John Mullan

the kind of things that could be grown in the garden, harvested, cooked, making of popular medicinal concoctions.

She could have got that from almanacs and so on.

But I don't think there's any evidence that she had anything even approaching GCSE level scientific knowledge.

Yeah, I mean, it's the word that Emma used right at the beginning, equal.

It's quite an important word, I think, in Austen novels, particularly important in Pride and Prejudice, actually.

And thus far, we are equals, says Elizabeth, I believe, to Lady Catherine de Bourgh.

She's talking about her sort of social background.

And I think quite a lot of confusion is

when people argue about this question now comes from what that word might mean.

I think we mean something really different by it, which just wasn't really available to Jane Austen.

Equal means you have your own bank accounts.

You equally have the vote.

Equal means you get the same educational opportunity.

All this is just anachronistic.

And Jane Austen's not really thinking about it because it's just what's the point in thinking about it?

She's a novelist.

She's not a political activist.

The thing which makes her perhaps not very feminist, but in a way that I think we'll find it easy to forgive, is what she invites us to laugh at.

If you read Pride and Prejudice, you get Charlotte Lucas marrying Mr Collins, that absolute absurd idiot, purely for convenience.

And when Elizabeth goes to visit her in Kent, and she looks around the house,