Jane Austen: Scenes from a provincial life

Jane Austen, handsome, clever, and posthumously rich, lived nearly 42 years in the world with, it seems, quite a bit to distress and vex her. The myth that our favourite romantic novelist spent her days contentedly at her desk, mob cap in place, clock ticking peacefully, imagining a world of passion which, as Charlotte Brontë put it, was "perfectly unknown to her", is about to explode.

Becoming Jane, which opens on Friday, tells the story of Austen's traumatic love affair, with a handsome Irish lawyer called Tom Lefroy. The flirtation between the two has been written about before, but Jon Spence, author of the book Becoming Jane Austen, on which the film is based, goes further than any other biographer by arguing that what happened between them was more significant than has been supposed and that the failure of Lefroy to propose to Jane was a painful experience which worked its way into her fiction.

Austen's popularity grows by the day. She is the only woman writer whose position on university courses remains secure at the same time as she sells by the shedload to the general reader. Even Bridget Jones's Diary is put on syllabuses as a spin-off of the Austen product. With our increasingly complex lives and in a world of psychobabble, the clearly defined societies and razor-sharp perception of Netherfield (Pride and Prejudice) and Mansfield Park offer comfort and respite. So much so that not only are we being presented this year with yet more adaptations of the novels, we are asked to adapt our relationship with Jane herself, from respectful politeness to a full blown heart-to-heart. It is time to shift from what Lord David Cecil described as the "acquaintance" we all share with her to the "intimacy" he believed was not possible.

Born in 1775 at the vicarage in Steventon, Hampshire, Jane's father, George, was a clergyman from middle-class stock but her mother, Cassandra, was proud to be descended from the same Lord Mayor of London who proclaimed Elizabeth I queen. The second daughter in a bevy of boys, Jane was breastfed by her mother for her first months before being handed to a woman in the village for a further year. The Austens were a loving family, and Jane remained close to her siblings all her life, particularly to her sister, also called Cassandra, who gave us the only picture we have of the author, a watercolour in which rogue curls fall out of her cap, large dark eyes gaze elsewhere and a small, pert mouth stays firmly shut.

The quietness of her life is referred to, but she received more education than most for a girl of her time and class. Her parents ran a boys' school from their home, and Jane grew up among ideas and books, after which she attended the Reading Ladies Boarding School for one year. Her writing was encouraged by her family, and she produced her first novel, Love and Friendship, at 15. By her early twenties she was writing at full-throttle.

She was cautious, shy, "whimsical", her cousin noticed, prone to depression and emotionally reticent, but richly humorous, always ready to laugh at herself as well as others. Deeply attached to her home, the one time she fell in love, with the young Tom Lefroy, in 1795, it was with a man who had the qualities of Elizabeth Bennet. Lefroy was quick-witted and charming, and he and Jane seem to have been instantly attracted to one another. Their flirtation lasted over the holiday, where they met at a number of parties.

When Lefroy returned to Ireland, Jane told Cassandra that "the day is come on which I am to flirt my last with Tom Lefroy, & when you receive this it will be over - My tears will flow as I write, at the melancholy idea." Marriage had not been mentioned but she expected him to propose. But she was too poor to make a good match for the cash-strapped Lefroy, who was helping his father support nine children, so he married a rich Wexford heiress instead. The experience fed into the novels Pride and Prejudice, Sense and Sensibility and Northanger Abbey, all of which were completed by the time she was 25.

In 1801, aged 26, the Austens had to leave Jane's beloved Hampshire, and moved to Bath - a reflection of the insecurity that the unpropertied middle classes lived with. Jane was miserable, and in 1802, seven years after the romance with Tom Lefroy, she accepted - and then declined - the hand of Harris Bigg-Wither, heir to a considerable Hampshire estate.

He was six years her junior and she was not in love, but by refusing she committed herself to spinsterhood. Following the death of her father in 1805, to which Jane responded with her usual stoicism, she, Cassandra and their mother were left homeless until they were housed by her brother Edward - who at 12 had been adopted by rich cousins - on a house in his estate in the Hampshire village of Chawton.

There was a break of more than 10 years in her writing and this has never been wholly explained. The family was on the move and she was someone who needed stability to be creative. She was also kept busy, assisting her brothers' lives, as spinster aunt. But there is also evidence of a prolonged depression. When Jane did pick up her pen she wrote three further novels - Mansfield Park (1814), Emma (1816), which was dedicated to the Prince Regent, and Persuasion (1818) - but the difference between the young author of Pride and Prejudice and the older, more experienced one who now emerged is apparent by a marked drop in temperature. The heroines are more complicated; morality plays a greater part and the author is more cynical - even jaded. It is as though she were making Lizzie Bennet marry Mr Collins instead of Darcy.

Her health began to suffer in 1816, and in 1817, aged 41, Jane died, probably from Addison's disease. Following her death, the subject of disappointment was raised: had she led the life she wanted for herself? Had the love and support of her family and the praise of a steady band of readers been enough? Henry Austen, her brother, believed that it had and that Jane never suffered more than the "little disappointments" known to us all. But perhaps it needed both time and a woman novelist to see beneath the ironic surface and suggest that Jane might not have been the contented woman we would like her to be, as less acquaintance and more intimacy with the novels will show. "If we look into the shrewdness and quiet satire of her stories," wrote the writer Julia Kavanagh in 1862, "we shall find a much keener sense of disappointment than joy fulfilled. Sometimes we find more than disappointments."