When Jane Austen was nineteen, her father did a remarkable thing. He gave her a wooden box that opened into a writing slope. He gave her, in other words, permission to be a writer.

He could not have given her, or the world, a greater gift.

This was one of many fascinating facts revealed in a new BBC series, Jane Austen: Rise of a Genius. As I’m sure you’ll have gathered, it’s the 250^th year of her birth. A few months ago, I wrote about the BBC costume drama, Miss Austen and the thoughts it triggered. (That’s “triggered” as in “sparked”, not as in: have to be escorted to a padded cocoon because someone said something you don’t agree with. I’ve always liked the word and refuse to have it wrested away from me.) You can read that piece here.

Jane Austen: Rise of a Genius was billed as “the incredible story of a young woman who ripped up the rulebook” because everything has to sound breathless these days, in order, presumably, to lure people away from Squid Game, Love Island or whatever’s currently gripping the nation. “Famous faces”, we were promised, would “celebrate her remarkable life” and the “beloved stories that still resonate today”.

200 years old and still relevant today! What a revolutionary idea!

I prepared to be irritated, but instead settled in. Most of the “famous faces” were not famous to me, though I’m clearly no longer in the cultural swim. For those that were, I’m afraid I thought: gosh, they’re looking older. Which is what I think when I catch a glimpse of myself on the screens in the Sky News studios. Who put those jowls there? And those eye bags? And those chins? And that’s after a make-up artist has spent 45 minutes toiling away.

(I thought of this when I read Daisy Buchanan’s lovely piece about author photographs earlier this week. She’s about 20 years younger than me and always looks gorgeous. I feel like giving her Nora Ephron’s advice to her younger self to wear a bikini “for the entire year”. I’m now more likely to think of the title of Ephron’s essay collection: I Feel Bad About My Neck.)

One of the familiar faces was Helen Fielding, who always cheers me up. Like me, she used to write a column for The Independent. Unlike me, she went on to become a global bestseller with her Bridget Jones books, and hit global audiences with the films. Jane Austen, and in particular Pride and Prejudice, are at the heart of her enterprise and its central character.

Cherie Blair popped up to talk about slavery. Colm Toibin, one of my literary heroes, talked about the nuts and bolts of what Austen did in her prose. “Part of Austen’s genius,” he said, “is she starts bringing you into a very close study of what somebody feels, hears, remembers, notices, so that you as the reader will slowly be pulled in, in an immersive way, into that consciousness.”

Exactly.

Her project, he said, “was to make possible the idea that women’s imagination and women’s minds were not just supple and graceful but sharp, with enormous integrity and seriousness.”

Another revolutionary idea.

Samuel West talked with great empathy and wisdom about her work. What a lovely man he seems to be! He said Captain Wentworth in Persuasion “does what a partner should do”. He “relieves you of your burden”. (My own once responded to a horrible Amazon review of one of my books using the name Wentworth, which kind of echoes his point.)

Fellow actor Tom Bennett lowered the tone by calling Mr Collins in Pride and Prejudice “a prick” and Sir James Martin, the character he played in the 2016 adaption of Love and Friendship, based on Austen’s short novel Lady Susan (written when she was eighteen!), a “fucking idiot”. I’m a fan of the punchy four-letter word, but I’m not sure that BBC documentaries on Jane Austen are quite the place for them.

And Admiral Lord West, First Sea Lord of the UK from 2002 to 2006, talked about the navy. Jane Austen’s brother Frank became Admiral of the Fleet and her brother Charles became a Rear Admiral. “The Royal Navy,” said West, “at that stage was charting the world. You were leading scientific research. If you were lucky and competent, you could make an immense amount of money.” The opportunities for a “genteel, middle-class woman”, on the other hand, “were about zero”.

I lapped it all up, even the reconstructions, which often make me wince. What struck me, among other things, was that Jane Austen was writing at a time of global turbulence and war. Her cousin Eliza’s husband was guillotined in the French Revolution. Her brothers sent home gifts bought with prize money released by the capture of enemy ships.

About five million people died in the Napoleonic wars, which were waged between 1803 and 1815. That’s about the same, as a proportion of the European population, as the First World War.

We are also, of course, in a time of war.

Dr Fiona Hill, one of the authors of the Strategic Defence Review released by the UK government this week, has said that World War III may already have started. Hill was an advisor on Russia affairs to Donald Trump during his first term and testified against him during his first impeachment. I think we can safely say that she has balls. She is also clear-eyed about the current geopolitical risks.

"We've got a hot war in Europe at this very moment,” she said in a recent interview, “that's had around a million casualties in terms of people either killed or severely wounded, millions of refugees, and all kinds of knock-on effects. That's very similar to what happened in World War I and World War II.” World Wars, she said in another recent interview, “are when you have global sets of conflicts that become intertwined. That’s where we are.”

Good to know.

Fiona Hill, by the way, is the daughter of a coal miner and a midwife from County Durham. When she was a child, her family didn’t have a phone, a car or a TV and often switched off the electricity to save money. She won a scholarship to a private school but didn’t go because her family couldn’t afford the uniform or the books. Her journey from chilly miner’s house to Trump top table is as dramatic as any Austen journey from parsonage to stately home.

Like Jane Austen, Hill refused to settle for the life on offer. She failed her interview at Oxford (so did I!) and was mocked for her Geordie accent. Instead, she read history and Russian at St Andrews, worked at Harvard and then as an intelligence analyst for Presidents Bush, Obama and Trump. She’s now Chancellor of Durham University while also advising our government.

And they are listening. Keir Starmer said this week that he’s putting our country on a “war footing”.

Again, good to know.

Jane Austen was 21 when her first attempt at Pride and Prejudice, First Impressions, was “declined, by return of post”. She could have given up but didn’t. Under pressure to marry, which was the only way for a woman of her time to gain financial security, she refused. She did, briefly, accept one marriage proposal, to a man she didn’t love and who didn’t love her, and had the courage to change her mind. She stuck with writing. She chose to be an independent woman and take the path of being a writer, a path very few women had taken before.

There was no guarantee that it would pay off. There is never any guarantee that it will pay off. But she did it anyway.

For those of us who want to write, make art or create anything, there’s no point in waiting for permission. No one is going to lay out a red carpet. You try. You fail. As Beckett said, you try again and you fail better. We all have bills to pay and we all have to find ways to pay them. But that’s no reason not to do it.

Jane Austen was lucky that her father believed in her. We are all lucky if we have people who believe in us. But writing, like art, comes from the inside. It comes at times of peace and at times of war. And it’s at time of severe threat that we need good writing most.

We need it to tell us who we are.

We all need a dose of good sense to stay grounded and pay the bills. To write well, we also need to hone our sensibility. We need, in other words, sense and sensibility, enough pride in ourselves to give ourselves permission to start and enough doggedness, which we might even call prejudice, to keep going when the going gets tough. Which, I’m afraid, it will.

Do you find it difficult to give yourself permission to write or make art? Does it feel self-indulgent or does it feel like something you have to do? I’m slightly obsessed by this issue and would really love to hear your thoughts.

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