shut up in the rectory.

Jane was a keen walker.

She had to be. For most of her life,

the Austen family couldn't afford a carriage.

And she often travelled miles on foot,

visiting a network of friends in the villages around Steventon.

Some of their houses still survive, like Ashe Rectory.

Here, Jane would call on her close friend, Mrs Anne Lefroy.

Music was a big part of these women's social lives.

I'm meeting Professor Jeanice Brooks to learn about Jane Austen,

the piano player.

Was music something that girls did together?

Yeah, there's lots of evidence that young women

were communicating around and through music,

in the same way that we think about how teenagers today

communicate through music and by exchanging music, by swapping things round, by saying,

hey, listen to this, this is my favourite right now.

It sounds like we don't know exactly how proficient she was,

but Jane Austen does strike me as somebody who really loves music.

- Would you agree? - Yes, yes.

And I think it's important that, if you look at the novels,

in all of the novels,

intelligent conversation is always about music and books.

It's not just books - it's music and books.

It's something that she sees as part of a kind of normal,

cultured education, something that people can talk about,

something that is important.

And she seems to, in later life, have played every day for herself.

It's a thread that weaves right through all of Jane's novels as well.

There are always characters who play in every single novel,

there are some very important scenes that happen while people are playing.

With music came dancing, which Jane also loved.

Many of her plots centre around the excitement of encounters at balls,

and Jane felt that thrill herself.

Deane House, newly built at the time,

was the scene of one particularly eventful ball for Jane.

She came here on the night of January 8th, 1796.

She'd just turned 20.

And I've got the chance to see inside the very room where Jane danced.

Now, this might not be the big and glamorous ballroom that you were expecting,

but it was possible to hold a ball in just an ordinary house.

You'd push back the furniture and invite around the neighbours for a dance.

This meant that, when Jane went to balls, she wasn't always meeting

new people. There were a lot of familiar faces but, one night,

in this very room, she did meet somebody new.

He was a young law student called Tom Lefroy.

He and Jane got on awfully well

and, pretty soon, they were flirting outrageously.

Tom was the nephew of Jane's friend, Mrs Lefroy.

Jane's letters to her sister, Cassandra, tell of encounters with Tom

over the course of a series of balls.

It all started so promisingly.

You scold me so much in the nice long letter which I have, this moment,

received from you

that I'm almost afraid to tell you how my Irish friend and I behaved.

Imagine to yourself everything most profligate and shocking in the way

of dancing and sitting down together.

After I'd written the above, we received a visit from Mr Tom Lefroy.

He has but one fault, which time will, I trust, entirely remove.

It is that his morning coat is a great deal too light.

I rather expect to receive an offer from my friend in the course of the evening.

I shall refuse him, however.

Unless he promises to give away his white coat.

But Tom's family didn't approve.

Their serious young lawyer was having way too much fun with Jane.

At their final ball together, he didn't propose.

Sometimes, people at balls drank too much,

even Jane Austen.

One time, she wrote about a hangover she had

and the shaking of her hands the morning after.

And there would be a rude awakening from her romance with Tom Lefroy.

Tom was sent away from Hampshire.

He had ten siblings - he needed to be able to support them,

he needed to marry someone richer than Jane.

The harsh truth was that, in Jane's world, money usually came before love.

No wonder this became a central theme in her novels.

And I don't think it's a coincidence that this is the year when Jane

wrote her first draft of Pride And Prejudice.

In fiction, at least,

she could make sure that the poor but clever heroine won both the good man

and his impressive house and grounds.

Poor Jane was dogged by worries about money and status,

even when she visited members of her own family.

I'm following Jane to Kent to her brother Edward's house,

where she sometimes stayed for months at a time.

Now, you might well wonder how Edward ended up with the vast Godmersham Park near Canterbury.

Well, quite simply, Jane's parents gave Edward away.

Adopted by the childless but wealthy Knight family,

Edward enjoyed an income of £15,000 a year.

Even Jane's fictional catch, Mr Darcy, only had 10!

Life at Godmersham gave Jane a window into a different world.

I think it had a huge effect on her.

Now it's a college for opticians.

But you can still feel its grandeur.

This might be the very room where Jane stayed when she was at Godmersham -

a whole room to herself.

She liked staying here because of the luxury.

She wrote that she was going to eat ice cream and drink French wine and

be above vulgar economy.

But it's quite hard for her, as the poor relation.

She worried that she couldn't afford to tip the servants properly.

And Jane's relatives here at Godmersham were very different from her.

They were hyper-social.

They were into their outdoor pursuits.

They thought Jane was clever, but a bit odd.

I think it's telling that she made one very close friend here who wasn't

a member of the family.

It was the governess.

Jane just wasn't in the same league as her fortunate brother,

and even the visiting hairdresser seems to have noticed.

Mr Hall walked off this morning with no inconsiderable booty.

He charged Elizabeth five shillings for every time of dressing her hair.

Towards me, he was as considerate as I'd hoped for,

charging me only two shillings six pence for cutting my hair.

He certainly respects either our youth or our poverty.

Jane was expected to earn her keep,

helping to entertain a growing brood of nieces and nephews.

One niece recalled spending entire days acting out plays with Aunt Jane.

Home theatricals were all the rage at the time.

And Professor Judith Hawley is helping me to put on a play that Jane wrote

herself as a child.

Scene the first, a parlour.

Cousin, your servant.

Stanly, good morning to you. I hope you slept well last night.

Er, remarkably well, I thank you.

I'm afraid you found your bed too short.

It was bought in my grandmother's time,

who was herself a very short woman

and made a point of suiting all her beds to suit her own length.

Judith, if you lived in a lovely big house in the country like this,

it must be very nice,

but do you think perhaps it got boring and you just longed for

something to happen?

That's when you could put on a private theatrical, and then you

had the whole sense of an event to work towards,

and the whole household could be involved.

One of the pleasures would just have been that business of the bustle of

turning a house upside down, rolling back the carpets,

clearing out all the furniture, that sort of chaotic disruption.

Do we know what plays Jane Austen wrote herself?

We've got three surviving manuscripts in her Juvenilia.

Her second play, which is my favourite, is called The Visit.

What happens in The Visit?

In The Visit, there's a brother and sister who invite people to

their house, only nothing works according to plan.

They're very apologetic about it,

but there are only six chairs for eight people

because Grandmamma didn't really like having people round.

Sir Arthur and Lady Hampton, Miss Hampton, Mr and Miss Willoughby.

Ooh, that's a lot of people.

Here they all come.

Pray, pray be seated.

Bless me! There really ought to be eight chairs, but there are but six.

However, if your Ladyship will take Sir Arthur in your lap and, Sophy,

my brother in yours, then I believe that we shall do pretty well.

I beg you'll make no apologies. Um...

Ooh, Sophy! Oh, yes, please!

Your brother really is very light.

This is better than a chair.

Now, if you've read Mansfield Park by Jane Austen,

you might think that she doesn't approve of theatricals

because they're a cover for flirtation and all sorts of inappropriate behaviour.

Well, Fanny, who's sort of the centre of the moral consciousness of the novel,

certainly refuses to act - Fanny will not act -

but it's simply not the case that Jane Austen herself disapproved of

either play-reading or theatre-going or involving herself in private theatricals.

She's absorbing things from her life and transforming them in artistic ways.

In Mansfield Park,

the amateur theatricals help to expose the conflicts and jealousies

within a great house -

just the sort of thing that Jane might have witnessed at Godmersham.

I think that this was the house that had the biggest influence on Jane's writing.

Some of Jane's other travels were rather more relaxing.

As the 19th century dawned,

Jane's parents embraced the fashion for tourism.

They took Jane to Sidmouth, to Dawlish...

..and then to Lyme Regis.

Jane couldn't swim,

but she was dipped in the sea by a local woman called Molly.

She probably didn't bathe nude, whatever this picture might suggest.

But it is true that Lyme was a free and easy sort of a place.

This book is a guide to the sea-bathing places,

and it's pretty frank about the advantages of Lyme -

advantages that would have appealed to the Austens.

The "lodgings at Lyme are not merely reasonable, they are even cheap."

It's a budget resort.

"There's no need to dress up in fancy clothes,

"no need for extravagance of exterior show."

The boarding houses in Lyme are graded.

At the top of the hill, you've got pleasant houses with nice views

for "persons of consideration".

Down in the lower town, though, you'll find "the lower orders".

And I'm sorry to say that the Austens were right at the bottom of the hill

in Mr Pyne's house, just there.

Even on holiday, you had to know your place.

And you got what you paid for.

The accommodation rented by the Austens was strictly no-frills.

Jane wouldn't have given a very good review to the various lodging houses

of Lyme. Of one of them, she wrote, "The inconvenience is exceeded only

"by the dirtiness."

And she had a bit of a ding-dong with the owner of this place,

Mr Pyne, about the ludicrous sum he wanted to charge for something that got broken.

But Jane didn't care at all because she could look out of this window

and watch the sea.

Jane thought that travel to the seaside was very delightful -

a taste of the itinerant life she envied in the wives of sailors or soldiers.

And there was a wildness here.

Jane was most drawn to the sea wall called The Cobb.

She once spent a whole hour walking along it.

You're not allowed to walk up here when it's windy because the big waves

come jumping up over the edge.

And I think that, for Jane,

being at the seaside was all about cutting loose and letting go.

She did have a holiday fling at the seaside, and her sister later said

that this mysterious man had been the love of Jane's life.

Jane saw the seaside as a place for passion, and Lyme became one of

her most memorable literary settings.

In Jane's novel Persuasion,

the high winds drive some ladies to come down from the Upper Cobb to

walk on the lower part, but one of them, Louisa,

gets so excited by the wind and the waves that she wants to jump down to

the bottom and into the arms of a dashing sea captain. She slips,

she falls, she's lifeless on the ground.

In this case, the exhilaration of the seaside has led to danger.

Jane herself liked the idea of a leap into the unknown -

that's what holidays were for.

But a permanent move was quite another matter.

In 1801, aged 25, Jane had to leave her home in Steventon forever.

Her father decided to retire and relocate, taking his wife and daughters

with him to start a new life in Bath.

It's said that, when Jane first heard she was moving here, she fainted.

Bath was a flourishing spa town with an incredibly busy social scene.

It was probably the last place that Jane would find peace and quiet to write.

But she had no choice.

She decided it was best just to get on with the move.

Jane and her mother threw themselves into house-hunting.

This was their headquarters - the house where Jane's aunt and uncle lived.

Jane's aunt wanted them to settle in this part of town,

but it was no good - it was too noisy,

there wasn't enough greenery and Mr Austen now had arthritis.

He walked with a stick and couldn't manage the steep hills.

Even more than in Lyme, where you lived in Bath reflected your status.

There was a thriving rental market catering to wealthy visitors.

I'm off to see some of the places that Jane considered.

There are an awful lot of them!

"I went with my mother to help look at some houses in New King Street,

"towards which she felt some kind of inclination.

"They were smaller than I expected to find them."

Quite monstrously little.

Jane's mother kept setting her heart on the most unsuitable places.

"Above all others, her wishes are, at present,

"fixed on the corner house in Chapel Row which opens into Princes Street.

"Her knowledge of it, however, is confined only to the outside."

The houses in Green Park Buildings were...

"So very desirable in size and situation..."

but they were also very damp.

The Austens looked at Charles Street, Seymour Street,

Westgate Buildings,

the streets off Laura Place - too expensive -

Gay Street - too steep.

At least Jane and her mother agreed on one place they absolutely would not live.

"She will do everything in her power to avoid Trim Street."

Eventually, the Austens decided on 4, Sydney Place.

Newly built and a flat walk from the centre,

it had the right sort of neighbours -

a baronet, a Major-General and a lady.

And it was just about affordable at £150 a year -

that's a quarter of Jane's father's income.

These days, it's a holiday let, which means that I get to stay the night.

The Austens had rather longer - a three-year lease - to enjoy its comforts.

Up here are the bedrooms.

Mr and Mrs Austen had the lovely view over the park...

..while Jane and Cassandra shared the room at the back.

This fantastic and utterly ginormous document contains

the original deeds of 4, Sydney Place.

Here's a beautiful elevation showing exactly how the builder should

construct the house, and over here is the contract, which specifies that

he's got to put in street lighting and running water.

It's all terribly grand.

But sitting here, in Jane and Cassandra's bedroom,

what strikes me is that your experience of a Georgian house like this

really does depend on your position in society.

The girls are tucked away upstairs in the back bedroom and, out of their window,

what you can see today are the slightly rubbish backs of the houses behind.

In fact, this document doesn't specify what the back of Sydney Place was to

look like because nobody cared.

Bath was all about the first impression.

First impressions mattered because most people didn't stay in Bath for long.

The whole social scene was constantly changing.

Jane had to embark on a complex schedule of visits and engagements,

and there was always the hope that she might find a husband.

I'm paying a call, just as Jane would have done, to a rather grander house

than her own in the Royal Crescent.

Professor Elaine Chalus has left her card for me, so I'm now returning the visit.

- Good morning, Elaine. - Hi, Lucy.

Thank you for having me.

- You're very welcome. - I'm paying you a morning call.

What are the rules for that?

You will come in and you'll find me in my morning drawing room.

In this house, it happens to be on the ground floor,

but often it's upstairs.

If you're somebody that I don't know particularly well or you're paying me

a courtesy call, you may come in, stay 10-15 minutes,

maybe half an hour maximum, and go.

If you're somebody that's intimate with me and we're good friends,

we haven't seen each other for a while, we could then spend the rest of

the morning together, basically, gossiping and having chat over tea.

And what would you do if you didn't want to see me?

- You can keep me out, can't you? - Oh, yeah.

That's rather fun. You basically tell your servants that you're not in.

So, Elaine, the morning's over, what's next in the Bath schedule?

Once you've changed and you're ready to go out, then you'll go out and you'll maybe go

for your walk,

you might go shopping,

then you come home and you're going to change again, of course.

And you'll get ready for dinner.

And that wouldn't take place in this room,

that would actually take place on the other side, and it was really

important that you had a good dining room because a dining room is one

of the places where people get together over food and drink,

it's more intimate than the morning visits.

That is a fantastic display, isn't it?

- It is. - Lovely dinner.

Yeah, and it's a wonderful place to show off your best china,

to show off the skills of your cook.

'After dinner, the guests moved upstairs for tea, where they were often

'joined by second-tier visitors - that's people like the Austens.'

This is the parlour withdrawing room where the women would come

after dinner, and things would be set out all ready for tea, as they are here.

You would find all kinds of things going on.

You would have some people reading and you could be, of course, playing

on whatever musical instruments were available. We've got a harpsichord here.

By the time of Austen, often, you would have had a piano,

there might have been a harp,

but these kinds of things so that you've got something to do to keep your hands occupied.

Did Jane enjoy these tea drinking sessions?

Some of them she did,

some of them she enjoyed because she liked the people,

but there were certainly some events that she found desperately difficult

in terms of being really, really boring.

I love the time when she says nothing much is happening,

so the entertainment is a reading from a pamphlet about smallpox.

Yeah, that kind of thing can happen.

I think smallpox tells you it was a really slow evening.

The subtext to all this social life is husband-hunting,

isn't it? How did that go for Jane?

What sort of a catch was she?

Not a great catch, actually.

She wouldn't have had a huge amount of money to bring with her.

She's a vicar's daughter.

She's not superbly beautiful.

She does have a GSOH -

- a good sense of humour. - She does have that,

but that's actually double-edged

because having a witty woman who could sort of

take the mick out of the men isn't necessarily going to win you a lot

of plaudits with some men, for sure, it will put them off.

Jane may not have been to the liking of the Bath bachelors

but, while she was living here, she did receive a proposal from a highly

eligible country gentleman.

In 1802, Jane and Cassandra

visited some old friends, Catherine and Alethea Bigg,

back in Hampshire.

They were joined by the Biggs' younger brother,

21-year-old Harris Bigg-Wither.

Harris Bigg-Wither proposed to Jane, and she accepted him.

She must have been relieved - she was nearly 27, getting on a bit.

And while Harris wasn't a looker, he was very respectable.

And he was going to inherit Manydown Park, long since demolished.

But the next morning, having thought it over, Jane broke it all off.

It must have been excruciatingly awkward.

She had to flee from Manydown Park in embarrassment.

It was probably for the best.

Harris didn't have much conversation,

he could sometimes be outrageously rude and Jane clearly didn't love him.

And I believe there was another reason Jane was feeling confident enough

to turn down the mansion and the cushy lifestyle.

She thought that she was soon going to become a published author.

And she knew that, if she got married, she'd have to give birth to babies,

not books.

Sure enough, in 1803, Jane sold the manuscript of her novel, Susan,

to a publisher for ten whole pounds.

This book would eventually become Northanger Abbey,

and it's all about Bath society.

Its young heroine, Catherine,

arrives here with eager delight, ready for the pleasures of

the public dances and the pump rooms.

It seemed that Jane had finally made it as an author.

Except, it all came to nothing.

The novel wasn't printed in her lifetime,

and Jane had lost her chance at independence.

Single women have a dreadful propensity for being poor...

..which is one very strong argument in favour of matrimony.

It was the start of a difficult time.

The Austens were going down in the world.

When the lease expired on Sydney Place,

they were forced to take a house in Green Park Buildings,

even though they'd previously ruled it out.

Then, in 1805, Jane's father became seriously ill with a fever...

and he died.

When the Austens had first been house-hunting in Bath, they'd rejected

Green Park Buildings because, although the houses were cheap,

they were damp. You can see that they've been built up on a platform

because the river used to flood just here.

The people in the houses complained about putrid fevers.

Now, when you get a lot of water standing around, you get mosquitoes.

And Mr Austen's waves of fever are consistent with the disease of malaria.

It could be that Green Park Buildings killed him.

Whatever the cause, his death was a disaster.

Jane and her mother and sister

now found themselves in reduced circumstances,

reliant on the charity of Jane's brothers.

They moved again, to Gay Street,

and then finally to the dreaded Trim Street.

In Trim Street, there weren't any titled neighbours, just a milliner's

and a fire insurance office.

Jane's mother was really fed up of living here.

She addressed her letters from Trim Street, still. Rr!

In Persuasion, Jane's heroine, Anne Eliot, persists in a very determined,

though very silent, disinclination for Bath.

You could certainly go off a place.

The truth was that the Austens couldn't afford to stay there.

In 1806, after five years in Bath, Jane was packed off again,

this time to a rented house in distinctly down-market Southampton.

Jane's brother, Frank, was in the Navy.

He moved his mother and sisters in with his young wife while he was

away at sea.

Southampton was the lowest point in Jane's fortunes.

It was described by one contemporary visitor as a dirty town

with unsurpassably smelly side streets.

Southampton has changed quite a lot since Jane's time.

But she would still recognise the ancient stone ramparts.

All this used to be the sea. It came right up against the old city walls.

You could see dolphins from this spot.

It's now dry land and a ginormous building site.

Jane's house has gone, too.

But luckily, a contemporary artist included it in his painting.

This is Jane's house, right next door to this rather eccentric castle

that had recently been embellished with extra turrets.

I think that the Austen ladies chose this house because it had a lovely garden.

They were missing greenery.

And you can see the garden's trees poking up over the old city walls.

And despite the size, it soon got full up.

There was Jane, her sister, their mother, their friend, Martha,

their sister-in-law, Mary, add in three or four servants,

and you have a household of eight or nine women.

It was cramped.

The castle's been replaced by a tower block and Jane's garden by a pub.

Time for a pint.

Jane had to spend her money very carefully

because it was all gifted to her.

Earning money was inappropriate for a gentlewoman.

Jane's actual accounts from 1807 survive.

Her mother and brother covered food and rent,

but everything else was down to her.

This is Jane's discretionary expenditure, and she's feeling very flush

because she's just received a legacy from a little old lady that she met

and got to know in Bath.

This is payback time for all of that hard socialising.

So what's she spent it on?

On getting her clothes washed, on letters and parcels -

that's very characteristic -

and there are treats here, too, because she's feeling rich.

She's hired a piano for £2.

She gives away a quarter of her money in tips to servants, in charity

and in presents.

Someone else had given her this money.

Now she was giving it to people who were even more in need.

It's a very feminine form of economics.

And it's a very precarious way of living.

Jane had no income except from family and friends.

She didn't have time or space to write.

Stuck in Southampton in her mid-30s, she had no prospects at all.

But then, along came another chance to move. Jane's brother, Edward,

the rich adopted one who lived in Kent,

also had a little bolthole in Hampshire.

Chawton House - a glorious Elizabethan manor.

When Edward's wife died, his thoughts turned to his home county

and to his mother and sisters.

Why not move them all back to be near him?

So, in 1809, Jane found herself heading again for a prime property,

but Edward wasn't quite as generous as he might have been.

Jane wasn't moving here...

..but to the former bailiff's house down the street.

Chawton Cottage was on a main road. In fact,

passing Stagecoach passengers could see right in through the windows.

But at least it was an end to all the uncertainty.

And here, Jane settled down into a daily routine.

We're told that she got up early to play the piano before anyone else

was around. Then, at nine o'clock, she made the tea.

This seems to have been about the limit of her household duties.

It's as if the rest of them realised she was no good at housework

and shielded her from it so that she could get on with her writing.

Jane now worked hard,

rewriting the novels she'd started years earlier at Steventon.

And, in 1811, she finally had a book published -

Sense And Sensibility.

It's the story of sisters who are forced to leave their spacious home

and move to a modest cottage in the country -

one with dark, narrow stairs and a kitchen that smokes.

The book made Jane a respectable £140 -

enough to cover her expenses for three years.

She sold the rights to Pride And Prejudice for a similar amount.

But when it came out in 1813, it was a huge bestseller.

It made Jane's publisher more than three times what he'd paid her.

Jane still lived frugally at Chawton Cottage with her sister,

mother and friend, Martha.

This is a collection of recipes put together by the Austen ladies with

their friend, Martha Lloyd.

They're not very ambitious in their cooking plans.

The first recipe is for pea soup.

And they're thrifty.

If you turn to the back of the book, we've got recipes for household products.

Here's one for "a cure for a swelled neck".

And here's one that seems particularly appropriate - a recipe "to make ink".

I'm going to have a go at that one,

but possibly not while I'm holding a priceless historical artefact!

First, you take galls. These are little nodules

that are produced when an insect lays its egg in an oak tree.

Next comes...oh, the gum.

This is gum arabic.

And my gum has been pre-powdered.

Next comes the green copperas.

This stuff is basically iron sulphate.

Next you put in the strong, stale beer.

Now, there's no real chemical reason for the beer,

but I think it's really in the recipe to make ink-making more fun.

You add some sugar and stir.

Then you stand the ink in a chimney corner

for 14 days, and you shake it

two or three times a day. Hm. 14 days!

Unfortunately, I don't think we have one that we made earlier!

Amazingly, that does look like real ink.

The original recipe makes two pints of ink.

Jane needed plenty of it.

She wrote a brand-new novel - Mansfield Park.

Her books were bringing her freedom and confidence.

The nitty-gritty of publishing often took Jane to London,

where she stayed with her brother, Henry, who was now a banker.

Henry had been working his way up the London property ladder.

And by 1814, he owned a fancy bachelor pad in Hans Place, Knightsbridge,

now replaced by mansion flats.

You might not think of London as Jane Austen land,

but I reckon that this was the place that suited her best of all.

Henry's house had a lovely garden right next to his study.

It was August and, when Jane got hot and tired of writing,

she could come out here for a restorative stroll.

Henry was out all day at his bank.

He was now a widower, he only had one maid.

There was nobody to bother Jane.

Here, at last, was a life free from social obligations.

And here, she got on with what I think is her most brilliant book - Emma.

This new heroine was rich and confident.

But she wasn't a woman of the world.

Although Emma lived 16 miles from London, she never actually goes there.

Jane was more intrepid.

For this latest novel, Jane's brother, Henry,

had found her a more prestigious publisher - John Murray.

But then Henry fell ill

and Jane was forced, for the first time,

to start dealing with her business herself.

This is John Murray's office and home, at 50 Albemarle Street.

This was a place where Lord Byron and Sir Walter Scott would come.

I can imagine Jane sitting impatiently in this waiting room...

..before being sent upstairs to John Murray's famous drawing room.

Murray had offered to publish Emma,

but he wanted the copyright of both Mansfield Park and

Sense And Sensibility thrown in, too.

Jane thought that Murray was offering her a bad deal.

She decided to seize control of her affairs at last.

So Jane started to negotiate, first by letter,

then in visits to this office.

It was hard work.

She wrote that John Murray was a rogue, if a very civil one,

and he offered her £450.

Now, Jane had been stung before by this selling the copyright thing.

That's how she'd published Pride And Prejudice.

And when it sold much better than expected, it meant that the publisher

kept all the cash.

So she refused that.

Instead, she went for what we'd call self-publishing,

where she ran the risk but would get the reward,

minus 10% commission to Murray.

Now, the really heartbreaking thing is

that this was a terrible business decision of Jane's.

None of her later books would sell as well as Pride And Prejudice.

And by the time she died,

she'd actually only earnt just over £650

from all her books.

But for a few years, during her visits to London,

Jane glimpsed a different life.

The life of a successful novelist, shopping, visiting exhibitions

and plays, and travelling in her brother's carriage.

The driving about, the carriage being open, was very pleasant.

I liked my solitary elegance very much

and was ready to laugh all the time at my being where I was.

I could not but feel that I had naturally small right to be parading

around London in a barouche.

Jane was no longer dependent,

to be passed about from one place to another like a parcel.

She was an author.

She could go where she liked.

It didn't last. Less than a year after Emma was published,

Jane was back at Chawton Cottage and seriously ill.

She was suffering from aches and pains, from fevers and bilious attacks.

One of her nieces remembers visiting Aunt Jane and being shocked to find

her up here in her bedroom,

wearing a dressing gown and sitting in a chair, just like an invalid.

Things were looking bad for Jane.

And she was only 41.

On 24th May, 1817, Jane and Cassandra made the 16-mile journey

to Winchester in their brother James' carriage.

They came to be near a doctor - Jane's last chance for a cure.

But she'd already made her will.

For two months, College Street was their home.

These rented rooms in the city centre were just the sort of place

that genteel old maids ended up.

My attendant is encouraging

and talks of making me quite well.

I live chiefly on the sofa...

..but I'm allowed to walk from one room to the other.

I've been out once in the sedan chair, and am to repeat it,

and be promoted to a wheelchair as the weather serves.

The upside was that Jane was living here with the family that she'd

selected for herself, spinsters looking out for each other.

She got this house because of her two good friends who live just

around the corner. And as Jane got sicker and sicker,

she was looked after here by her sister and her sister-in-law.

Jane spent the very last hours of her life with her head in her sister Cassandra's lap.

And then, very early in the morning of 18th July, 1817,

she slipped away in that room, just up there.

Six days later, Jane's body was borne along College Street.

Cassandra wrote,

"I watched the little mournful procession the length of the street.

"And when it turned from my sight, I had lost her for ever."

Walking alongside the coffin were three of Jane's brothers and a nephew -

the only mourners.

Jane was brought here, to Winchester Cathedral,

and placed in a vault on the North Aisle.

It was a prime location at last.

A black marble gravestone was laid over her.

The inscription mentions "the benevolence of her heart,

"the sweetness of her temper,

"and the extraordinary endowments of her mind."

That's as close as it gets to mentioning her novels.

When Jane died, she was just a youngish, unknown, frail woman.

Her name wasn't even printed in her books.

All this would change. A few years later,

one of the vergers of the cathedral was heard asking,

"Who is this Jane Austen woman that everybody's talking about?"

And now her fame almost eclipses that of the cathedral.

Today, Winchester Cathedral is perhaps best known as Jane's final home.