Jane Austen 250th Anniversary | MASTERPIECE Studio
Released December 16, 2025 34:09
December 16, 2025 marks a special day in the world of arts and culture; the 250th anniversary of the birth of Jane Austen. Here at MASTERPIECE, we are admirers of Jane Austen. Through interviews with historian and television presenter Lucy Worsley, Miss Austen novelist Gill Hornby, screenwriter Andrew Davies, and MASTERPIECE’s Senior Series Producer, Erin Delaney, we’re looking back at Austen’s life, her legacy, and what her novels mean to us. Now join us in the drawing room as we gather round to celebrate our beloved Jane Austen in this special episode.
Jace Lacob: I’m Jace Lacob and you’re listening to MASTERPIECE Studio.
December 16, 2025 marks a special day in the world of arts and culture, and particularly in the literary domain, a red-letter day. It marks the 250th anniversary of the birth of Jane Austen.
Austen holds a special place in the pantheon of literary gods, one of the most celebrated writers of our age who only achieved modest success in her lifetime. However, her popularity and influence have skyrocketed since then.
A small joke, and possibly an apocryphal one, when asked if he read novels, British philosopher Gilbert Ryle is alleged to have replied, “Oh, yes — all six, every year.”
Those devoted to Jane Austen — including those super-fans who might call themselves Janeites — know immediately that Ryle is referring to the six published novels that Austen wrote during her life: Pride & Prejudice, Sense & Sensibility, Persuasion, Emma, Northanger Abbey, and Mansfield Park.
Author Gill Hornby explains the alchemy of Austen’s novels.
Gill Hornby: If you put four or six or eight people together in a house, bring them up together and then turn them into adults, you will get everything. Love, drama, warfare, real warfare, romance and the inevitable humor. And you don't really need anything else because these are the things that make our worlds go round.
Austen’s novels have captivated millions since they were first published in the early 19th century, inspiring countless adaptations ranging from the faithful to the creative, involving everything from shopaholic Beverly Hills teens and Bollywood dancers to even zombies.
Perhaps no one is better known for beloved British miniseries adaptations more than Andrew Davies.
Andrew Davies: Well, I guess the thing about Jane Austen is that she could tell a wonderful story that just goes straight to your heart. And combined with that, she had a really deep insight into character, and an extraordinarily witty way of putting it across. And that kind of combination is just absolutely winning.
On the surface, these novels are about marriage and courtship, yes, but at their heart, they’re about connection and belonging… timeless emotions, really. MASTERPIECE’s Senior Series Producer Erin Delaney reflects on just how important they are.
Erin Delaney: It's absolutely the emotions. The emotions that Jane Austen poured into these characters, and especially the female characters, they just feel so fresh and compelling and now.
The story of Jane Austen is the story of genius finding acclaim, even if only after death. Here at MASTERPIECE, we are admirers of Jane Austen to say the least. Adaptations of Austen’s classics have been a mainstay throughout MASTERPIECE’s history on PBS, bringing her stories to American audiences and creating new generations of fans. In honor of the 250th anniversary of her birth, we’re looking back at Austen’s life, her legacy, and what her novels mean to us.
Jane Austen wrote throughout most of her life, but she didn’t really hit her stride until her later years. Austen’s early life was somewhat unsettled as she moved from place to place with her family, which made it difficult for her to write.
For years, Jane, Cassandra, and their mother bounced around, sometimes staying with relatives, and other times seeking more affordable accommodations. This was a trying time for the young novelist. Here’s historian Lucy Worsley on just how precarious Austen’s life was during this period:
Lucy Worsley: She was on one of these trips that she used to make between far flung relatives in different parts of the country that meant traveling in other people's carriages or maybe in the stagecoach. And you would have to go and stay at a coaching inn when the horses were changed. You couldn't travel from Hampshire to Kent, which was a journey she quite often made to her brother's house, you couldn't make that journey in a day.
When the luggage was mixed up and her own little writing desk, that was kind of like a home that she carried with her because that's where she kept her novels, that's where she kept the most precious and important things in her life, they nearly got carried off to well, Lord knows where. That's just such an insight into the way that her life, although she always had food and she always had a roof over her head, it's such an incredible near miss of disaster, isn't it? Oof, oof, what a feeling. I mean, I get a bit upset if I lose my bank card, but imagine losing your life's work and it not being your… oh my goodness, I can't even bear to think about it!
Fortunately for Austen — and for us — her writing desk and all of its priceless contents were not “carried off to lord knows where.” But moments like these were unfortunately all too common during this time, making it difficult for Austen to focus on what she loved most. But when she was 33 years old, her older sister Cassandra gave her the gift of a lifetime.
Gill Hornby: Thanks to Cassandra, she got the perfect establishment which was the cottage in Chawton with her mother Mrs. Austen, her beloved sister Cassandra and their great friend Martha Lloyd, and they were four ladies in a cottage. They didn't have much money, but they didn't need it. Mrs. Austen did the garden, Cassandra ran the house, Martha dealt with the kitchen and Jane wrote. And it was her idea of utopia.
This cottage at Chawton belonged to Jane and Cassandra’s older brother Edward, who owned the estate and lived nearby at Chawton House. Cassandra had arranged for the four women to live here beginning in early 1809. Austen lived here from ages 33 to 41 and completed her six iconic novels.
Jane Austen wrote about marriage and courtship, and she had an extremely sharp eye as a social commentator, writing about capital, family, and class. But one major theme that runs through her work is the idea of searching for a stable and happy home environment, whether that's the Dashwoods in Sense & Sensibility, Fanny Price being sent to live with wealthy relations in Mansfield Park, or the vast Bennet brood in Pride and Prejudice.
In this regard, Austen was writing about one of the most important issues facing women for centuries, and something with which she had direct personal experience.
Here’s historian Lucy Worsley, author of Jane Austen at Home.
Lucy Worsley: Home is hugely important to her heroines, as it was to Jane herself, because like Lizzie Bennet, when her father died, she was going to have nowhere to live. And what her family expected her to do was of course, to marry, to marry money. So, the stakes were incredibly high for these people at gentry level in Georgian England, these women, I should say. Marriage was going to be the absolute single most important thing they could do with their lives.
And the reason that home to Jane Austen herself was always a bit of a problem was because she never married. And that was her own choice. She got lots of offers. Really significantly, I think, turned down an offer of marriage from a man with a massive mansion. She accepted him and then over that night, she thought again and in the morning, she broke it off. And I think the reason that she had the courage to do that was because she just sold her first novel, the one that would become Northanger Abbey.
And I think she thought, hang on, I'm going to defy expectations here and I'm going to try to live as a professional writer, which was hard. Her books didn't make much money. And she ended up living as the unmarried aunt in other people's houses and as a guest and on people's charity. So, the sacrifices of home comforts that she made in order to be an artist were huge. And it's also not at all surprising to find that home is such a major concern in her fiction.
Women in the 18th and 19th centuries did not have as many options as men, and home was vital in order to ensure social and economic security. That was often the end goal: marry, secure a home, and be able to survive. And we see that play out within Austen’s work, which always ends with a happily ever after.
Gill Hornby: She was sharp enough to know that she had to have a romance, she had to have a happy ending. She always just took them to the altar and then you had to forget about them. But, what she was really talking about was social commentary and what she'd really seen about people and the difference between the sexes, very important in Austen novels, and the rigorous class structure that they were living within. And I think they would've been read very differently, her novels, then than the way they're read now. I mean, Pride and Prejudice, for example, is a revolutionary novel. There's this grandest of men falling in love with this girl who has nothing, not really a penny, from a family he looks down on.
This is author Gill Hornby, who has written several books about Jane Austen including Miss Austen, The Elopement, and Godmersham Park.
Beyond themes of home and love conquering all, Austen’s stories are rich and dynamic, narratives with strong social commentary that reward multiple readings. For screenwriter Andrew Davies, these stories have more depth than what appears on the surface.
Andrew’s audio for this episode comes from an archival interview he did with MASTERPIECE back in 2019 promoting Sanditon.
Andrew Davies: Well one of the things that I like most about Jane Austen is that there are always more layers, and the more carefully you read her, the more things you can see. People think of Jane Austen as being very “prim and proper,” but if look at the backstories and the bits that she doesn’t do as scenes, but come out as references, you’re aware that the world her characters live in is just as dangerous, transgressive, and really thrilling and sometimes dark as anything of our own.
We all have a Jane Austen origin story. Mine begins like many others, in high school, reading that Austen gateway novel, Pride & Prejudice. I was immediately struck by the strength of her prose, her incisive wit, and by her characters who seemed to leap off the page almost two centuries after their publication. Within a year, Andrew Davies’ 1995 BBC adaptation of Pride & Prejudice crossed the Atlantic, and I was engrossed with Jennifer Ehle’s Lizzie Bennet and Colin Firth’s Mr. Darcy. I would, years later, sit down to interview Ehle and had to stop myself from fanboying entirely.
Later, at university, I took several 19th century English literature courses about Austen, and during my year abroad at Oxford University, I worked with my tutor on coursework that had me reading every work that Austen ever wrote from the six novels to the Juvenilia and fragments like Sanditon that were never completed.
Perhaps surprisingly, my favorite of those isn’t Pride & Prejudice or Persuasion, but Mansfield Park, where Austen juggles poor Fanny Price, amateur theatrics, the truly awful Crawfords, and an excoriation of the “dead silence” around wealth made through the slave trade. It’s a book I come back to again and again.
Similar to my experience reading Austen while at university, Lucy Worsley also found solace in Jane’s work during periods of intense study.
Lucy Worsley: I do particularly remember when I was doing the final exams for my history degree, going into the library and revising all day and then in the evening, I would go home and I would read Jane Austen, as people did in the London Blitz, as people do in illness, as people do in times of trouble. There's something supremely health giving about her work. It's so absorbing, it's so brilliant, oh it just has such wonderful resolution to it. You can read the stories as romantic comedies, you can read them as sort of tragic stories, but they just excel as stories. They absolutely take you out of normal life.
Gill Hornby: I think it took me out of myself is what it did. You know how adolescents are so completely in their own heads? There was something about the quality of the writing and the approachability of it. I mean, the set dressing is 19th century, but the women's lives, we've all got mothers, we've all got sisters, and it matters if we fall in love. I loved the romance of it, but also I loved the jokes. She made me laugh as a teenager like she makes me laugh now.
Andrew Davies: Well, for me, it’s a combination of quite old fashioned, almost fairy tale-like love stories, usually of a lovely but disadvantaged heroine finding happiness, love, fulfillment, etc., etc. Now, that can be the basis of the most conventional and sickening romance story, but this is combined in Jane Austen with great wit and humor and a very deep understanding of human behavior. She’s very good at creating characters with an enormous amount of superficial charm whom we are charmed by and then disillusioned with and that sort of thing. And also, she constructs plots with great skill and precision so that she sets up little time bombs that are going to explode at just the right spot in the story.
Erin Delaney: Explorations of money and class, and how it affects the lives and the lives women lead and the choices they make and have to make. There's a sympathy with the downtrodden and the unluckier people. Obviously, this is true of all novels, not just Jane Austen, but there's a struggle.
Erin remembers first reading Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice as a young girl growing up in New England.
Erin Delaney: And I remember while I was reading it, I grew up in Massachusetts, in New England, and there were always huge storms in those days, there was a big snowstorm, and we lost power, of course. I'm not sure I was allowed to bring candles upstairs. I had a good flashlight, and I was sitting at my Victorian writing desk and trying to read the novel.
Alas, the font was very small and the light was not good, but I read a little bit and I just was transported because it was dark, because there was hardly any light. And the light that there was, was falling on my book. And I had my long skirt on and my Victorian writing desk. Reading that book was a very transporting experience. I don't think Jane Austen belabors the descriptions of the clothes or the settings, the lighting, and yet somehow you feel it.
Not only was Pride and Prejudice the first Jane Austen novel Erin read, but it has also become her favorite.
Erin Delaney: Pride and Prejudice covers in depth a lot of the great themes of all of Austen's novels, the whole, you know, this family with five daughters and what a burden it is for them to have daughters and how will they get them all married off? And the rich, the Darcy-Bingham wealth axis when set against the pretty poor, country, barely gentlemen family of the Austens. She was really considering wealth in an interesting way, and class in an interesting way, and how it all tied into marriage and happy endings. I just like the sort of incisive wit of Pride and Prejudice.
Lucy Worsley: Often I notice that people who like Pride and Prejudice are actually telling me that they really like, do you remember that famous scene when Colin Firth was Mr. Darcy and he came out of the lake in the wet shirt? A lot of people are secretly telling me that they remember and really like that.
That scene Lucy is describing is one of the most well known moments among Austen adaptations. And like many Austen adaptations, Andrew Davies is responsible for writing that iconic scene. These moments, ones with little dialogue, are what Davies is most drawn to.
ANDREW: Ah, my favorite scene in Pride and Prejudice. People often assume it’s going to be Mr. Darcy diving in the lake, or Mr. Darcy’s wet shirt… yeah, obviously that made the adaptation very famous, but the scene I particularly like most is one that comes a little bit later, and that’s a scene in the music room, in which Georgiana, Darcy’s sister, is playing the piano, and Miss Bingley makes an inopportune remark which embarrasses Georgiana. Elizabeth rescues Georgiana, Darcy is very grateful, looks across with gratitude, and then something that’s clearly love, and then Elizabeth looks back across the piano, and the music is going the whole time, and that, I think, is my favorite scene. The best moments are often those where there’s no dialogue at all, and we understand so much about the characters that just a look between them can convey so much.
Author Gill Hornby also has a place in her heart for Pride and Prejudice, although her favorite Austen novel has changed throughout the years.
Gill Hornby: It was always Pride and Prejudice for ages, for all the obvious reasons. Then I got old, and so it became Persuasion for all the obvious reasons. I've recently had to reread Emma for something I was writing, and I think I have to say that is her masterpiece. She wrote that at the top of her powers. It was the fifth novel that she wrote. She was absolutely match fit when she wrote it. With Emma, she just blew the whole novel thing out of the water. She writes it from Emma's position, so she makes no moral judgments about Emma at any point. The unconscious narrator had never been done before. It's done all the time now. We don't blink twice when we read that and it's second nature to modern novelists, but she invented it.
Here’s historian Lucy Worsley, author of Jane Austen at Home.
Lucy Worsley: My own favorite is a less popular choice, I think. It’s the one when Jane Austen was writing it she said, I'm going to write a heroine whom nobody else will much like apart from me. And the reason I like Emma Woodhouse, who is the heroine of the story, Emma, is because she's quite sort of difficult and up herself and she thinks that she knows better than everybody else. I mean, I have absolutely nothing in common with her at all. But I also feel a deep affinity with her.
Like Lucy and Gill, I'm also a fan of Emma, and my favorite Austen character, like Lucy, is Emma Woodhouse, who is her own worst enemy. Emma chastises those who adore her; she meddles endlessly; she has her heart broken. By the end, Emma must make amends, acknowledge her flaws, and strive to do and to be better. In other words: she grows up.
Austen wrote her characters in such an honest and vulnerable way that it’s hard for readers not to identify with them. Here’s Erin again talking about just that.
Erin Delaney: I think I identified, of course, as we all do, with Lizzie Bennet. She was feisty, she was smart. She was a friend to her sisters, but somehow, also a little apart, which many of us feel as young people, and I know I did. She's quite snarky and sarcastic, but with a smile on her face. She's never nasty, as some Austen characters clearly are. She's cautious but fun loving. She's a thinker. I guess at the end of the day, we all like who we are. I'm a thinker, so I love Lizzie Bennet, who's a thinker.
Lucy Worsley: I really like Mr. Knightley. Of all of Jane Austen's heroes, he’s the one that she said, if I had ever married, it could only have been to a man as nice as Mr. Knightley is.
Gill Hornby: Well, I do rather love Emma now, recently. It might be Anne Elliot, I think. I think her kind of noble forbearance, it reminds me of Cassandra actually, doing everything for everybody. The uncomplaining nature of her, the sort of quiet intelligence. I do like her, but you know, there's something to be said for all of them, isn't there? But Emma's a fabulous creation, absolutely fantastic.
Although we can examine Austen’s novels, letters, and early works, we don’t actually know a lot about Austen as a person, or what her personality was like. For someone who wrote her characters so intimately but disclosed so little personally, one has to wonder if Austen saw herself in any of her characters.
ANDREW: It’s a bit presumptuous to say whether she did, but I would think Elinor in Sense and Sensibility must be fairly close because she’s very perspicacious, and she’s very thoughtful, and she’s quite reserved. Although, if we read about Jane Austen’s journals and accounts of her life, she was herself quite skittish, inclined to fall in love in a hurry, often drank rather too much, which is not like any of her female characters.
We may never know if Austen based any of her characters on herself or saw herself in her characters, but we do know that she wrote from experience.
ANDREW: The famous thing about Jane Austen with male characters and female characters is that she restricted herself. She wouldn’t write a scene with a man on his own, let us into his thoughts. Neither would she write a scene where two men were talking together about their hopes and dreams. So, she restrained herself from doing that. I’m sure she would have been able to do it brilliantly. What she said was, “I’ve never obviously experienced such a scene, so how could I write one?” But she does write her men with great perception.
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Themes of home, humor, love and romance, marriage, and social class have captivated Jane Austen audiences for years, particularly the MASTERPIECE audience. The relationship between MASTERPIECE and Jane Austen began in 1980 and continues up to the present day with the 2025 miniseries Miss Austen. But perhaps the most Jane Austen intensive time for MASTERPIECE was during 2008’s The Complete Jane Austen.
Erin Delaney: We had four of the six Jane Austen novels. And so, I suggested, you know what, there are some great Austen adaptations of the two we don't currently have. We should just license them and make a whole fun fest, a Jane Austen festival. And people liked the idea, and so we did it.
MASTERPIECE relicensed the BBC’s 1996 adaptation of Emma and their 1995 adaptation of Pride and Prejudice, starring Colin Firth and Jennifer Ehle, and aired The Complete Jane Austen on MASTERPIECE from January through April 2008. Adaptations of all six novels, plus the film Miss Austen Regrets captivated audiences, cementing the Jane Austen-MASTERPIECE relationship.
Erin Delaney: As I recall, people loved it. Austen adaptations pop up randomly and it's typically the big two. You get a lot of Pride and Prejudice, you get a fair number of Emma’s and a couple Sense and Sensibilities. The other ones, not so much. And I think people realized, oh, that's cool, Jane Austen.
MASTERPIECE continues to produce and broadcast Jane Austen related shows such as the 2021 series Sanditon, based on Austen’s unfinished novel set by the seaside, and earlier this year, Miss Austen, adapted from Gill Hornby’s novel which tells the story of Jane and her sister Cassandra’s relationship and the beginnings of Austen’s legacy. Austen’s honesty, social commentary, and relatable characters keep us returning to her works year after year. She shows us what it means to embrace our emotions in the face of adversity, and how leading with the heart can be our most difficult, and most rewarding endeavor.
In her lifetime, Jane Austen only achieved modest success, a mere glimmer of the reputation and admiration she has today. While these novels were written over 200 years ago, they have clearly stood the test of time. So, what is it about Jane Austen and her work that continues to resonate with each new generation?
Lucy Worsley: I think it's partly because she's such a wonderful entertainer, isn't she? But also, partly because I think this message that society is unjust and that women's opportunities are limited, I think it still holds meaning, I think it still holds power. It's easy for us to think we're better than those people in the past, but in some ways, we haven't got it right yet.
ANDREW: In her novels, she often shows people changing drastically. That is one of those things about literature isn’t it, people have character arcs, whereas in real life I guess they don’t. You don’t often see reforms and redemptions, although they’re one of the most lovely things to read about and write about. I think often what she’s doing is she’s revealing something that’s there at the heart all the time, which is believable.
Gill Hornby: She's forgiving all of her baddies, she makes a case for them. She always explains why people are the way they are. And I think that's very important and a very important life lesson for all of us. And I do think the humor. Humor is what makes us human. And even in the darkest times, you know, at a funeral, there will be laughter. There just has to be, it's how we release ourselves. And so, I really think that her comedy explains her success in enormous ways.
Her contemporaries, like Walter Scott, of whom she was very jealous, he wrote, as he said so himself because he was an Austen admirer, he said he wrote about the big bow-wow and he could do that better than anyone, but she wrote about the minute. And of course, it's because his novels are all about the big bow-wow, the wars and the great sweeps of history and so on, that we're not interested in them now. We've got our own wars, frankly. And we've got our own sweep of history that's taking us at quite a pace, but the minute is where we all live, and that's what she does so brilliantly.
When Austen arrived at Chawton with her mother, sister, and family friend Martha, she finally found that sense of home and stability that she had been searching for since her early days in Steventon. She was incredibly prolific, writing and revising the six novels that would forever change the literary world. But by 1816, Austen’s health began to deteriorate. She left Chawton in May of 1817 and relocated to Winchester for treatment. On July 18, 1817, Jane Austen died at the age of 41.
Erin Delaney: It's heartbreaking that Jane Austen died so young because given what she achieved before the age of 41, writing about young women and kind of the marriage market, I wonder what she might have written had she lived to be 60, 70, 80 and still been writing because she would have gained in wisdom and she would have had a broader perspective, and she would have left that sort of breathless, looking for love, youthful stage. And what might she have done?
Fame and fortune were never in the cards for Austen in life. Her work did sell, but not enough to earn her significant wealth or publicity. Her first novel was credited as written “By a Lady,” rather than under her own name, and subsequent novels were credited to “the author of Sense and Sensibility,” and so on. Her original gravestone at Winchester Cathedral didn’t even mention that she was a writer.
But those who knew her works adored her. So much so that by the mid-19th century, her novels began to gain traction with the re-publication of her works as a complete set in 1833, and a biography published in 1869. Decades after her death, people began flocking to her grave at Winchester Cathedral. The verger at the cathedral, unaware of Austen’s work, is said to have asked one of the visitors, “Pray, sir, can you tell me whether there was anything particular about that lady?” It wasn’t until 1900 that a plaque was added that made mention that she was a writer.
As of October 2025, there is now a statue of Jane Austen, standing at her writing table, outside the cathedral. After the statue was unveiled, the interim dean of Winchester Cathedral said, “The grave is a ledger stone with some lovely words on it but we had nothing that signified her legacy, her vision, her vitality and a sculpture does that better than anything.”
That legacy stretches from her death in 1817 to today, and beyond. All it took was a home to call her own, a room where Jane could write.
Gill Hornby: I think she had the happiest ending she could possibly have had, which was eight years in Chawton. A mere eight years! And in that time, she churned out the six best novels in the English language. It is extraordinary. The most extraordinary, creative flowering I think of anybody ever. In that time, I don't think she could have been happier.
From all of us at MASTERPIECE, wishing you a very happy birthday, Jane Austen.
This special birthday episode was written by me, Jace Lacob, and Jack Pombriant, produced by Jack Pombriant, mastered by Elisheba Ittoop, and edited by Robyn Bissette. Special thanks to Lucy Worsley, Gill Hornby, Erin Delaney, and Andrew Davies.
MASTERPIECE Studio is hosted by me, Jace Lacob, produced by Jack Pombriant and edited by Robyn Bissette. Elisheba Ittoop is our sound designer. The executive producer for MASTERPIECE is Susanne Simpson.
Jace Lacob: I want to do a little Jane Austen free association with you. I'm going to give you an Austen title, and I want you to give me just the first word that immediately comes into your head. So, the first one is Emma.
Erin Delaney: Spirited.
Jace Lacob: Sense and Sensibility.
Erin Delaney: Lovelorn.
Jace Lacob: Sanditon.
Erin Delaney: Beach.
Jace Lacob: Northanger Abbey.
Erin Delaney: Gothic.
Jace Lacob: Pride and prejudice.
Erin Delaney: Perfection.
Jace Lacob: Persuasion.
Erin Delaney: Patience.
Jace Lacob: And Mansfield Park.
Erin Delaney: Tedious. Sorry.
Jace Lacob: My favorite Jane Austen novel.
Erin Delaney: Really?
Jace Lacob: So, I'll try not to take that personally.
Erin Delaney: Oh, can I have a second chance?
Jace Lacob: No, no. Stay with “tedious”, stay with “tedious”.
Erin Delaney: Damn.
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