Jane Austen: Rise of a Genius review — fans will lap up the quality insights

Times

26-05-2025

It is a truth universally acknowledged that any article on Jane Austen must begin with the words 'It is a truth universally acknowledged…' I thought the same was going to apply to Jane Austen: Rise of a Genius (BBC1) when it started a with a close-up of Emoke Zsigmond, the actress playing Austen, scratching out the word 'truth' with her quill. Here we go again, I thought.
But it didn't show us the rest of the sentence. Maybe she was writing another of Austen's famous sentences: 'Seldom, very seldom, does complete truth belong to any human disclosure.'
There is a lot of supposition — 'she must have felt'; 'she would have been' — in this story of Austen's life marking 250 years since the year of her birth. Which is unavoidable because, as anyone who watched the excellent Miss Austen starring Keeley Hawes knows, her sister Cassandra burnt most of her letters, considering the contents too wicked, funny, waspish, outrageous and offensive for public consumption. She thought it might hurt the subjects' feelings, and she was probably right.
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It's a huge loss to historians and Austen fans but, let's be honest, would you want all your snippy, gossipy texts and messages that you sent to friends and family over the years to be released after your death? In one letter that survived she wrote that a woman they knew who had suffered a miscarriage had deliberately aborted because her husband was so ugly. Oof.
This is a perky, informative three-parter, even if I'm not keen on those dramatised reconstructions in which the actors don't speak. Given Austen's mastery of words it feels ironic that she is muted, but then this is the style of the Rise of a Genius brand. They did the same with Shakespeare.
We hear that Austen 'might' have been put off having babies by helping her cousins in labour and the fact that two of her relatives had died in childbirth, though it seems more likely she was a free-spirited intellect who didn't want to be a wife and baby machine and fiercely fought for her own financial independence.
It seems a safe bet that she would indeed have been devastated, as the series says, when her father sold off his library to fund his retirement, because it had been her window to the world. But not half as much as when he left everything to his eldest son. 'The whole world is a conspiracy to enrich one part of our family at the expense of another,' she wrote about the unfairness of primogeniture.
The best parts here are the contributions of the talking heads, from Helen Fielding, the Bridget Jones creator, Tamsin Greig, Greg Wise and Samuel West to experts and historians such as Paula Byrne and Louise Curran. The actors occasionally speak Austen's sparkling words aloud, which slightly made up for her muteness in the dramatised sequences. The writer Colm Toibin said of her protectiveness of Mansfield Park, a novel she felt didn't get the critical attention it deserved, that it was like the 'orphan child' that many writers have — the progeny they feel is underappreciated.
The series maintains quality to the end, showing us Austen's death at the age of 41, her head cradled lovingly by her sister for six hours at a crooked angle. Wise speaks, movingly, of being at his own sister's deathbed. 'It is exquisitely powerful and very tender,' he says.
Cassandra's own words about her lost sister were beautiful: 'She was the sun of my life … the gilder of every pleasure … the soother of every sorrow.' If you have the time, this is a nourishing three hours on which, I imagine, Austen fans will binge.★★★★☆
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