Anna Walker

Jane was very close with her sister, Cassandra, as Anne Elliot is with her hypochondriac sister, Mary, though that portrait of siblinghood is less than flattering, I would say.

Was Austen's family a source of happiness or stress for her throughout her life, Freya?

It's Cassandra's lap that Jane's head rests on for much of that time in her final days, isn't it?

When Jane's sister Cassandra was just 24, her fiancé Tom Fowle died of yellow fever in the West Indies, and she never went on to marry.

Might Jane have been drawing on this experience of her sister for the character of Anne Elliot Freya?

Persuasion was the final novel that Jane Austen completed, published just six months after her death in 1817 at the age of 41.

Freya, what do we know about how Austen died?

One thing all of Austen's heroines, including Anne Elliot, have in common is a happy ending.

They all marry respectable and kind men, build comfortable homes for themselves and generally end the novel in a more joyful place than they started it.

But what of Jane's own ending?

Would you say she was ultimately happy at the end of her life?

Freya, let's start with you.

We also get a brilliant passage in a letter where she tells us of her, the pleasure she gets from a recipe for sponge cake, don't we?

Well, whether or not we ever will know if Jane was happy, we certainly know that she laughed.

So that's a nice, enduring image to have of her.

Thank you both for your happy company today.

It's been such a pleasure talking with you.

Though we can use her remaining letters, novels, and the accounts of her descendants to piece together the puzzle of her life, a full picture of Jane Austen the woman remains elusive.

Every line she wrote contains a double meaning, every sentiment she shared might as easily be a joke, and the more I learn about her from our academic experts, the more I believe that's just how she liked it.

There are only two known paintings of Jane, both by her sister Cassandra.