Hello and welcome to Life of the Week from History Extra, where leading historians delve into the lives of history's most intriguing and significant figures.

Jane Austen remains one of the most influential novelists in English history.

Her social commentary, sharp wits, and exploration of love, class and gender

continue to captivate readers today. 2025 marks the 250th anniversary of her birth, and a new BBC1

drama, Miss Austin, is currently exploring her relationship with her sister Cassandra.

So this seemed like the perfect moment to speak to historian and Jane Austen fan, Lizzie Rogers,

to piece together her life, from her cultured upbringing in a rural Hampshire village,

to the turbulent bath years and beyond. Today we are going to be talking

all about the life of Jane Austen. Now, she's quite an iconic character in history. Could you

introduce us to her? Yeah, it's a funny one to introduce you to Jane Austen because I think

her name kind of appears before she does, but to kind of get it down to its introduce you to Jane Austen because I think her name kind of appears before she does,

but to kind of get it down to its bare bones, Jane Austen is an author of six published novels,

finished novels, who was born in 1775 and she died in 1817. She wrote some of the works that

are adapted numerous times for TV today and that we read and reread like

pride and prejudice and sense and sensibility. So you've given us a clue to when she was born,

but where was she born? So she was a Hampshire girl. She was born at Steventon in Hampshire in

December of 1775. So yeah, that was where she spent the first 25 years of her life, actually.

And what was her family background like? How did this sort of shape who she was?

Yeah, well, her family, I think, is really crucial to who she became. So her nephew ended

writing a memoir about her and he described Steventon in Hampshire where she was born

as the cradle of her genius. It's quite a powerful phrase. I mean, when you learn more about it,

so she was the seventh of eight children, the Austins were a big family. Her father was a rector

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