The Tragic Early Death Of Jane Austen

[Music] lucy thank you for bringing me to this house jane austen's house first of all jane austen one of the world's greatest novelists oh totally and a really not only an important writer but an important human being it's a fun human yeah i think say one of my favorite people from history that's interesting she's one of my favorite authors but i hate emma is that normal oh yeah so many people hate i hate them except for the people who really really love her and then do they dislike the other ones is there is that a thing in jane austen studies like if you love persuasion and pride and prejudice and hey emma is that an or is it the way around do you love emma and hate the other ones i think that a true austin lover's gonna love them all but you probably hate emma because she's a bit kind of um full of herself uppity know it all and some people are drawn to a character like that inexplicably which i love it all you know better than anybody that i love no tools but no i don't like emma because it's weird at the end she kind of marries her father figure that's why i don't like that novel sorry spoilers yeah that's one way of looking at it but he is kind and good and so much more emotionally mature than say mr rc darcy okay well we can get into this now listen tell me what is the what is the importance of this house and what am i gonna see this is the house where it's generally accepted that jane austen was happy and productive and finally sort of settled in life after quite an itinerant journey through life and here she wrote her three late great novels and here and this is where it all turns tragic and heartbreaking here she got ill with the strange illness that killed her when she was only 41 years old pretty young and when she died was she a figure of national celebration is that why the house was preserved or was it rescued later she wasn't so not a figure of national celebration during her lifetime four of her main six books were published but her name wasn't on them because that was not genteel that was not ladylike and the point about this house is that although it looks like a highly desirable residence and i'd be very glad to live here myself for her at her level in society this was a bit of a calm down this was slightly slumming it for somebody like her whose brother was immensely rich and he lived in a mansion up the road and he had another mansion in kent and he was fantastically wealthy so this was a funny little place where she found a funny little way of living i would say can we go inside and look at that funny way of living let's have a look so this would have been a little sort of a cottage or a little house at the time it was a bailiffs cottage for the rich brother and then he could see that his widow's mother and sisters were in a hole because they were all single ladies with no money and nowhere to live so finally and it took him a long time he said you can come and live this in this cottage that that i've got and at that time they were living in a house in southampton where they couldn't really afford the rent and the roof leaked and he got them out of a hole but on the other hand so he should have done it so he should have done so he should have done and also they belong to this level of society that was called the pseudo gentry i quite like this stuff it means that you want to be in the landed gentry but you haven't actually got any land but you have aspirations so there's a certain amount of make do and mend and keeping up appearances and so this little cottage was by the village pond now missing it was damp there's a lot of traffic going past the stagecoach used to almost make the building shake and the building here it used to get quite full up because all of the nieces and nephews that jane austen had she had 33 nieces and nephews used to come and stay uninvited so in some ways you know it was a good solution and she was able to get on her right with her writing here but in other ways it was second best for somebody who was born into her level of society was the pseudo gentry a very scary place to be if you drop out of that yeah what happens to you i mean it's really she could not her family did not sort of really give her the confidence to go out and for example get a job she could have become a governor she could have earned 35 pounds a year doing that the total expectation for her in life was that she'd get married to a rich man and so her brother was quite grudging grudgingly giving them supporting them yeah and was she by the even by the end of her life was the money coming in from book sales and i think was able to support this lifestyle at all was she depend on her brother her whole life she sort of was really by the time she died at 41 her lifetime earnings from all of her novels that she published so far were 650 pounds that's quite a lot if you compare it to the salary of a governance of 35 pounds a year but if you were say a georgian solicitor or doctor you'd earn that much in six months it wasn't a whole lot of money so here she is occupying this sort of funny precarious upper to middle to lower to middle level in society and let's talk about the rumor now what do we know do we know would this have been how it was when she was in the house yes pretty this is the drawing room and the ladies so mrs austin and her and jane and her sister when they moved in they added this window into it um and they closed up i think i'm writing a window that looked onto the road because they were trying to convert it from being a cottage on a busy road there's a previously been a pub actually and they're trying to make it more into a little country house with a view of the garden much more bit of gentrification going on the story goes that the books were written in this room here and this is this is this is the creation myth of jane austen's late great free books that she wrote here she spaced us out at that little wobbly table and this room had a squeaky door and the story goes that she would never get the squeak at the door fixed because that was her warning that somebody was going to come in and that meant that she would put away the paper she wasn't supposed to be writing these books don't forget and then she would get on with winding wool or playing shuttle or whatever it was that the 33 nieces and nephews wanted her to do so here sort of in secret but that can't be true oh well there's no actual hardcore evidence for it but it does make psychological sense that what ladies were supposed to do if they failed to marry a rich man which she did incidentally have the chance of doing she just broke off her engagement and decided to become a professional writer instead what they were supposed to spend their time doing was writing letters to their relatives so that was fine it was okay for her this little table the little square of paper and to be apparently writing something but ladies weren't supposed to write novels the later history of this house is that after jane's sister cassandra eventually died and she lived over a long time without jane the house sort of sunk back down again and it was split up and it was made into cottages for farm laborers then later on in the 20th century when this cult of jane austen started to develop people started to look around the village for artifacts that had come from the house and i think one of the old gardeners of the village had this in his house and he said well you know this is the table this is the table this is the table so it now it now is a sort of fine exactly look it's got a special protection it has it's such an important thing it's really it's fantastic and what i like about it is that it's so small and insignificant looking and kind of rubbish looking but that's the secret of her brilliance for me that out of very ordinary things in a life that wasn't particularly glamorous these amazing works of art were produced so this is the things that english professors have argued about for hundreds of years how much of of jane austen's personal experience was she transmitting into those manuscripts that she was writing well on one level nothing because she was a brilliant artist she took real life she did something magical to it and she turned it into fiction but on another level everything because i believe that the underlying message of all of her books all of them is look how rubbish it is that women in georgia society women like jane austen herself are put into this position where they believe they have to marry for money that there is no other option to them and if you look at ann elliot the character of persuasion for example she's 28 years old she's on the shelf she's entering what are called the years of danger her life is going to be a failure unless she gets married and she does get married but with jane austen there's always this twist there's always something very slightly unsatisfactory about the marriages that so neatly wrap up the ends of the books i think that you can read them and this is what's brilliant about jane austen you can read them on so many levels you can read them as happy jolly funny love stories or you can read them as a really sharp critique of georgian society and so you did say there were a few jobs open to women but but why wasn't why wouldn't her brother have been more generous was it just assumed that the women would be taken off taken off his hands i think that the girls were definitely brought up to get married so her father was a teacher he taught boys uh latin greek he didn't teach blessed and greeks his daughters even though he was a very good teacher because that would have made them less marriageable that was definitely their purpose in life and i guess the family always assumed that one day it would happen and then when it didn't happen they became oh it's they became sort of a bit like parcels and the different brothers would hand the the girls from house the house look you you happen for a bit and they said no no well they can go stay with their friend for a while and there's this sort of sense that they were inconvenient yes inconvenient lucy where should we go next let's go and see one of the most intimate bits of the house her little bedroom so this little room is not enormous and there was even less space because there were two of these beds one for jay and one for her sister cassandra and they had such a close relationship people said it was as if they were married to each other because both of them were spinsters and they because psja's mother had a lot of children there's a sense that cassandra jane's older sister stood in as a mother to her and they had this very close relationship and one of the reasons we know a lot about jane's life is the letters that they used to exchange when they weren't in the same house and one of the things that cassandra did later she gets a lot of stick for is destroy a lot of jane austen's letters and i think that is because they were full of such offensive jokes about their family and friends and was cassandra a wonderful writer and correspondent as well or did jane just have this extraordinary talent well i do think asandra had the gift but some some of the most moving things you will ever read really are accounts that cassandra wrote of her sister's last days um and the things the reason we're talking about jane austen today is not because she needs the attention she's a global brand people have heard of her all about the world all over the world but there's still a sense i feel of injustice about her life which is that if she was cut off in her prime and before she got the attention the money that she deserved as well like a sense of unfinished business did she die in this room no she didn't but they were living here in their two little beds when she began to get strangely ill and this was unfolding in 1816 and into 1817 so we're in we are now in april 1818 and so it was 201 years ago next month that the two of them left this house and they went to rent rooms in the town center of winchester to be near to the hospital and to the doctors there and that's where she lived out the very last weeks of her life what did she do do we now know well it's a mystery it's a it's a so many different uh theories are put forward one of the theories is that she had an impaired immune system because she uh she was born a month late and there are five percent of babies who spend longer than 43 weeks in the womb and sometimes they're born with impaired immune systems as well so that might explain why she died younger than all of her siblings who lived for a ripe old age different forms of leukemia and cancer have been suggested the most flashy but unlikely suggestion is that she was poisoned by the arsenic that was very common in georgian medicine when they were living here did they have staff to to make their fires to change them to bring them hot water to were they able to maintain the appear like just the the outline appearance of of a genteel family they did have staff uh practically everybody did in georgia and england unless they were servants themselves uh domestic labor was was cheap and plentiful so they did have a cook they had a small household um at one point they got quite excited because they felt they were able to hire a footman and this was something they were able to do once they were living in a rent-free environment you see that was one of the advantages of living here um but what i one of the things i like about jane's lifestyle here is that her mother and her sister seem to have come to this agreement that they were going to not make her do much housework so her job in the household the thing that she had to do was to make the toast at breakfast time and she had to keep the wine covered locked up which are uh which are important duties obviously that's right and so although so did they disapprove of her writing did they so they must have known even that story downstairs about the door creaking the mother and the sister must have known she was a writer they must have known uh not least because all of her life the way that jane used to develop her material as i understand it is that she used to read it aloud in the long winter evenings to members of the family so if you're not terribly well off you don't want to be lighting your room with loads of expensive beeswax candles so maybe the family would write light just one candle and one member would read aloud to the others and we know that she did this and i think that she would read out the funny bits and sort of see where people laughed and over time polish her work because she worked on her novels for a really long time she did many many drafts and they got better over time but her mother's quite an interesting character because in jane austen's novels there are a lot of bad mothers and there were one or two little hints in the letters and so on that maybe they didn't have the easiest relationship what i imagine it must have been so difficult but it must have been so difficult trying to maintain the appearance of gentility here uh having no money and having these also these slightly poison well challenging relationships between members of their family yeah and what part of the reasons that her books were published anonymously is because of the whole gentility thing but also i think it's because she drew quite a negative picture of certain family relationships that maybe her own relatives would be challenged by would feel threatened by i mean that brother living up the road with his big house there's so many characters like that in the stories who are bad characters you know the ones who who are rich and controlling and don't care about other people let me ask you again so these two these two women they're living in the same room uh although you're saying in their late twenties on the shelf of course we'd now regard them in the prime of life did they did they have relationships did they know what it was to to to have sex or be in love with people ah well cassandra has left us evidence that there was this great mysterious love of jane austen's life he was a mysterious gentleman that she met on a seaside holiday and in her novels and in her world the seaside represents yeah exactly the scene represents love and freedom and passion and a lot of exciting sort of sexy things happening um her most significant brush with marriage happened when she herself was 28 and she got a very good offer for my man with a proper mansion so she said yes she would have been set up for life you know future sorted but the next morning she broke it off and that's because he was just too awful to go through with it and that's before you take into account his very slightly amusing name which was mr harris big wither so she said no to mrs mr harris big wither and at that point well you know the woman he did go on to marry ended up having 10 children so i think perhaps part of her decision was i don't want to have as many children as she saw her own sisters-in-law having two of her sisters-in-law died giving birth to their 11th child so she could see that future perhaps or you know living with cassandra in a cottage not having a lot of money but having a sort of level of creative freedom [Music] i really wanted to show you these very nice little white satin dancing shoes which didn't belong to jane austen they belong to one of her nieces but she would have worn something like this when she was the belle of the ballrooms of hampshire as she was in her young days and so how old would you be when you were really hitting the ball rooms hard well you could if you were really hot poverty be married at 16 like some of the characters in jane austen's books so when she was 16 she would have been introduced to the world as a debutant and that meant going to balls going to parties and you know it's really a victorian impression of jane austen that she was a little old lady a bit like miss marple who wrote books sort of by accident not really realizing how good they were that's an old-fashioned view of jane austen what historians today see in her life is somebody who did have wild times somebody who did have a lot of dancing partners somebody who was notorious for flirting in her letters she complains about her hangovers on occasion uh she she got up to wild and naughty and passionate things as well as in her in this in this debutant time of her life so this is sort of 1516 to what sort of earlier into her 20s into her 20s and then things perhaps sort of got a bit more serious when she was 25 and still unmarried and that's when her father said need to do something about this i've got these two girls i need to get them off my hands and um at that point he moved the family away from hampshire they were living in a village just up the road and he moved them to bath that was more of a happy hunting ground for husbands but you don't get the impression that jane really enjoyed her her time on the marriage market in bar when did she start writing do we think she was obviously corresponding or at least when did you start writing novels oh from really early on growing up she would entertain the whole family with these uh ridiculous short stories they called the juvenile now and they are they're full of people going mad and fighting and having coach accidents and causing trouble and by the time she was 21 we know that she completed the first draft of pride and prejudice for example so she was a very um she was both a quick and a slow worker she was at it early on but she didn't get published until quite late on in her 30s and this was partly because it took publishers ages to see what was good about these books because there weren't any pirates in them it was a sort of new genre of fiction social satire as i'm listening to you i feel sort of almost an anger bubbling up in the idea this this astonishingly talented young woman who's just facing obstacles every single way every single direction that she turns i don't think her life was materially difficult she always had a roof over her head someone always eventually came through and gave her enough money on which to live but it was a psychologically difficult life because she was so put into this round hole when she was a completely clever square peg and she was just you know she changed the shape of the hole really to extend my analogy perhaps unfortunately far but i think that through writing her books she was changing expectations of how women like her was supposed to live their lives yes so we should talk about that that was very interesting you said outside that actually even ignoring the the artistic outputs on one level you feel she's actually a very important human being in british and world history so so why is that because the key thing is for me this this moment in her life this night of her life when she'd accepted this offer of marriage and all of her life had led up to that point her parents would have been delighted the family were delighted everyone was expecting her to do that but she had the courage to say no and to break it off with huge you know social embarrassment and i think the reason that she'd done that is because she just sold her first novel northanger abbey to a publisher that had just happened she just earned 10 pounds for herself which isn't sort of money but the significance was maybe she could become a professional writer and because she did that the brontes were able to do it mrs gaskell was able to do it george eliot was able to do it it became the thing she was setting setting the pace and is that right so they they were were they inspired by her or did she change the world of publishing so they were more open to manuscripts presented to them by females well a bit of both really um so she was a she was an absolute trailblazer yes she was one of the things that historians today are interested in about her life is her career as a professional writer and as she went on she became more professional about it and would go up to london and cut her own publishing deals and that sort of thing and so there's the business of being an author but there's also the subject matter of the books themselves which is subversive did she meet people like mary wollstonecraft or anyone else did any of the other amazing women of this of this period or did she sort of exist slightly by herself down here well she didn't meet mary wolf but she did have some other published writers in her extended circle of family and friends and she was particularly keen on fanny bernie now we should call her frances bernie because that's more respectful and when she when francis bernie brought out her novel called camilla she did it by subscription which is kind of like crowdfunding so she says to all of her friends will you give me some money i'll publish a book and um in the list of the people who subscribe is miss j austin and that's the first time that jane austen's name appeared in print and i think she was only about 18 it looks like her dad paid for her to do this to give the money to help another female author to bring out her book so this was something that was clearly important to her so not looking for clues in any of her writing and if her fiction but actually looking for evidence in the in the real sources that we have about her life what do you think she was like my favorite description of jane austen says that if you in her presence it was as if wit and jokes came oozing out of her they just oozed out of her the whole time as if she couldn't help it and i think she was quite a sharp quick bitter but very funny person if she was relaxed with you if she trusted you and opened up to you um other people who didn't know her said that she was quite cold and silent and judgmental a bit like a poker a she was described as a poker she was a poger sitting quietly in the corner watching everything that went on but to her intimate circle was brutally witty and funny yes i think so and one of the great ironies that's happened in recent years is that she's appeared on our banknotes have you got a picture of jane austen in your pocket a lot of people will have a jane austen picture in their pocket because she's on the 10 pound note now and this picture that was used on the note uh was you see there's a wonderful irony here which is that it was rustled up after she was dead because the publishers were finding that readers wanted to know what she looked like so they rustled up this picture she was dead she had no say in it it doesn't bear much relationship to reality and someone who knew her looked at this picture and said the awful portrait said that's a sweet and pleasing face she really didn't look like that at all it's all this huge effort to get jane austen on the notes it's not even her no no but there's a fantastic irony about that because it means that she's still playing tricks with us she's being elusive she's not showing us her real face and that seems to be entirely appropriate how old was she when she died 41. so we could have dozens more novels she was just getting going when she was cut off in that fight and what happened to her family what happened to her sister cassandra her sister cassandra went on living in this little house and became a very old lady and she ran a school for the girls in the village wonderful lucy thank you so much for bringing me to jane austen's house well thank you for coming and there's there's something i'd like to let your viewers and listeners know about which is jane's fund it's on just giving you go you search for jane's fund you'll find it if you want to contribute to the repairs that they need to do to their roof they'd be very glad to take a few quid off you please get jane's fund everybody and what about you you've got a book out as well i have written about jane austen and her homes and her life within them and that's called jane austen at home and it's just out in paperback [Music] thanks for watching this video on the history hit youtube channel you can subscribe right here to make sure you don't miss any of our great films that are coming out or if you are a true history fan check out our special dedicated history channel history hit dot tv you're gonna love it

Channel: History Hit

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Keywords: history hit, history hit youtube, jane austen, pride and prejudice, mansfield park, sense and sensibility, lucy worsley, chawton house, life of jane austen, chawton house history, jane austen books, jane austen house, jane austen house tour, jane austen house museum, chawton cottage, jane austen documentary, jane austen movies youtube, jane austen house interior, dan snow, dan snow history hit, dan snow documentary, dan snow lucy worsley, lucy worsley documentary

Id: tqgJZPF_m0o

Length: 27min 18sec (1638 seconds)

Published: Fri Aug 05 2022