Britain's incredible landscapes were the inspiration for some of our greatest women writers.

From the Brontes' mysterious moors, to Beatrix Potter's idyllic Lake District and the rugged Cornwall of Daphne du Maurier.

I'm Mariella Frostrup and my passion is books.

I want to uncover the stories behind some truly classic novels and find out what made these great authors write the works they did.

From forgotten walks to mysterious coves, I'll be discovering the hidden secrets of these landscapes that motivated our best loved female authors to create their masterpieces.

Oh, my goodness, what have we got here?

There'll be big revelations as I find diaries, letters and new evidence that show what these regions really meant to these writers, and why their stories couldn't have come from anywhere else.

It's a journey that will reveal why our greatest novels weren't just written by their authors, but by the times and places they lived in.

Today, I'm in Jane Austen's Hampshire, visiting an Earl's estate to discover how landowners like this influenced her aristocratic characters... Now that is exactly what I imagine from a rolling Hampshire landscape.

Exploring why living in 18th century Hampshire could mean Austen is actually a war novelist... LOUD GUNSHOTS That is really loud!

And finding out the real reasons Austen felt she could only write in this county... There is something about needing that South Downs chalk under her feet to write these wonderful novels.

This is Hampshire, a county of rolling hills, lush forests, and crystal clear chalk streams.

It was here in 1775 that one of Britain's most successful authors was born... Jane Austen.

The daughter of a vicar in the village of Steventon, Austen spent most of her 41 years in Hampshire and wrote all six of her famous novels here.

Pride and Prejudice alone has sold more than 20 million copies.

What I love about Austen is her perceptive and satirical take on people - she was a master when it came to observing character.

Well, to the innocent rambler this might look just like any old field, albeit a rather pretty one.

But, actually, this is incredibly rich, literally soil that we're looking at, because this is where the parsonage stood, where Jane Austen was born and brought up, which makes it one of the most famous literary shrines, possibly, in the world today.

Sense and Sensibility.

Pride and Prejudice.

Persuasion.

Emma.

Mansfield Park.

Northanger Abbey.

Those are the titles of novels known across the globe, and it was right here that that little girl came into being.

Austen had six brothers and a sister - to think I'm roaming the same country lanes and fields they all did.

But what was it about Hampshire and its people that really inspired Jane Austen to write her classics?

I'm starting with the landed gentry.

Their lives make up such an important part of Austen's stories.

Like many of us, one of my favourites is Mr Darcy in Pride and Prejudice.

When he and his fortune turn up, everyone has just one thing in mind - marriage.

"It's a truth, universally acknowledged, that a single man "in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife."

That's how Jane Austen opens Pride and Prejudice, and it is also the preoccupation of many of her other popular novels.

This portrait of the landed gentry here in her native Hampshire, and the attempts of those from lower social orders to elevate themselves by marrying into it.

Vast areas of 18th century Hampshire were owned by just a few wealthy families, and so they were the custodians of this beautiful landscape.

I've come to one of these great estates, Farleigh Wallop, just six miles from where Austen grew up.

Well, this is quite the pile.

It is, isn't it?

Come on in.Thanks.

Dr Helena Kelly has researched Austen's portrayal of the landed gentry and how it may well have been inspired by the very family who lived here.

Old family portraits.

Who's this gentleman here?

This gentleman here is the first Earl of Portsmouth.

This would have been painted sort of early to middle 18th century.

Farleigh Wallop House has been owned by the Portsmouths for almost 600 years, only changing hands through inheritance or marriage.

Oh, look at this.

This is rather grand.

I love the view!

Now that is exactly what I imagine from a rolling Hampshire landscape.

Got your croquet lawn.

You've got your ha-ha sheep grazing in the distance.

You've set it all up so beautifully for me.

Let's go and explore.

It feels like I'm following in Austen's footsteps, as she regularly attended balls with the Portsmouths and her father taught the young earl.

And she must have been impressed... The Portsmouths were loaded.

Believe it or not, this is just one of several Hampshire estates they own.

So here we are - the dining room.

The Portsmouths are kind of the pre-eminent family locally, both because they've been here for such a long time, but also because they are the Earl and Countess.

But how do characters like Mr Darcy size up to the Earl of Portsmouth?

Austen does down scale everything, so the Earl was probably worth about 18,000 a year.

That's the equivalent of 1.5 million today.

It came mostly from the land?

Broadly speaking, yes, and Darcy in Pride and Prejudice, of course, he's very rich.

He has a very big estate, but he's only - only!

- worth 10,000 a year, so about half.

And he's not an earl.

He's the grandson of an earl.

But he's not himself an aristocrat.

She has a very, very strong tendency to sort of stop at a baronet... Stop at a baronet - keeping it real!

She really does.

Her heroes don't have titles, which is actually quite unusual for popular fun novels for women at the time.

Usually, it's all lord this and earl that, you know.

How much would the specifics of Hampshire society have informed Jane Austen's novels?

Her books very often kind of run on a farming year, so they start in August or September and sort of run round to the next one.

So, the sense in her novels that you do very much get is that connection with the land, the kind of importance of belonging to it.

In Austen's time, almost all of the vast Farleigh Wallop estate was farmed.

But life for the workers here was tough.

The gap between rich and poor had never been greater, and the whole family would have to work to get by.

How difficult was it for farm workers at the time?

They're right on the edge of being able to cope.

So, it was quite unusual for women to work properly backbreaking work out here in the fields, picking stones, hoeing.

Women working the land would often have to clear whole fields of stones by hand to smooth the passage for the horse drawn plough, a massive task that meant sometimes working 14 hours a day.

There's quite a lot of stones.

Did they have to remove all the stones?

What's wrong with stones?!

I'd want to bring back the stone cos this is, you know, I've been at it for about five minutes now, two minutes even, and already I'm losing patience.

I'm aching in my legs.

Yeah, I definitely wouldn't... You said how long, 14 hours a day?

Dawn to dusk.

Well, you know what, I've probably done about a millionth of what a woman would have been doing back then but thankfully it's the 21st century and I don't need to pick up stones!

Oh, backbreaking work, that is.

Life expectancy for farm labourers was far shorter than for the wealthy characters Austen depicts in her novels.

They're working dawn to dusk, they're out in the fields.

One of the criticisms of Austen's novels would be that very little of that is actually to be found in the books.

I think that's probably a fair criticism.

The landscapes that her characters move through don't appear to have any agricultural workers in them.

And that's absolutely the case until we get to Emma.

Austen's fifth novel, Emma, may have great fun with the matchmaking attempts of its title character, but it also highlights the hardships caused by a new law.

The Enclosure Act allowed landowners to fence off common land, denying the rural poor access to foraging and hunting grounds.

The ability to go and just take firewood from the woods, that went.

The labouring poor at that time was so close to the poverty line that, in a lot of cases, removing those quite small, you know, the firewood, the berries, that tipped them straight over.

So, references in Emma to hedges, for example, are incredibly politically loaded.

We don't see that.

We just see, "Oh, a lovely rural view."

But in the 1810s, this is, basically, a great big, you know, political neon flashing sign.

Meeting Helena is already changing my perception of Jane Austen, who I'd thought generally focused on the wealthiest in society, but now I realise she does highlight the challenges for both rich and poor, no matter how different they may be.

So now I want to find out where Austen herself fitted into this class ridden rural society.

I'm on my way to meet literature professor John Mullan at the Parish Church in Steventon, where Jane's father served as rector for almost 40 years.

Hello, John Mullan.

Hello.

Nice to see you.

Do you want to go in first?

Thank you very much.

Well, look at this, it's beautiful.

I still feel a kind of shudder of delight at sharing the same space as her.

Do you feel that?

I have an absolute frisson.

I think that's like a little breath of immortality brushing past you, certainly.

What would life have been like for a young girl?

Her father a clergyman at that time.

There was actually a phrase for the kind of class she belonged to - the middling sort.

They didn't say middle class in those days, that didn't exist, but the middling sort.

So, in one way, economically, if you like, she was absolutely in the middling sort.

But in another way, she and her siblings would have had considerable status because the rector was the most educated man in the village.

She depended a great deal on her father and his books for her education.

She only went to school for less than two years, and yet, just read a paragraph of Jane Austen's narrative and what an eloquent writer with what a flexible vocabulary.

Would she have had access, as a clergyman's daughter, to a wider reach of society?

Yeah, I think she did, because on the one hand, you were, as a clergyman's daughter, you had sort of access to the higher echelons of society.

But on the other hand, you knew much more about the actual trials and troubles of those at the bottom of the social ladder.

Jane Austen would have been much better informed about what was going on in the village, in every bit of the village, than many other people.

Austen famously advised her niece, who was a budding author, that the best thing to write about was three or four families in a village.

What Jane Austen meant was, if you really know what's going on in a small community - their jealousies and secrets and aspirations and rivalries will give you an extraordinary amount to work on.

It's incredible to think that some of literature's greatest characters may have been dreamt up in this small Hampshire church where I am now.

But it wasn't just writing on the young Jane Austen's mind.

She knew she had to marry well.

This is a page from a ledger that was kept in the Church of marriage banns, and the young Jane Austen in her mid-teens has sort of playfully, I suppose you'd say, written in here... "The banns of a marriage between "Henry Frederick Howard Fitzwilliam..." which I guess is a sort of mouth filling name, "..of London, and Jane Austen of Steventon."

It's so sweet, it's so girlish.

She's, I guess, graphically fantasising about her own possible unions.

Clearly, Jane Austen's romantic imagination was already on fire.

But how much of an uphill battle would it be for Jane Austen and others like her to marry into the Hampshire landed gentry?

Her characters seem to manage it eventually, but I want to find out the truth behind the fiction.

I'm in Hampshire finding out how its landscapes and people inspired Jane Austen to write her great novels, from Sense and Sensibility to Persuasion.

All her major books deal with the important task of finding a good husband.

And in the 18th century, this was about much more than just romance.

Life in rural Hampshire was insecure.

Both men and women looked to marriage as a means of survival.

Sometimes it was the only way to ensure a reasonable standard of living for yourself and your family, which is probably why it's a theme that Austen returns to over and over again.

Sense and Sensibility follows the attempts of impoverished sisters Elinor and Marianne Dashwood to find good husbands, and Austen makes it clear that they cannot live on affection alone.

"Edward had 2,000 and Elinor one, "and they were neither of them quite enough in love "to think that 350 a year "would supply them with the comforts of life."

What I want to explore now is whether finding a good match was as difficult as Austen makes out.

The best way to bag a rich husband back then was to attend a ball.

One of the few social events where the classes could mix.

In rural Hampshire, these were often held on moonlit nights so revellers could make their way home through the dark countryside.

Balls were an enormous big deal in 18th century Hampshire and beyond, not only transactionally, but also as entertainment, and when the Bennet girls excitedly set off in Pride and Prejudice to attend one, this is the sort of place they would have been heading.

Chawton House is an Elizabethan manor house set in 275 acres of glorious Hampshire.

Oh, to be a fly on the wall at one of the balls held here.

Austen loved balls for their mix of passion and propriety, and they feature in every novel except her last, Persuasion.

This is quite extraordinary.

Regency dance expert, Sally Petchey, is going to guide me through the reality of trying to find a match at such an event.

Watching the dance is quite intimate, and that surprised me because in those days you would have been chaperoned.

People were, you know, respected, valued for being chaste.

Which is why, when there's an opportunity like that, they will catch eyes and they will make the most of it because opportunities are rare like that.

Codes of behaviour were very strict.

In Pride and Prejudice, Lizzie Bennet is obliged to dance with the oily Mr Collins because if she turns down one request for a dance, she must turn down all.

What sort of pressure would be on a young lady coming to a ball like this?

There is a great deal of pressure.

This is a period of the Napoleonic Wars, so there aren't so many men around.

It's very, very important for them to find a husband because they need to be financially secure.

It really was a marketplace, wasn't it?

Absolutely.

What I love about Austen, though, is she clearly didn't just come here to find a man, she used these events as inspiration for her writing.

And she did meet someone... At 20, she fell for Irish lawyer Tom Lefroy... ..but it's thought his family considered her too poor to marry - any potential union was quickly dashed.

It's surely no coincidence that Austen started writing Pride and Prejudice, about the pressures on young women to find a husband, that same year.

Austen was a realist in life, and in her fiction.

She learned the hard way that it was very difficult to make any love match work if financial gain wasn't taken into account, too.

Austen became a regular visitor to Chawton House after the good fortune of her older brother, Edward.

He inherited the estate from a wealthy but childless couple who took a shine to him when he was 12 and named him their heir.

It wasn't unusual to inherit that way when childlessness was far more common.

Edward's vast library is still here.

I can't help wondering if these books, which Austen may have read, could provide a clue to her real thoughts on marriage.

All of these incredible, priceless books, actually, and so many of them written by women, during a period when we don't really know about three quarters of the women writers who were at work.

It's just, well, it's a treasure trove.

What I find so impressive is that even in Austen's lifetime, women were already writing about a huge range of subjects from travel to medicine.

They were also starting to play a vital role in the debate about female education and marriage.

And I can't believe that these ground-breaking works would have passed an avid reader like Jane Austen by.

Jane Austen may have only attended school for a couple of years, but her education certainly didn't stop there.

She read incredibly widely and, interestingly, a book like A Vindication of the Rights of Women, by Mary Wollstonecraft, came out just a couple of years before she started penning Sense and Sensibility and Pride and Prejudice.

In it, Wollstonecraft describes marriage as a kind of prostitution, and that sense of the marriage market being as much to do with fiscal interest as love interest is something that certainly seems to have carried through into Austen's novels.

This is exciting stuff.

Feminism was starting to get going, and Austen was very subtly getting in on the act and there was no stopping her.

In her early 20s, she completed the drafts of her first three novels, Sense and Sensibility, Pride and Prejudice and Northanger Abbey.

These three novels are the youthful view of Austen World.

It wasn't until many years later, and a few more emotional heartbreaks, that she was to write the more mature works like Mansfield Park.

What I find really sad is that Austen would have to wait more than ten years to get any of her books published... ..but nothing would get in the way of her enjoying the beauty of the Hampshire landscape, striding out on long walks through the hills and fields.

We can see Austen's love of the countryside reflected in her writing, all the important moments happen outside, not in drawing rooms or at balls.

Darcy's second proposal to Elizabeth, the Box Hill picnic in Emma, and, of course, Marianne getting soaked to bits in Sense and Sensibility.

In Persuasion, heroine Anne walks sadly through the fields, thinking she's in the autumn of life and past it, but then she sees a farmer who's already sowing the seeds for next spring, and it makes her realise that after autumn, there still can be another spring.

Austen was not the only person enraptured by the landscape at the turn of the century.

The great artists of the romantic movement, Turner and Constable, both born within a year of her, celebrated the beauty of the natural world, along with Lake poets Wordsworth and Coleridge.

This Romantic movement was a reaction to the growing industrialisation happening in cities up and down the country.

Jane might not have been aware of the immediate effects of industrialisation here in sleepy, rural Hampshire, but she would have seen its impact in the changes in society and indeed in the growing middle class.

Austen is not usually given a place in the Romantic movement of the early 19th century, but I think perhaps she should be.

The Romantic poets celebrated solitude, loneliness and individualism.

Personally, I can see all those elements in Austen's work.

The Romantic movement was at its height when Jane hit her writing stride, and it can't have passed her by.

You can see its influence in her work and in Hampshire society, in its growing appreciation of the beauty of nature and the countryside - and I can't blame them.

Looking around, I'm feeling exactly the same sublime appreciation of beauty, of nature.

But that tranquillity was about to be shattered.

I'm going to find out why living in 18th century Hampshire means Austen could, incredibly, be considered a war novelist.

Hampshire and its stunning landscape are at the very heart of Jane Austen's novels.

When we think of her books, we think of fancy balls and genteel society, but Britain was at war for most of Austen's life.

First, in the American War of Independence... ..and then against Napoleon's France.

This shattered the peace and tranquillity of the Hampshire countryside.

Jane may write about a rural, peaceful existence, but the reality 200 years ago was very different.

With England's naval base at Portsmouth, the county was home to thousands of military personnel and prisoners of war.

Hampshire, effectively, became a home front against the threat of invasion.

Austen's nearest town, Basingstoke, was awash with soldiers from the South Devon militia, and this infiltrates her writing.

In Pride and Prejudice, Lydia can barely contain her excitement at the sight of the militia arriving at Meryton.

She says, "She saw all the glories of the camp.

"Its tents stretched forth in beauteous uniformity of lines, "crowded with the young and the gay and dazzling with scarlet.

"And to complete the view, she saw herself seated beneath a tent, "tenderly flirting with at least six officers at once."

Characters like the dastardly George Wickham and Sense and Sensibility's Colonel Brandon may well have been inspired by the daring dues of someone close to Austen.

Her brother, Henry, who was in the militia.

I've come to Aldershot Military Museum to discover for myself the reality behind her colourful military characters.

I'm reporting for duty to military expert John Stockall.

Hello, John.Hello.

Can you tell me a little bit about why Hampshire would have been considered the home front?

Well, so it's right on the Channel, so France is only 80-odd miles away.

They could hear the guns of Waterloo from the south coast of England.

Really?There are always soldiers around, people will know.

It was like watching out for the possibility of invasion.

Some of Austen's military characters are depicted as heroes, but what would their experience of war really have been like?

What kind of weapons would you be fighting with?

This is an India Pattern Brown Bess musket.

So this was the kind of weapon the British Army was using from about the early 1700s through to about even the mid 1800s.

Can you show me how it works?Yes.

Yeah, it's actually very simple.

So, um...in my cartridge box, I have a cartridge with, er...gunpowder in it.

Loading the Brown Bess was a slow business.

First, gunpowder went into the firing pan and some down the musket barrel, rammed down with the musket ball.

With the flintlock cocked, the musket was ready to fire.

That is really loud!

A trained soldier like Colonel Brandon had to be able to reload and shoot three times a minute.

If he ran out of time before he could reload and the enemy was upon him, there was only one thing for it.

These are 16 inches of steel, OK?

And it is triangular, so it's stronger, but also, it makes a triangular wound in you, so it makes it hard to sew up.

I'm hoping that trying the weapon myself will give me a window into the world of Austen's soldiers.

So you're standing with it like this.

In your shoulder, like that.

In your shoulder... Yeah, I'm trying, I'm trying.

Oh!

Yes.Do you know what, it's too heavy!

I know it's heavy.I'm not joking, I've got a bad shoulder.

Ah!

I think I'd settle for the bayonet at that point and just like, keep it at waist level and... Huh!

You think it's easy like that, do you?

I don't think any of it's easy!

But it is quite interesting to understand what people would have had to endure at that period in time, you know, 200 years ago.

Right, here.Yeah.Left hand... But I shudder at the thought of defending myself with a bayonet.

The Napoleonic War saw tens of thousands of ordinary British men enlisted and sent off to war.

And as I've discovered, it would have been brutal and fierce.

For Jane, two of whose brothers were in the army, this would have felt very, very close to home.

And I think for me, that lends a special significance to her military characters.

Because if you had been sent abroad to fight during that era, you weren't simply a soldier, you were a survivor.

And Jane knew that.

With Hampshire's strategic position on the south coast, the landscape would have been flooded with military personnel, as well as prisoners of war.

Many of these prisoners were paroled, living amongst the local population.

And it's likely that Austen would have encountered some in towns like Alresford.

The gravestones of these French prisoners of war can be seen today.

But they don't tell the whole story.

About 2,500 black prisoners captured when fighting for the French in the Caribbean were held in Portsmouth in harsh conditions, at a time when Britain was fiercely debating the slave trade.

Austen's books have sometimes been criticised for depicting a calm and genteel England, when actually, it was a time of great social and political turmoil.

But one of her novels, written a few years after the abolition of the slave trade in 1807, does give a clue as to the writer's thoughts on the heated topic of the day.

Austen herself expresses anti-slavery beliefs in her novel Emma, through her character Jane Fairfax, albeit with a slightly naive idea about the experience of enslaved peoples.

Jane Fairfax compares the dehumanising slave trade with being a governess.

"The sale, not quite of human flesh, but of human intellect... "Governess-trade...widely different "certainly as to the guilt of those who carry it on.

"But as to the greater misery of the victims, "I do not know where it lies."

Well, despite there being a clear lack of understanding to the true misery of slaves, there's certainly an admission there of guilt on the part of those who carry on the trade.

So true to form, Jane Austen is touching on the big issues of the day without digging too deep.

And we have to rely on lines like this to form the impression that she would have been pro-abolition.

But should Austen have done more to include her likely-abolitionist views and the hardships of wartime Hampshire in her writing?

Professor John Mullan thinks he knows the reason she didn't.

Why did she shy away from mentioning the war?

Well, I think Jane Austen is a novelist who wants her readers to feel the outside world impinging upon her characters.

So although there's a war going on, most of the time, they're not thinking about that.

They're interested in who they're dancing with or how much money they've got.

And she takes it for granted that you'll infer the greater machinery of politics in world history, but she's not going to tell you about it.

One of the things that was also going on during Jane's life was a big debate about slavery, and the abolition of the slave trade happened while she was still alive.

And yet, I think there's only a couple of mentions in her books about it.

Well, there are two mentions.

There are plenty of novels written at the time where there are no mentions.

And so, I think that requiring Jane Austen to sort of make more of what she thought of, and what she despised about slavery in her novels, is simply expecting her to be a different sort of writer.

I mean, Virginia Woolf once said the great thing about Jane Austen is she's not there in her novels at all.

She's endlessly elusive.

With war and politics, Hampshire was changing.

Now in her late 20s, Austen was still unpublished and still unmarried.

And with so many men away fighting, it was harder to find a husband.

So when Austen finally got the chance to marry into the Hampshire landed gentry, why did she turn the offer down?

I'm about to find out.

I'm in Hampshire, finding out how Jane Austen's life in this beautiful landscape influenced her writing.

In the early 1800s, Austen was still an unpublished writer, and was still expected to marry.

Then, at the age of 26, she finally received a proposal.

It came from Harris Bigg-Wither, a wealthy Hampshire landowner who owned a grand house, Manydown, that has since been demolished.

For someone who wrote so much about marrying well, it seems like a dream come true.

But Austen turned the offer down.

No-one knows quite why she rejected the proposal, but Bigg-Wither was described as socially-awkward, and there were certainly no romantic feelings on Jane Austen's side.

I like to think that after writing so many big romances and happy endings, she wasn't prepared to settle for anything less in her own life.

Having turned down a good offer, and homeless after her father died, Jane Austen spent much of the next ten years out of Hampshire, doing the Georgian equivalent of sofa-surfing.

But what's extraordinary is that although she didn't set any novels in her home county during the decade she spent out of it, she wrote nothing.

That was about to change.

At 33, Austen got an offer of a permanent home from her wealthy older brother, Edward, back in the Hampshire she so loved.

The impact of the move was immediate.

Austen began redrafting her unpublished novels with new zest, and began writing what would be her fourth novel, Mansfield Park.

Ironically, about a young woman who rejects a marriage proposal and is proved right for doing so.

This is Chawton Cottage, where Austen would spend the rest of her life.

Now a museum, it feels like I'm entering truly hallowed ground.

What was it about this place that got her writing like never before?

I'm meeting museum director, Lizzie Dunford.

Hi, Lizzie.Hello!

Welcome!

Welcome to Jane Austen's house!

I can't believe I'm in the room where Jane Austen actually wrote those six magnificent novels.

This is the space where all of those wonderful characters, those immortal phrases and those fabulous books came from.

Ah!

This is her little desk!

Can I sit in the chair?

Everything's so tiny.

It's like it's made for the little people!

Sense and Sensibility, Pride and Prejudice, Mansfield Park, all written at this little table in the corner of the dining room.

Was she tiny?

She was quite tall, actually.

She was about five foot eight.

No way!

She was very slim, but, yes, quite tall.

A lot of her heroines are always striding out, aren't they?

She was very fond of nature, and every novel follows the passage of the seasons.

So it was important to her.

She writes best when she is in a more rural setting.

She writes Steventon and she writes here.

When she's in Bath, when she's in Southampton, she doesn't write.

Not in the way that she writes in these spaces.

Austen lived in her new house with her mother, sister Cassandra, and family friend, Martha Lloyd.

She finally had somewhere to call home.

Her novels, at their heart, is the search for a secure and safe home where you are loved and respected.

And only then can you flourish.

Austen found it here.

And you do have this incredible period, particularly those years, 1811-1816, which is that five-year period where they boom, boom, boom, one after the other.

BIRDSONG What I love about Austen's later works, like Persuasion, is how she increasingly reflects all sections of society, both rich and poor.

But manages to do this without losing her satire and humour.

It's a great feat.

Do you think there's something about the Hampshire soil that made her feel grounded enough to be able to create?

There is something about needing that South Downs chalk under her feet to write these wonderful novels.

Also, very interestingly, she doesn't set a novel in Hampshire.

And is that because her novels are satire and she can't mock and doesn't want to mock Hampshire?

It's this place that is so important to her and to her writing.

Soon after moving to Chawton, Austen finally managed to have her first novel, Sense and Sensibility, published.

But early editions made no mention of the author's name, just, "By a Lady".

Two years later, Pride and Prejudice hit the press, and I'm lucky enough to glimpse a first edition here.

So we've got here first editions.

Very exciting.

Terrified to touch them.

Promise I won't!

But of Pride and Prejudice and of Mansfield Park.

And then there's this letter.

This letter is written from this house on January 29th, 1813.

So it's the day after Pride and Prejudice is published, And she actually writes about being in this room, probably very close to where we are now, and she and her mother reading the first volume, which is what you have in front of you there, to their friend, Miss Benn.

And they read it aloud and they do all the voices, in this space.

Miss Benn does not know it's Jane that wrote it, but she likes it.

That's the thing, isn't it?

It's published without her name on it!

It is.Why?

We don't know, is the very simple answer.

Her family were incredibly supportive of her writing.

They knew it was her, they knew it was published.

We know later on that her nieces come to ask her for advice in writing.

Does she ever published a book in her own name in her lifetime?

Not in her lifetime, no.

That's so sad!

Is it a reflection of...of vulnerability she felt?

It seems to be her choice.

But the message that she has through those novels is... possibly more important than her herself.

Visiting Austen's cottage has really brought home to me how much Hampshire and the security she found here enabled her to write.

For most of her life, these Hampshire hills had echoed to the sound of soldiers' musket practice.

But in 1815, at the Battle of Waterloo, Napoleon was defeated at last.

Now there was a new sound, the sound of celebration.

One town in Hampshire was even named after the riotous party held there.

I'm in for a bit of a treat, as food historian Emma Kay has cooked up the sort of victory feast Jane Austen would have enjoyed.

Wow!

For a Waterloo feast, is this very much what Jane Austen's class of person, the "middling sort", as she describes them, would be eating?

That's right.

If it was one of the big, official dinners, then you would have had food like this, but on a very different scale.

What have we got here?

Very pretty, this, with a picture of a deer with his antlers on it.

Should that be a clue for me?

It is actually a jelly made of hartshorn.

You don't mean THE heart?

No, I mean hart as in a stag.

And it's actually made from shavings from the antler.

Boiled down or something?

Boiled down.

And it was the smell... Sorry to grimace.

Ha-ha!

No, seriously, the smell when you make it is like the whole kitchen is full of damp dog.

You're not selling it to me.

No.

Well... Would it taste like damp dog, as well, or...?

It's unusual.I don't mind trying.

It's unusual.

Thankfully, it's quite tasteless.

OK, so let's move on to this very pretty-coloured, pinkish beetroot, or...?

Cranberries, actually.Ah!

Jellies were a real feature of those kind of big Waterloo celebrations.

Because, obviously, they didn't have gelatine, they either used fish bladder or they used rice.

Tell me you've used rice.

Hee!

I have used rice.Good.

But they would grind the rice down.

I'm...I'm being tentative.

Quite nice.Yeah.

Do you get the cranberry there?

Mm!Good.I can definitely taste the cranberries.

Got a nice...tart strike of cranberry.

Let's move down to the slightly more exotic end of the table.

We have a plum pudding.

You mean like Christmas plum pudding?

Yeah, but it wasn't really a Christmas plum pudding then.

During the 1800s, and particularly after Waterloo, it was satirised a lot.

There's a Gillray picture that uses Napoleon and Pitt the Younger.

They're over this giant pudding, kind of carving it up.

So it represented triumph, the spoils of war?

Yeah.Can I taste it?

It's sturdy and stodgy, as you can see, in one morsel.

Yeah, I mean, a bit like sort of unfinished dough.

I think the thing is that also, you'd be able to store it for a long time.

I bet you would!

So if you didn't have... It's going to be sitting in my stomach for quite some time, I fear.

But for Austen, the celebrations wouldn't last long.

In the year after the great victory, she fell ill.

Seeking treatment, she moved to College Street in Winchester, but died here six weeks later from suspected lymphoma, at just 41.

Jane Austen was laid to rest in Hampshire soil in nearby Winchester Cathedral.

Britain had lost one of its greatest ever literary geniuses.

My exploration of Jane Austen's Hampshire has shed a whole new light on a writer I thought I knew.

A novelist celebrated for her depiction of romance and the landed gentry, look closer, and Austen really does reflect the hardships of the poor.

Not only that, she was an early feminist who questioned a woman's place in society.

An author who saw first hand the impact of war.

And who, along with the romantic artists of the day, captured the beauty of nature in her work.

Above all, though none of her novels may have been set in Hampshire, her books absolutely have the county at their beating heart.

It was the chalk downlands and picturesque Georgian villages of this quiet, rural backwater of England, Hampshire, that so inspired Austen and gave us the novels that are still so popular today.

Subtitles by Red Bee Media