The Many Lovers of Miss Jane Austen

BIRDSONG

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 her stories of the courtships

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 travelled a long way.

From the libraries of aristocrats,

to cheap railway bookstalls.

She produced fiction which had a sort of,

a self possession and a technical audacity,

unparalleled anywhere else in Europe.

She was adored by soldiers

and she found stardom on stage and on screen.

It's a hit Broadway comedy.

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 importantly as she does.

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-loved 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 bonnets,

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 ranks second only to Shakespeare.

This gloriously eccentric hotel convention,

demonstrates the rampant commercialisation

of the world Jane Austen made.

There's an extraordinary array of merchandise,

spin offs from the Austen brand.

Jane And The Damned.

Austen as chick lit.

Clueless - Emma updated to an American high school.

And here we have Bollywood, Bride And Prejudice.

It's an astounding phenomenon.

But underneath all the dressing up and role play

the spin-offs and the merchandise,

there are plenty of committed Austen readers.

I like the way she characterises 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, the 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 I have...

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.

This is a section...

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

'at the manuscript, before it went under the hammer.'

I've never seen a Jane Austen manuscript before.

Yeah it's a...

it is a wonderful thing, so exciting to actually see...

see her handwriting and, of course, not just...

just her handwriting, it's not... 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, you know,

careful corrections.

This is the only manuscript draft, isn't it, of her unfinished novel?

-Yeah, that's right.

-The Watsons.

It's a very tantalising fragment, isn't it?

Yes.

"Your lordship thinks

"we always have our own way."

Yeah.

"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 lords,

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

Absolutely!

Yeah!

I think what's really most important about this piece of work

is its content and that seems to me, quite explosive,

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....

Are you at liberty...?

What sort of figure do you expect?

The estimate is £200-to-300,000.

At 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 then, at 800,000... 820, I have now.

850...

No? It's in the room.

On the arm. Anybody else?

At 850...

last chance, against you all.

No regrets? At 850...

Yours sir. Thank you.

APPLAUSE

The Watsons has just sold for a stunning £850,000,

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 none 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, re-reading,

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? Oh!

Oh, Marianne.

'And even today, the locals still relish a bit of alfresco theatre.'

I think I've twisted my ankle.

Allow me to offer my services, madam.

'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 her early 20s,

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, however may I thank you? May I ask to whom I am so obliged?

"His name, he replied, was..."

Willoughby, madam, currently of Allenham.

"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 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?

People say it's because she was modest and unassuming...

No!

..which is baloney actually,

because Sir Walter Scott, who was the bestselling novelist of the age,

also published anonymously.

So it's 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 in Chawton, a 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.

Jane Austen didn't tell her.

I think she quite liked 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 more likely to buy a novel by a lady?

I think saying, "By A Lady" on the title page,

did affect people's expectations.

I think they would have known that it was an advertisement

for the kind of product they were getting.

They weren't going to get

roistering scenes of, sort of, sexual impropriety.

So would they expect, what, a comedy of manners

or 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.

Let me be open now.

Every day,

since I first saw you,

my love for you has grown.

Elinor, I know I have no right to hope,

but I must ask.

Can you forgive me?

Can you love me?

Will you marry me?

Austen anatomised the social and psychological drama of courtship,

the perils and the pleasures.

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 Bessborough,

that prove Sense And Sensibility,

was read with pleasure in this house.

Althorp 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 Althorp."

Lady Bessborough's the lady in the middle of the portrait there,

and one of the three Spencers of that generation,

the most famous one on the left,

her sister Georgiana, 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 toffs, sitting around reading, perhaps reading aloud.

Have you any sense of how reading was done in a room like this?

I have. I mean, I know from 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 behaviour.

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 I think that,

you know, you can have a, you can have an unconventional love life

and still appreciate the more formal settings of Jane Austen's novels,

and the part of romance,

and marriage and social advancement in them.

There must be a strong possibility that the women in the family

sympathised 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 their gender.

Lady Bessborough and her sister were both paired off

with incredibly eligible men who they didn't like or love,

so the whole business of marriage

and of allying 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,

roused 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

and that means she gets the profits from it.

She earns £250 from Sense And Sensibility.

I mean, you don't actually even have to compare it to other writers' earnings.

This is at the time where perhaps the income for a professional gentleman who's doing quite well

might be £500 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 splendour 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 discrete and sparsely attended.

This is her grave.

I mustn't stand on it. She's actually buried beneath here.

"In memory of Jane Austen.

"Younger 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.

Unsold copies of her stories of polite rural society

were sold off by the publishers at knock-down prices.

So what on earth happened?

Well, the main culprit was Romanticism.

Literary fashion was turning against the drawing room.

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

fiery desire and rebellion, that set 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 were forever here in Haworth Parsonage on the coach.

It was always raining.

But somehow this kind of gloomy, poky 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, 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 suggests that Austen just wasn't hugely popular

in the 1820s and '30s when Charlotte Bronte was,

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 Brontes found Austen too sensible and suitable?

Yeah, but it'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.

They're 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 Eyre or indeed Wuthering Heights.

The idea of the romantic outsider, the romantic rebel.

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

but they still endured heartbreak and desire.

And where Bronte loves hysteria, Austen prefers smiling irony.

"Dear Miss Morland,

"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 Miss Morland, 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 Sir Walter Scott,

as well as the social panoramas of Thackeray, 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,

WH Smiths,

opened their very first railway bookshop here at Euston.

So if you were off on your travels you could nip into the bookshop

and pick up a copy from their railway library.

These very cheap and often garish editions

were known as yellowbacks.

The inclusion of Austen

among the early yellowbacks on the shelves of Smiths

was largely due to the fact

her titles had recently fallen out of copyright.

Nevertheless, it was these low-priced 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 wife."

"However little known of the feelings or views of such a man,

"may be on his first entering a neighbourhood..."

"This truth is so well fixed in the minds of the surrounding families..."

"That he is considered as the rightful property

"of some one or other of their daughters."

But the real turning point in Austen's relationship

with her Victorian readers came in 1870,

when Jane's nephew, James Edward Austen-Leigh,

took it upon himself to present an authorised 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 parcelled out her time,

how she was the one in the family who prepared breakfast at 9.00 am.

She was also responsible for

keeping an eye on the quantities of tea that they had, and topping it up.

How she wrote in this room,

sitting at her desk over there

and how, and this is where of course

mythology perhaps begins to enter the story,

how she was alerted to any unwelcome 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 of, "Ooh, the creaking door,"

and then, "Oh, I'll hide away cos 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 wren or sparrow.

-Yes.

You know, and not seeking the glare of publicity

and...I don't know, it doesn't fit, really,

with all the sense of the intellectual brio

-you find in the novels.

-No, 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 time.

So, presumably there's not very much

about the secret private life of the bedroom in the Austen-Leigh biography.

No, I think we'd be hard pushed to find secret life of the bedroom

in any of Jane Austen's biographies.

That's a challenge for the biographer, 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-Leigh myth in here.

For instance, he had,

he had the dilemma of a portrait.

People wanted 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, quite a mean little face, really.

-A mean little face indeed.

Pursed little lips?

And the family argued over what they should do,

and they decided they would give it a makeover.

So a portrait was commissioned from that to soften its features.

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 recognise her from it.

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

Pleasant, but much less intelligent-looking.

-Less intelligent, more homely...

-Bit dopey.

-Yes!

-More confined within a domestic image.

-Yes.

And this became the frontispiece of the first edition of the biography.

-So this is dear Saint Jane of Chawton.

-Exactly.

This is the Jane Austen of myth.

PARLOUR MUSIC

As the end of the century approached

an ardent army of Jane Austen fans were swelling in numbers.

Make haste!

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 muslins and millinery, bonnets and breeches.

And it's not just the ladies who have a weakness for buckskin.

Are you the haberdasher?

Well, I, madam, am the haberdasher's assistant.

Tis my wife's business, madam.

So you sell all this stuff.

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

Well...

I mean, that is a short, short question and a big answer.

If you accept that the 60 years of George III's reign

were 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 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 the clothes, the costumes, the carriages,

-the chandeliers.

-Oh yes, yeah.

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

And a lot of people look for it.

A lot of people wish they were back to that standard of elegance.

100 years ago

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

A sophisticated and high-brow clique of academics and aesthetes

who called themselves the Janeites.

GEORGIAN DANCING MUSIC

For Janeites like Sir George Saintsbury,

the proper appreciation of Austen's literature

was an exclusive and reverential pursuit.

With Miss 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 cosy elite of Oxford dons, the literati,

who are all really interested in Jane Austen.

They do seem quite precious to me.

The Janeites say things like,

"I'd like to marry Elizabeth Bennett and spend my life with her."

It's 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.

They're interested in falling in love with her characters,

knowing more about them, being part of a world 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 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 be subverted and undercut in the novels.

I think people saw that stability in her.

I think it's good to know

there are all these male supporters of Jane Austen throughout history

because somehow the fact she is now seen

as a kind of female author with a female readership

has somehow undermined her status.

Yes, I think it's important for people to know

Winston Churchill, for example, read Jane Austen in the middle of the war

and said she cured him.

"Antibiotics and Jane Austen made me better from a fever," he says.

DRUM BEATS

Another loyal Janeite was the writer Rudyard Kipling.

During the First World War,

the Kiplings 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

set in the battlefields of the Western Front.

This is the Menin Gate in Ypres,

the town the Tommies 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.

BUGLES PLAY "THE LAST POST"

Trench warfare was a soul-destroying mix

of intermittent terror

and numbing monotony.

SOUNDS OF CANNONS

The December 1915 edition of The War Illustrated

reported, "We were caught unprepared by the clamour 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 dug-outs."

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 route march or a cold dirty job,

a lorry or caterpillar, I've been kept in my spirits

by the thought of the book in my kit bag waiting for me.

With what eagerness I have opened it and been transported immediately

from the world of sergeant majors, bayonet fighting and trench digging

and lorry cleaning and caterpillar greasing

to a new world created for me by my 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 industrialised military slaughter,

soldiers could look away into Austen's world

and be consoled.

In 1917, an intelligence officer, Reginald Farrer,

managed to find time to mark the centenary of Jane Austen's death

with a critical essay which redefined her achievement.

Farrer 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 twee, spinsterish Jane,

and says really, she lives only in the novels

where she's a genius on a par with Shakespeare,

important forever for the brilliance of her realism.

So at last, 100 years after her death,

she's finally made it as the...as a national author.

After the unimaginable barbarity of world war,

the civilising 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 rigour

be brought to the gentle art of reading books.

In 1948, a controversial Cambridge don

wrote a book that transformed Jane Austen's ranking

in the literary league tables.

FR 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,

FR Leavis asserted

that there are only five truly great novelists writing in English.

And they were

DH Lawrence, Henry James,

Joseph Conrad, George Eliot,

and then, the writer he declared the mother of the great tradition,

Jane Austen.

FR and his wife Queenie both taught the young Janet Todd

when she was a student in Cambridge in the '60s.

It was right after the war, and I think the Leavises both thought

that English literature was going to save civilisation.

We were to learn it and get it correct

and then we were to 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 roguishly calls himself the Jewish Jane Austen,

was also a student of the Leavises.

He 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 as serious a 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 as serious novels as you get.

Leavis argues about society, 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 praised 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 for her wit,

where is the moral force 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

and 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 at last 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.

-Fanny, we want your services.

-Yes. I'm here.

You needn't leave your seat.

We don't want you now, but for the play.

-You must be Cottager's wife.

-No!

Indeed you must excuse me.

I could not act for anything if you were to give me the world.

No, 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, Fanny, to make such a difficulty

of obliging your cousins in such a trifle,

so kind as they are to you. Take the part with a good grace and let us hear no more of it.

Do not urge her, madam. 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.

Very 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.

You've taken me to the movies to see an MGM costume drama.

-Set the scene.

-We're in 1940, the year this film was made.

This is MGM's production of Pride And Prejudice.

Big budget film. You can see the money up on the screen there,

-all those costumes, all that costume jewellery.

-Lots of glittering.

The star is Lawrence Olivier, Mr Darcy.

A great screen lover of the period, full of burning, savage romance.

-Marvellous!

-And his co-star is Greer Garson.

I am afraid that the honour of standing up with you, Mr Darcy, is more than I can bear.

Pray excuse me.

-Is this the first Austen film adaptation?

-Yes, it is.

Austen was almost untouched by film makers until this point.

-Between 1897 and 1915 there were 60 Dickens films made.

-60?

60. Not a single Austen one.

The silents weren't interested in her

really because the dialogue is the joy of it, isn't it?

There's no big-action set pieces.

And now we see...

This, like most films of the period, went to a stage adaptation for inspiration

and I think the original audience of this film would have watched this as though it was one of those.

So they're not coming to it as readers of Jane Austen, then?

Or fans of Jane Austen thinking, "Let's see our beloved Jane on screen?"

This is a hit Broadway comedy. That's what this is.

So what are you showing me now?

-This is 1967.

-Oh, we've leapt on.

Yeah. This is a BBC costume drama from the period.

This young man, who is he?

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

It's Sunday teatime here and this is important, I think,

because the classic serial was for many years a children's slot, really.

Teatime drama on a Sunday night.

It's not use to me his being extremely rich if he's forever flying from one place to another.

I begin to wonder whether he'll be so great an asset to...

-But this is going out at the same time as The Forsyte Saga.

-Of course.

BBC Two, later in the evening, for grown-ups.

So this is like the junior version of the Forsyth Saga.

-Without the sex, then?

-Without the sex...

-Irene!

-Yes, without Irene pinioned!

THEY LAUGH

But even then Austen is not really one of the major writers for this kind of slot.

Still the teatime classic serial was very much the preserve of

-Robert Louis Stevenson and Dickens and much more.

-Oh, Kidnapped?

Absolutely. So you would see Kidnapped or Oliver Twist

or St Ives or Dombey And Son, 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's much more complicated.

There's much more location filming in it.

The plain 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 subtly to it and an authenticity to the costumes.

We're clearly in the right period.

Is this on BBC One, BBC Two? What time?

This is BBC Two and this is Sunday night.

-So it's at 9 o'clock?

-Mm.

-Top slot.

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 Laura Ashley version, then? The Heritage paint?

-Very much so, very much so.

-Oh!

-Here he comes.

Oh, it's marvellous!

-..this stupid manner...

-Dance with such company?

Look at those cheek bones. My word.

So is this the moment you became an Austen scholar?

I think it might be!

-I do remember there was a...

-Are you having an epiphany now?

Yeah! We all we all had a bit of a pash on David Rintoul.

Look at 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 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 the producers finally know who she is.

The big difference in the 1995 adaptation

is famously how much sex Andrew Davies pumped back into that production.

-That is the moment that happens. We all know the image that's coming next.

-I can't bear it!

In 1995, the actor Colin Firth emerged from the lake at Pemberley

in a sopping-wet linen shirt and walked straight into female fantasy.

Pride And Prejudice with added testosterone,

potent fuel that launched a truly global brand.

Mr Darcy!

Miss Bennett.

I did not expect to see you, sir.

We understood all the family were from home or we would never have presumed.

Excuse me.

Over the last two decades, thanks to both cinema

and Andrew Davies' 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 Davies 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 out the only bad thing about the film!

LAUGHTER

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

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

and that the engine of the plot is Darcy's desire for Elizabeth.

I wanted to emphasise the physicality.

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...

-I did notice that!

-..as seemed compatible and decent.

So you really developed, I think, the character of Darcy, didn't you?

I mean, for me, it seems as if you kind of made him almost more like Mr Rochester.

There's a bit of Bronte in your Austen.

Um, 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...

-You'd 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.

So that's what I did.

-You added testosterone to it.

-Er, 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.

Well, 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 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 vicarage where she was born

and spent a large part of her life.

It's all nettles and cowpats 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 popularised.

I bet Austen's satirical pen would have got to work on

this eccentric convention thrown in her honour.

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.

Cheryl Kinney is a doctor from Dallas and chair of this year's event.

What I've been struck by

is the incredible intellectual firepower you've got here.

I mean, you're a gynaecologist, 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! XOXO Willoughby." 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?

-Yes.

-I'm amazed that a gynaecologist would support Willoughby.

Well, as I said, unless I'm trying to make money from sexually transmitted diseases.

You won't put that on, will you? Oh, that just slipped out!

AMANDA HOWLS WITH LAUGHTER

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 Althorp onwards.

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!

-ALL: To Jane!

Very good.

Ooh!

# Happy trails to you

# Until we meet again

# Happy trails to you

# Till we meet again. #

Happy trails, everyone. Have a good night.

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