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- This is the world of a Jane Austen novel,

an elegant Georgian drawing room.

I could just imagine Emma Woodhouse taking tea,

Anne Elliot reading poetry,

or even Mr. Darcy

warming his britches before the fire.

It seems a safe, domesticated landscape.

And it's the setting for his stories of the court ships

of intelligent, polite

and privileged young ladies.

But why on Earth are millions of us

still reading these period romances?

How has this genteel fiction

become a 21st century global phenomenon?

Over the last 200 years,

Austen's books have traveled a long way,

from the libraries of aristocrats

to cheap railway bookstores.

- She produced fiction,

which had a sort of a self-possession

and a technical audacity,

which was unparalleled anywhere else in Europe.

- She was adored by soldiers

and she found stardom on stage and onscreen.

- She goes from niche to mainstream.

- What's more in every era,

her readers have found something personal, important,

and new in her words.

- No one has known how to make love,

read so important as she has.

- As a historian and an unashamed fan,

I'm fascinated by the story of how an anonymous

minor novelist in her own lifetime

became celebrated today

as our very best love writer.

This is Fort Worth, Texas.

And if you wanted to know

just how successful Jane Austen is today,

hold your horses and look no further

because this weekend,

the Stetsons have been outnumbered by the Bomics,

as Fort Worth plays host to the Jane Austen Society

of North America's Annual convention.

The biggest international celebration

for an author whose fame ranked second only to Shakespeare.

This gloriously eccentric hotel convention

demonstrates the rampant commercialization

of the world Jane Austen made.

There's an extraordinary array of merchandise,

spin-offs from the Austen brand.

"Jane and the Damned".

Austen has chick flicks.

"Clueless", "Emma" updated to an American high school.

And here we have Bollywood's, "Bride & Prejudice".

It's an astounding phenomenon.

But underneath all the dressing up and the role-play,

the spin-offs and the merchandise,

there are plenty of committed Austen readers.

- I liked the way she characterizes people

and the people that she writes about,

you can still see today.

- I think anyone who's ever been in love

will find an equal in one of her novels.

- She has a wonderful, ironic tone

that makes me think

and gives me a sense of history

and romance and great literature.

- Here in Texas, Jane Austen, the commercial brand,

dances hand in hand with an appreciation of Jane Austen,

a serious novelist.

And it's this partnership

that gives Austen a unique position

in the world of literature.

At Sotheby's in London,

the International Sale Rooms,

Brand Austen is the big attraction at today's auction.

- 220?

240?

260-

- This is the sale of a rare Jane Austen fragment.

In her short life, Austen only produced six complete novels

and every surviving scrap of her writing

is of immense interest,

especially if the manuscript is in her own hand.

Here are 60 precious pages of an uncompleted novel

written while she was living in Bath.

Earlier on, I was lucky enough to be given a peak

at the manuscript before it went onto the hammer.

I've never seen a Jane Austen manuscript before.

- Yeah, it is a wonderful thing.

It's so exciting to actually see,

see her handwriting.

And of course, not just her handwriting,

it's not just a letter.

It's actually a literary manuscript

and not just a literary manuscript,

but a working manuscript, as you can see it,

careful corrections.

- This is the only manuscript draft, isn't it,

of her unfinished novel?

- Yeah, that's right.

- "The Watsons". - Yeah, yeah.

- It's a very tantalizing fragment, isn't it?

- Yes.

- Your lordship thinks,

we always have our own way.

That is a point on which ladies and gentlemen

long disagreed,

but without pretending to decide it,

I may say that there are some circumstances

which even women cannot control.

Female economy will do a great deal, my Lord,

but it cannot turn a small income into a large one.

Absolutely.

I think what's really most important

about this piece of work is it's content.

And that seems to be quite explosive

because there's a real angry voice in this,

which is overlaid with more elegance, I think,

in the other novels,

Who do you think are going to be the big bidders?

- I mean obviously, I can't-

- Obviously, I can't.

I can't.

What sort of figure do you expect to get?

- The estimate is a 200 to 300,000 pounds.

- That's 650 in the room.

680, thank you.

700,000, thank you.

- It's beginning to look as if Gabriel

was being ever so slightly cautious.

- 720, thank you.

750, thank you.

- There are two very committed bidders.

And we've now reached nearly three times the estimate.

- Yeah, 800,000, thank you.

Last chance there, at 800,000.

820, I have now.

850.

No, it's in the room.

On the aisle, anybody else?

At 850.

Last chance, against your...

No regrets, at 850.

Yours, thank you.

- "The Watsons" has just sold for a stunning 850,000 pounds.

So that's three times the estimate.

I think that's an amazing achievement

for a woman who struggled in genteel poverty.

At her death, her manuscripts were burnt or scattered

or just given away.

And now, she's provoked

just for a little fragment of a novel,

a global bidding war.

And the buyer who saved the manuscript for the nation

was non other than the Bodleian Library in Oxford.

It's a huge price to pay

and clear proof that Austen's academic status today

is just as potent as her commercial brand.

So how did Austen become our national treasure?

To find the answer, you have to look at the history

of how she was read.

Who was reading her and why?

The very first people to read Jane Austen were her family.

We know that Jane Austen was clever and precocious.

She was writing by the age of 12,

but then she was born into a big bookish family.

All her brothers and her beloved sister, Cassandra,

all of them loved reading, rereading, reading aloud,

writing, drawing, and amateur theatricals.

- Come on!

- The Austens adored putting on plays

for family and friends.

- Let's turn back quickly.

- Very well.

But hasn't this walk been invigorating, ow!

- And even today,

the locals still relish of this alfresco theater.

- I think I've twisted my ankle.

- Would you allow me to offer my services, madame?

- The teenage Jane was theatrical,

irreverent and prolific,

dashing off romantic parodies and satires

for the entertainment of her clever siblings

and bookish relatives.

By early twenties,

Jane Austen had completed drafts of two novels,

"First Impressions" and "Elinor And Marianne".

But it would be another 14 years

and numerous disappointments

before she was finally published.

- "Elinor And Marianne" became "Sense and Sensibility"

and first went on sale 200 years ago in October, 1811.

- Oh sir, how may I thank you?

May I ask whom I'm so obliged?

- His name, he replied, was...

- Willoughby, madam,

currently of .

- His manly beauty,

and more than common gracefulness

were instantly the theme of general admiration

and the laugh, which his gallantry raised

against Marianne received particular spirit

from his exterior attractions.

Marianne, herself, had seen less of his person than the rest

for the confusion,

which crimsoned over her face on his lifting her up,

had robbed her of the power of regarding him

after their entering of the house.

But the people who first enjoyed these words

had no idea who was writing them.

Why do you think Jane Austen published anonymously?

- Well, people say that it was because she was so modest

and unassuming. - No.

- Which is bologna actually,

because Sir Walter Scott

who was the bestselling novelist of the age,

also published anonymously.

- So it's a polite convention only then?

- Yeah, it's a polite convention,

which enabled her to have quite a lot of fun actually,

because of course, people guessed a lot.

A lady in the village

and Mrs. Ben came 'round

and "Pride and Prejudice" had just been delivered

and Jane Austen and her mum took turns reading out

about half of the novel over several hours.

And Mrs. Ben was delighted and said how brilliant

the author must be.

And Jane Austen didn't tell her that it was herself.

I think she quite like those sorts of games.

- But, calling it "By a Lady",

it's not utterly anonymous.

So she makes it clear that it's a female author.

Do you think that affects the way readers

would have viewed the novel at the time?

Do you think women are more likely to buy a novel by a lady?

- I think, saying by a lady on the title page

did affect people's expectations.

So I think they would have known

that it was an advertisement

for the kind of product they were getting.

They weren't gonna get roistering scenes

of sort of sexual impropriety.

- So would they expect, what,

a comedy of manners or a romantic comedy in modern terms?

- I think, when you see "By a Lady" on the cover,

what you expect is really a tale of courtship.

You expect a story about a young woman

who is not married at the beginning of the novel

and is married at the end.

- So who read that first edition of "Sense and Sensibility"?

Although 750 copies were sold in the next couple of years,

there aren't many clues about who actually bought it,

but luckily, there are letters from one woman,

Countess Despencer that prove that "Sense and Sensibility"

was read with pleasure in this house.

Northrop is the breathtaking Northamptonshire home

of the Spencer family.

I went to meet Earl Spencer

to talk to him about his regency relative, Lady Bessborough

who wrote to a friend,

"'Have you read "Sense and Sensibility'?

"It is a clever novel.

"They were full of it at all at Northorp."

- Well, Lady Bessborough is actually the lady

in the middle of the portrait there.

And she's one of the three Spencers of that generation,

the most famous one being the one on the left,

her sister, Georgina, Duchess of Devonshire.

And Harriet was very much her handmaiden and companion.

And we know she was great fun, very, very amiable,

lovely, bright, sparkly person, Harriet,

and intensely loyal.

- I imagine this kind of group of tufts sitting around,

reading, perhaps reading aloud,

have you any sense of how the reading was done

in a room like this?

- I have, I mean,

I know from the diary entries from my family at the time

that reading was taken incredibly seriously.

Lady Bessborough and her family,

when they lived here, when they came here,

it was a buzzing, fizzing place of new ideas.

You know, this was not some stuffy aristocratic outpost.

This was a salon with a crackling atmosphere

of intellect and discovery.

- Lady Bessborough notoriously had a long affair

with a much younger man

who then married her niece.

You know, this is quite racy behavior.

So I wonder how they regard the proprieties really

of a novel like "Sense and Sensibility".

- Well Lady Bessborough did have a racy love life,

but I think that, you know,

you can have an unconventional love life

and still appreciate that the more formal settings

of Jane Austen's novels

and the part of romance

and marriage and social advancement in them.

- I think there must be a strong possibility

that the women in the family sympathized with Marianne,

because though they're aristocratic women,

they still have very constrained choices.

So I think they could really engage with a novel,

which is about limited options.

- I think the fact that Lady Bessborough

and her sister were aristocrats

is sort of less important than the gender, yes.

Lady Bessborough and her sister,

were both paired off with incredibly eligible men

who they didn't like or love.

And so the whole business of marriage

and of aligning marriage with social class,

they would have understood that, very, very keenly.

- In the time of Jane Austen,

courtship was the defining test

in the life of a young woman,

but she was supposed to be passive and self-controlled.

So how could she find out whether a man was worthy?

Austen nails the desperate torment of that struggle

with masterful understatement.

- Marianne, only half dressed,

was kneeling against one of the window seats

for the sake of all the little light

she could command from it.

And writing as fast as a continual flow of tears

would permit her.

In this situation,

Elinor, rouse from sleep by her agitation and sobs,

first perceived her.

And after observing her for a few moments

with silent anxiety,

said in a tone of the most considerate gentleness,

Marianne, may I ask?

No, Elinor, she replied.

Ask nothing.

You will soon know all.

The sort of desperate calmness with which this was said

lasted no longer than while she spoke

and was immediately followed by a return

of the same excessive affliction.

It was some minutes before she could go on with her letter

and the frequent bursts of grief,

which still obliged her at intervals

to withhold her pen,

were proofs enough of her feeling

how more than probable it was that she was writing

for the last time to Willoughby.

- The story of "Marianne and Elinor"

and their broken hearts

was appreciated by an audience well beyond the libraries

of the aristocracy.

Books were expensive,

but thanks to the popular circulating libraries,

Austen's novels also made their way into the hands

of a wider public.

So how successful was she?

- I would say that by the standards of Jane Austen's day,

in her own lifetime,

in that very short period of six years,

between her first published novel and her death,

she's really very successful.

- Oh, you think? - Oh, absolutely.

She publishes her first novel, "Sense and Sensibility",

at her own expense. - Hmm.

- That means she gets the profits from it.

And she earns 250 pounds from "Sense and Sensibility".

And I mean, you don't actually have to even compare it

to other writers earnings.

This is a time where perhaps the income

for a professional gentleman

who's doing quite well might be 500 pounds a year.

So that's a really substantial sum of money.

- Her literary career taking off,

Austen published three more novels in quick succession,

"Pride and Prejudice", in 1813,

"Mansfield Park", in 1814,

and "Emma", in 1815.

But before she could see her last two manuscripts in print,

"Northanger Abbey and Persuasion",

her health began to fail.

In 1817, Jane died in her sister's arms

at the age of only 41.

She was buried here in the splendor of Winchester Cathedral,

but don't get the wrong idea.

This was no grand farewell.

Whatever success Austen had enjoyed

was certainly not translated into public recognition.

Her early morning funeral was discreet

and sparsely attended.

This is her grave.

What's down in there?

She's actually buried beneath here.

In memory of Jane Austen.

Young daughter of the late George Austen of Steventon.

What's she remembered for?

She's remembered as a daughter,

as a true Christian,

for the benevolence of her heart,

the sweetness of her temper

and the extraordinary endowments of her mind.

But that's it,

nothing of her great novels.

So it seems at the very moment of her death,

her great achievement

and her fragile prestige as a writer

is going to perish with her.

Within three years of her death,

Austen had fallen out of fashion and out of print

and unsold copies of her stories

of polite rural society was sold off by the publishers

at knockdown prices.

So what on Earth happened?

Well, the main culprit was romanticism.

Literally, fashion was turning against the drawing room.

By the 1840s, it was dramatic landscapes and wide horizons,

fiery desire and rebellion that sat the pulses racing.

And no woman captured humid passion on the page

quite like Charlotte Bronte.

As a Northern school girl,

there was absolutely no escaping the Brontes.

We're forever here, in Haworth Parsonage, on the coach,

was always raining,

but somehow this kind of gloomy, pooky parsonage,

and the idea of the three sisters writing and dying

seemed designed to appeal to the teenage imagination.

Bronte is as deeply associated with Yorkshire

and gloom and rain and Moors

as Jane Austen is with Hampshire and sunshine.

And Charlotte was certainly no Jane Austen fan.

She complained in letters to her friends.

- The passions

are perfectly unknown to her.

I should hardly like to live with her ladies and gentlemen

in their elegant, but confined houses.

- Lucasta Miller is a Bronte expert.

And I wondered if she could explain

Charlotte's attitude to Austen.

- I think it just suggest that Austen

just wasn't hugely popular in the 1820s and '30s

when Charlotte Bronte was sort of,

as it were, doing her apprenticeship as a writer.

I mean, she was a hugely voracious reader,

but what she was reading

was stuff that was completely opposed

to the Austen sensibility.

- Is it just that the Bronte's found Austen

too sensible and suitable?

- Yeah, there's much more than that.

I think Bronte thought that Austen was in denial

about human psychology.

I mean, Bronte, you know,

the sex instinct and the death instinct

are the things that you get in the Bronte novels,

that sort of, you know,

pulling them right up to the surface

and Bronte thought that Austen was shallow, prim,

superficial, sort of averting her eyes

from the truth about human nature.

- I would say that's a really unfair caricature of Austen

because there's just as much pain and suffering,

disinheritance, poverty,

outsiders and depression, there,

as there is in any Bronte novel.

But clearly there's something lacking

as far as romantic readers are concerned.

So what is it?

- Yeah, I think it's the individualism of Jane

or indeed weathering heights.

The idea of the romantic outside or the romantic rebel.

- Well, Austen's heroines may not have been rebels,

but they still enjoyed heartbreak and desire.

And where Bronte loves hysteria,

Austen prefers smiling irony.

- Dear, Mrs. Moreland,

consider the dreadful nature of the suspicions

you have entertained.

What have you been judging from?

Remember the country and the age in which we live?

Remember that we are English,

that we are Christians.

- 30 years earlier,

Austen mocked overheated Gothic fiction

in her novel, "Northanger Abbey".

You can feel her smirking

when her hero chides the heroine

for entertaining cliched, fantasies about spooky houses,

locked rooms and dirty deeds.

- Consult your own understanding,

your own sense of the probable,

your own observation of what is passing around you.

Dearest Mrs. Moreland,

what ideas have you been entertaining?

- In the decades after her death,

Austen was a background figure in the literary landscape.

Outshone by the unbridled Brontes,

the medieval romances of the Sir Walter Scott,

as well as the social panoramas

of Fackory, Gaskell and Dickens.

But by the middle of the 19th century,

Austen was back in print,

thanks to a new Victorian invention.

The advent of rail travel

re-engineered the shape of the nation

and the speed of life.

Quite unexpectedly, it also created a captive new audience

for books!

In 1848, William Henry Smith and Sons, WHSmiths,

opened their very first railway bookshop, here at Euston.

So if you're off on your travels,

you could nip into the bookshop

and pick up a copy from their railway library.

These very cheap and often garrish editions

were known as yellow backs.

The inclusion of Austen among the early yellow backs

on the shelves of Smiths

was largely due to the fact her titles

had recently fallen out of copyright.

Nevertheless, it was these low price, popular editions,

which introduced Austen for the first time

to a mass audience.

- It is a truth universally acknowledged

that a single man in possession of a good fortune

must be in want of a woman.

- However little know,

the feelings or views of such a man,

may be on his first entering a neighborhood.

- This mystery, so well fixed in the minds

of the surrounding families.

- That he is considered

as the rightful property

of someone or other of their daughters.

- But the real turning point

in Austen's relationship

with her Victorian readers came in 1870,

when Jame's nephew, James Edward Austen Lee,

took it upon himself to present

an authorized account of her life.

I went to meet Professor Kathryn Sutherland

at the modest Hampshire cottage,

where Austen lived with her mother and sister.

So, who is the Jane Austen, then,

that emerges from this first biography?

- Well, a surprisingly intimate picture

of Jane Austen emerges,

how she parceled out her time,

how she was the one in the family

who prepared breakfast at nine in the morning.

She was also responsible for keeping an eye

on the quantities of tea that they had

and just topping it up.

How she wrote in this room,

sitting at her desk over there and how,

this is where, of course,

mythology, perhaps begins to enter the story.

How she was alerted to any unwelcomed intruder

on her writing activities

by the creaking of this door as it opened

so she could hide away her manuscripts.

- I have to say that is one of the most annoying anecdotes

in the whole of the history of literary women.

This idea that, oh, the creaking door.

And then, oh, I'll hide away

'cause I'm a modest little woman.

She's described really in a way that fits,

I think, Victorian ideals of femininity,

like some sort of little rein or spirits, you know,

and not seeking the, you know, the glare of publicity.

And I dunno, it don't fit really

with all the sense of the kind of intellectual breo

that you find in the-

- I think it doesn't fit at all, but undoubtedly,

it does give us a myth

and a myth that remained powerful for an extremely long.

- So presumably, there's not very much

about the secret private life of the bedroom

in the Austen Lee biography.

- No, I think we'd be hard pushed

to find secret private lives of the bedroom

in any of Jane Austen's biographies.

That's a challenge for biographers, isn't it?

But actually, as the way this room is now presented

as part of the museum of the shrine to Jane,

there are elements of the Austen Lee myth in here.

For instance, he had the dilemma of a portrait.

People want to see what Jane Austen looked like.

All he had to work with was this cartoon drawing

by Cassandra, sometime 1810, '11,

rather sardonic image.

- Yes, what a sort of mean little face.

- A mean, little face, indeed,

and sadly argued over what they should do.

And they decided they would give it a make-over.

And so a portrait was commissioned from that

to soften its features.

And interestingly, there was quite a debate in the family

as to whether it looked like Jane and they all agreed,

it had a kind of look of her,

but they wouldn't really recognize her from it.

But on the other hand, it was a pleasant face.

- Pleasant, but much less intelligent looking.

- Less intelligent, a bit dopey.

- Yes, more confined within a domestic image.

- Yes.

- And this became the frontest piece

of the first edition of the biography.

- So this is dear- - This is, shortened.

- Exactly, this is the Jane Austen of myth.

- As the end of the century approached,

an ardent army of Jane Austen fans

were swelling in numbers.

Then and now, the spiritual home for these enthusiasts

was and remains the Georgian resort city of Bath.

Today, the highlight of Bath's annual Jane Austen festival

is a dashing regency parade,

a carnival of and millinery,

bonnets and britches.

And it's not just the ladies

who have a weakness for buckskin.

Are you the haberdasher?

- Well, I, madame, I'm the Haberdasher's assistant,

for my wife's businessman, madame.

- So you sell all this stuff?

How'd you account for everybody wanting to dress up so much?

- Well, I mean that is a short, short question

with a big answer.

If you accept the 60 years of Georgia III's right,

it was probably the greatest epoch in British history

and the regency is the cream on the top of the cake.

And so it attracts so many people.

- Did you make your own costumes

or did you buy them?

- This is my own.

And this is a Naval surgeon, 1806.

- Oh, is it? - Oh yes, yeah.

- Do you think, that's what a lot of the appeal is,

actually seeing clothes, the costumes, the carriages, the-

- Oh yeah, yeah.

- The chandeliers. - Yeah.

It's like age of elegance, that's gone, I think.

And a lot of people look for it.

A lot of people are wishing they were back

to that standard of elegance.

- A hundred years ago,

there was a rather more serious male interest in her books,

a sophisticated, and highbrow clique of academics

and elites who call themselves the Janeites.

For Janeites, like George Saintsbury,

the proper appreciation of Austen's literature

was an exclusive and reverential pursuit.

- With Ms. Austen,

the myriad, trivial unforced strokes

build up the picture like magic.

Nothing is false.

Nothing is superfluous.

- Katie Halsey is the author of a new book

on Jane Austen's readers.

And I met up with her in Bath

to find out who these Janeites actually were.

- They're a sort of cozy elites of Oxford dawns,

the literati, who are all really interested in Jane Austen.

- They do seem quite precious to me, the Janeites.

They say things like,

oh, I'd like to marry Elizabeth Bennett

and spend my life with her.

It was quite an odd thing to say about a heroine.

- Yeah, it is.

But then that whole thing about wanting

to be a part of Jane Austen's life

is very much part of what the Janeites are all about, too.

So they're interested

in falling in love with her characters,

knowing more about her characters,

being part of a world, I suppose,

that Jane Austen has created.

- So what was it that the Janeites found in the books?

Is it the characters, the style, the laughter?

Is it the wit?

Is it the architecture?

- I think it's probably

all of those things and more.

I mean, I think one of the things they did find

was an idea of an England that had gone,

a secure world, a world that has rules,

however much those rules may actually be subverted

and undercut in the novels.

So I think people saw that stability in her.

- I think it's good to know

that there are all these sort of male supporters

of Jane Austen throughout history,

because somehow the fact that she is now seen

as such a kind of female author with a female readership

has somehow undermined her status.

- Yes and I think it's important

for people to know that Winston Churchill, for example,

read Jane Austen in the middle of the war.

And he said that she cured him.

Antibiotics and Jane Austen made me better

from a fever, he says.

- Another loyal Janeite was the writer, Rudyard Kipling.

During the first World War,

the Kipling's lost their only son in battle.

Rudyard assuaged their grief,

reading Austen aloud to his wife and daughter.

He even went on to write a short story called the Janeites

sat in the battlefields of the Western front.

This is the man in gate, in HIPA,

the town, the Tommy's called wipers.

Thousands upon thousands of soldiers

from across the British empire

marched out into the trenches through this gate.

In an act of commemoration,

a ceremony of remembrance takes place here

every single day of the year.

Trench warfare was a soul destroying mix

of intermittent terror and numbing monotony.

The December, 1915 edition of the War Illustrated reported,

we were caught unprepared by the calama for books

that rose from the trenches almost as soon as they were dug.

No matter what officer or man was asked,

if there was anything he wanted,

the answer was always the same.

Cigarettes and something to read.

But what sort of books did the soldiers demand?

What he does not want is fiction about war.

He likes tales of strong domestic interest,

and it is worth noting that Jane Austen

has taken her fragrant way

into a surprising number of dugouts.

Among papers donated to the Imperial War Museum,

there is a private memoir by an officer,

a teacher from Glasgow

by the name of William Boyd Henderson.

- Often and often,

during a long notch,

of a cold dotted job,

a lottie or a caterpillar,

I've been think kept in my spirits

by the thought of the book in my kitbag waiting for me,

with what eagerness I have opened it

and being transported immediately

from the world of sergeant majors,

being out fighting and trench digging and lolly cleaning

and caterpillar leasing to a new world created for me

by adored, Jane Austen.

- I see myself lying full length on the grass

as I finish a chapter of "Emma".

Till now that she was threatened with its loss,

Emma had never known how much of her happiness

depended on being first with Mr. Knightley,

first in interest and affection.

Satisfied that it was so and feeling it her due,

she had enjoyed it without reflection.

And only in the dread of being supplanted

found how inexpressibly important it had been.

Face to face with industrialized military slaughter,

soldiers could look away into Austen's world

and be consoled.

In 1917, an intelligence officer, Reginald Farrah,

managed to find time to mark the centenary

of Jane Austen's death with a critical essay,

which redefined her achievement.

Farrah wrote, "Talk of her limitations is vain.

"It must never be thought that limitation of scene

"implies limitation of human emotion.

"Jane Austen's heroes and heroines and subject matter

"are in fact, universal human nature.

He kills off stone dead,

the idea of two-ways spinsterish Jane

and says, really she lives only in the novels

where she is a genius on a par with Shakespeare,

important forever for the brilliance of her realism.

So it lasts a hundred years after her death.

She's finally made it as a national author.

After the unimaginable barbarity of World War,

the civilizing power of culture

seemed essential for the future of mankind.

And in the universities, the study of the humanities,

especially English literature, expanded rapidly.

This newly popular discipline demanded a scientific rigor,

be brought to the gentle art of reading books.

In 1948, a controversial Cambridge-dom

wrote a book that transformed Jane Austen's ranking

in the literary league tables.

F. R. Leavis was one of the most opinionated

and influential critics of modern times.

And he was based here at Downing College.

Leavis formed the taste of generations of graduates

from the 1930s, right through to the 1960s.

In his bible entitled, "The Great Tradition",

F. R. Leavis asserted that there were only five,

truly great novelists writing in English.

And they were D.H. Lawrence,

Henry James, Joseph Conrad,

George Elliott, and then the writer he declared,

the mother of the great tradition, Jane Austen.

F.R. his wife, Queenie,

both taught the young Janet Todd,

when she was a student in Cambridge, in the sixties.

- Right after the war.

and the I think that the Leavis' both thought

that English literature was going to save civilization

and we were to learn it and get it correct.

And then we would go out into the big world

and in a sense, preach the doctrine of English literature.

So I think there was a real didactic aim in it.

At the same time,

they despised didacticism in literature,

which is why they liked Jane Austen.

- Man Booker Prize winner Howard Jacobson,

who rogueishly calls himself

the Jewish Jane Austen

was also a student of the Leavis'.

- He's was the words on the page, man.

That was the phrase, the words on the page.

And that was why I went to him.

I was interested in the words on the page,

and that was why I'd got to Jane Austen, myself,,

because of the words on the page.

Nothing extraneous.

Leavis said, Jane Austen, is a serious of writer,

as you get, and the fact that she is as funny as she is,

doesn't detract from the seriousness,

indeed contributes to the seriousness,

but these are serious, serious novels as you get,

Leavis argues, about society and about morality,

about the relation between manners and morality.

And I had no difficulty reading her that way, too,

when I got to Cambridge.

- So what are the qualities that they really praise then,

in Jane Austen?

Because we have this,

if she's been praised in the 19th century

for her kind of homely virtue and her domestic heroines,

and then she seems to be praised in the early 20th century,

you know, for her wit. - Hmm.

- Where is the moral force, then,

that Leavis would have loved in her?

- Well, I think it's a moral complexity,

that's what they like.

And it's not "Pride and Prejudice", primarily.

It's "Mansfield Park".

And Queenie says that "Mansfield Park"

is the first modern novel.

- Alas, it was almost Crawford's doing.

She had seen her influence in every speech

and was miserable.

The doubts and alarms as to her own conduct,

which had previously distressed her in,

which had all slept while she listened to him

will become of little consequence, now.

This deeper anxiety swallowed them up.

Things should take their course.

She cared not how it ended.

Her cousins might attack, but could hardly tease her.

She was beyond their reach,

and if it lasts obliged to yield, no matter.

It was all misery, now.

- "Mansfield Park", interestingly,

was probably the novel that we did most at Cambridge,

that we thought most about at Cambridge.

It was the one that had that air of being, you know,

a serious investigation

of the mores of that society.

- Frannie, we want your services.

- Yes, I'm here.

- Oh, don't leave your seat, we don't want you now.

But for the plane.

You must be wife.

- No.

Indeed, you must excuse me.

I could not act for anything.

If you wanted to give me the world,

well indeed, I cannot.

- The tragedy just under the surface of that world,

of high morals,

of how snobbery or a certain kind of laxity here and there

could lead to the most terrible consequences.

- I'm quite ashamed of you, Fannie,

to make such a difficulty of obliging your cousins

in such a trifle,

so kind as they are to you?

Pick the pop with the good grace

and let us hear no more of it.

- Do not urge her madame.

It is not fair to urge her.

- I am not going to urge her.

But I shall think her a very obstinate, ungrateful girl,

if she does not do what her aunt and cousins wish her.

Ungrateful indeed, considering who and what she is.

- While Jane Austen was being read with a new seriousness

at the academic high table,

she was also settling down with a new mass audience

in cinemas and sitting rooms up and down the country.

- So what are you showing me now?

- This is 1967.

Yeah, this is a BBC costume drama from the period.

- A young man, who is he?

- A young man of large fortune from the north of England.

- It's Sunday tea time, here.

And this is important, I think,

because the classic serial was for many years,

sort of a children's slot, really,

tea time drama on a Sunday night.

- It's news to me him being extremely rich

If he's flying from one place to another.

I begin to wonder whether he'll be so great

an asset to our neighborhood...

- But this is going out at the same time

as the "The Forsyte Saga". - Of course.

- BBC Two, later in the evening for grownups.

So this is like the junior version of "The Forsyte Saga".

- Without the sex, though.

- Without the sex, without the-

But even then, Austen is not kind of

really one of the major writers for this kind of slot.

Still, the tea time classic serial

was very much the preserve of Robert Louis Stevenson,

and Dickins- - Oh, "Kidnapped".

- Yeah, absolutely, yeah.

So you would see "Kidnapped" or "Oliver Twist"

or "St. Ives" or "Dom Busby" or something like that.

- So here we are, 1980, "Pride and Prejudice",

this is the first adaptation that I remember vividly.

Is it a classier production?

- Much more so, it's much more expensive.

The lighting is much more complicated.

There's much more location filming in it.

The playing style is very different, too.

It's much less of a feeling of being trapped inside

the quality street tin with this.

There's a subtlety to it.

There's an authenticity to the costumes, too.

We're clearly in the right period, you know?

- Is this on BBC One, BBC Two, what time?

- This is BBC Two and this is Sunday.

- So it's at nine o'clock.

- Hmm, yeah, I mean, we're in,

this is a slot that for a decade or so at this point

has been associated with high-end,

thoughtful literary adaptation.

- So it's the version then,

the heritage paint?

- Yeah, very much so, very much so.

Here he comes. - Oh, marvelous.

- Standing around in this stupid manner.

- Dance with such company...

- Look at those cheekbones, my words.

- So is the moment you became an Austen scholar?

- I think it might be.

I do remember, we all had-

- Are you having an epiphany, now?

- We all had a bit of a pash on David, look at that.

- Dancing with that.

- Oh, she's the most beautiful creature I ever beheld.

- Austen seems to have achieved the status now

of kind of heritage entertainment for adults,

utterly kind of tasteful and restrained.

- Yes, the tone of these adaptations

has changed very dramatically.

It's risen from the status of historical fun of some kind

to an object of veneration.

- And then it seems to me that in 1995,

it all kind of goes ballistic, really.

- That's the moment she goes from being BBC Two to BBC One,

from niche to mainstream.

She does seem to take on a different kind of weight

in the world, really.

Maybe kind of the producers finally know who she is.

- The big difference in the 1995 adaptation

is famously how much sex Andrew Davis

kind of pumped back into that production.

- That is the moment when that happens, isn't it?

We all know the image that's coming next.

- I know, and I can't bear it.

In 1995, the actor Colin Firth

emerged from the lake of Pemberley.

In his sopping wet linen shirts

and walked straight into female fantasy.

"Pride and Prejudice" with added testosterone,

potent fuel that launched a truly global brand.

Mr. Darcy?

- Mrs. Bennett.

- I did not expect to see you, sir.

We understood all the family were from who

or we would never have presumed.

- Excuse me.

- Over the last two decades,

thanks to both cinema and Andrew Davis' sexy TV version

of regency gentility,

Jane Austen has leapt from classic author

into the realm of cult status.

Back in Texas, that same Andrew Davis

is the star turn at the Jane Austen Society Convention.

- I have a very quick question.

Could you tell me why when Elizabeth accepts Darcy,

that I don't see any real emotion on his part

that he's really happy about it?

- Very good question.

And thank you very much for pointing up the only bad about-

- Outside the hall, I asked Andrew why he'd wanted

to adapt "Pride and Prejudice" in the first place.

- I thought that all the previous adaptations were so dumb,

completely missed the fact that it's about sex and money.

And that the engine of the plot is Darcy's desire

for Elizabeth.

And I wanted to emphasize the physicality and the thing,

it's about young people with hormones.

So, lots and lots of galloping horses,

lots and lots of opportunity

for the audience to see the actors

with as many of their clothes off and seen-

- I did notice that.

- Compatible with this-

- So you really developed, I think,

the character of Darcy, didn't you?

I mean, I, for me, it seems as if you kind of made him more,

almost more like Mr. Rochester.

There's a bit of Bronte in your roster.

- I don't think I was changing his character in the least,

from what Jane Austen did.

What I was doing was trying to give the audience a chance

to see the story from his point of view, as well as hers.

- But you did something similar, I think,

in "Sense and Sensibility".

- Absolutely, I think Jane Austen,

missed a trick or two in "Sense and Sensibility" because-

- You better not say that here.

- I am going to say it here

because the guys that get the girls

in "Sense and Sensibility" on the face of it

are not worthy of them.

And so I thought, they really needed butching up.

And so that's what I did.

- You added testosterone to it.

- Yes.

- What impact do you think the adaptations have

on the readership of the books themselves?

- Well, I think there's been a change in a lot of ways

because a lot of kids, a lot of students

come to the books through the adaptations

and while it's a good way to get school kids in particular,

to read the books.

- So what's happening to the Austen brand now?

Do you think her popularity has peaked for a while?

- I think it might have peaked over here,

in the West at any rate.

I'm not sure whether the we've heard enough

from the Chinese, from the far East, in fact.

I don't know when,

because there's a huge enthusiasm for Jane Austen in Japan

and increasingly in China, as well.

- So, we've had Southern California,

Bollywood and next stop, China.

- Well, that's my bet.

- So what is it in Austen's prose

that has allowed her to be both so freely adapted

and so widely read?

I think there is a clue to her magic

in the Hampshire village, where she was born.

One of the most surprising things about Jane Austen

is just how very little we know about her.

This is the site of the Vic Ridge,

where she was born and spent a large part of her life.

It's all nettles and cow paths today.

So you have to use your imagination to fill in the blanks,

which is just what Jane Austen trusted her readers

to be able to do.

Open any of Austen's novels

and you won't get bogged down in descriptive details.

For example, all we are ever really told

about Willoughby or Darcy's looks

is that they are uncommonly handsome.

Austen leaves room for the reader's intelligence

and fantasies, which has the uncanny effect

of allowing each new generation

to see themselves reflected back from her pages.

I think it's her spare restrained style of writing

that has also allowed Austen to be so widely reinvented

and ultimately, popularized.

I bet Austen satirical pen would have got

to work on this eccentric convention thrown in her honor,

but for the 600 delegates,

having fun living the Jane Austen life for a weekend,

this is all an attempt to unlock the fiction

they love so much.

Sheryl Kinney is a doctor from Dallas

and chair of this year's event.

What I've been struck by

is just incredible intellectual firepower got here.

I mean, you're a gynecologist.

There's judges, teachers, journalists,

but ordinary readers and fans all mixing together.

- And that's the wonderful thing about Jane Austen

that you can enjoy her on so many levels.

You can just enjoy the films.

You can know the books verbatim and we embrace everyone.

And that's what's so much fun.

- You're working hard to dispel

any kind of old fashioned chintzy view of Jane Austen?

- Well, absolutely.

And this year we worked very hard on that.

One of our sponsors provided us with black lace panties.

- Oh my word. - Yes.

And in each bag was a note from John Willoughby

that said to call him.

- Call me XO, XO, Willoughby.

- Yes. - What does he say?

- Well, when you call him on the phone,

it says, hi, I'm John.

This is John Willoughby.

And I'm not available this weekend.

Come to New York in 2012 for sex, power and money,

which is the next conference.

- But also, you have all this other stuff.

Team Willoughby.

I'm amazed that a gynecologist would support Willoughby.

- Yes, well, as I said,

unless I'm trying to make money

from sexually transmitted diseases, so.

Oh, that just slipped out.

- This gathering of readers displays a defining aspect

of Austen's long lasting power.

Plenty of men love Austen.

But from the outset,

these books by a woman, about women,

always created a sense of female community

from the ladies of all Thorpe onwards

and amongst this extremely diverse group,

I think the main attraction is still

that strong sense of sisterhood.

I'm really moved by the warmth of the community

of fans, scholars, and readers

all united by their love for Jane Austen.

But perhaps, that's actually,

what's unique about Austen as a writer.

She seems to have pulled off

what seems an impossible combination of academic prestige

and popular devotion.

- To Jane.

- Very good.

Oh.