I’m always on the lookout for writers who’ve had well-paid, fun, fulfilled lives but I hardly ever find them. Jane Austen, for example. You’d think that the very least God would have given her in return for Emma and Pride and Prejudice would have been a single man in possession of a good fortune, a long, happy marriage and lots of lovely kiddies.
But no, God really hates writers, preferring to smile on Dan Brown. If you’re Jane Austen, the deal is you get a pretty rubbish life as an impoverished spinster, but the moment you’re dead everyone thinks you’re great, and goes on remaking films of your novels and slushy drama-docs with pretty girls in bonnets well into the 21st century. ‘Thanks, God,’ she’s no doubt thinking sourly as she looks down from her cloud. ‘But I think I’d have preferred the life rather than the posterity.’
Miss Austen Regrets (BBC1, Sunday) was writer Gwyneth Hughes’s attempt to make sense of this using some of the letters Austen wrote to her niece Fanny.
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