FASS academics advise on OU/BBC series Jane Austen: Rise of a Genius

The BBC 2 three-episode docudrama made in conjunction with The OU, Jane Austen: Rise of a Genius has made quite a splash, even in a crowded year of 250^th anniversary global celebrations focused on the birthday of one of the most famous women authors in the world, Jane Austen: Rise of a Genius - BBC iPlayer. 

OU academics Nicola J Watson and Emma Sweeney (ECW) served as nominated academics on the series. Watson has a career-long string of research publications related to Austen, most recently, on the history of literary tourism and biographical museum-making around her in The Author’s Effects: On the Writer’s House Museum (2020). Sweeney has published on the literary friendships of the author in A Secret Sisterhood (2017) and has a particular interest in Austen’s disabled brother and uncle. 

Watson and Sweeney provided comments and advice on everything from possible interviewees, draft scripts, archive images, use of adaptations, visual authenticity, and successive cuts. They also designed an interactive asset for OU Connect, ‘Jane Austen’s World’ Jane Austen: Rise of a Genius - An OU/BBC Co-production. This invites participants to ‘step into the parlour where Jane Austen wrote her world-famous novels.’ Users click on the objects scattered about to travel to spaces that shaped her, locations featured in the novels, and parts of the world her books have since reached.

The series reimagines Austen for 2025 as an excitingly modern young woman who falls in love but does not marry, preferring to pursue her deeply-felt ambitions to become a commercially successful novelist. The strapline sums this up as ‘The incredible story of a young woman who ripped up the rulebook and reinvented the novel.’ The interactive offers a different way of accessing Austen’s life and legacy through real and imaginary objects and places.

Averaging 1.1 million viewers per episode, the series has pulled in 4.7m viewers to date in the UK alone, a tribute to both Austen’s superstardom and the pacy production values.  The OU Connect interactive has been astonishingly successful, bringing in over 13,000 visitors so far, over half of whom went on to visit formal course pages. 

At The Global Jane Austen conference this summer at Southampton University, Watson spoke to a packed room of academics and amateurs, placing the series within the longer history of popular Austen biography, reflecting on the negotiations between verifiable ‘fact’ and undisproveable fiction that advising on the series entailed, and dealing with a heated set of questions from the floor. Austen may be an undisputed global superstar, but telling stories about her can still spark plenty of controversy.