Freya Johnston

People have suggested leukaemia.

or some kind of cancer as a plausible candidate.

But in any case, the symptoms seem to have been a kind of weakness or dizziness or nausea.

The last thing she wrote, which she didn't complete, Sanditon, is amongst other things, a satire of hypochondria.

And one of the characters in that, Diana Parker, has the same symptoms or claims to.

And so it's as if Austen...

kind of hoped through comedy to sort of spoof away the symptoms that she was suffering from.

I don't think any of them thought that the illness would be fatal as quickly as it was, although one or more family members did say they thought that she wouldn't survive it.

But she was very unlucky.

I mean, most of her family is very long-lived.

So for her to die at 41 was a strange thing for an Austin, and we don't quite know why.

I don't know how to answer that.

I don't know how I would answer it about anyone.

I mean, one of her favourite authors, Dr Johnson, famously said that nobody was happy and anyone who claimed to be happy was lying.

But I think you could certainly say that by the time she died, the professional success that we've already talked about had brought her a great deal of satisfaction and enjoyment and she was still creative right up until the very end.

You know, so in that sense, I would say she was absolutely happy in terms of the expression of her happiness

novelistic gifts and creative self, and that that was only growing and growing and growing right up until the point she died.

One thing that she does talk about a lot in her letters is the happiness of domesticity.

And that is also true of Persuasion.

One of the reasons why the Navy emerges such virtuous characters is that they have such fantastic capacity to make domestic life good.