John Mullan

She throws herself off the cob.

in Lyme Regis asking Captain Wentworth to catch her and she does it too precipitately and she falls and bangs her head.

So her spirits have their downside too.

Yes, yes, she did.

And also famously disappointments about trying to get published.

We know that she completed her six finished novels in the space of sort of little more than seven years in what must seem a real furore of creativity.

But it is striking that when she came to write those six novels, it was because she had somewhere stable

to live.

She didn't have to worry too much about money, thanks to the wealth that her brother Edward had inherited from distant relatives.

In a way, perhaps for us, it was lucky that she had those early disappointments, because by the time in her mid-30s,

that she was writing her first published novel, Sense and Sensibility, based on an earlier draft.

She was already a practice writer.

There's no novel where she's sort of getting the hang of it.

Bang!

Sense and Sensibility is a slam-dunk masterpiece from the get-go.

So she made the best of her disappointments, we might say.

Well, as she dies, yeah.

The relationship with Cassandra is often talked about because it's so important, but also her mother, her father especially, and her brothers were very important to her.

I think if you could beam yourself down...

to an Austen family gathering with all of them sitting around the table.