KNOW-IT-ALL POSH BOY MADE ME DOUBT MYSELF

They say that during the Blitz the quietness of Jane austen’s novels made the fear go away. Three times as many copies of Pride and Prejudice were reportedly sold during the war. her books did the same for me during the final examinations for my history degree. It wasn’t as if bombs were falling, but it was a

stressful time. By day I was hard at it in the library, in the evenings I escaped to Pride And Prejudice.

Fear of failing was very awful to a socially awkward, state-school girl like me, come to Oxford to live in what was basically a stately home. My college was a huge rambling historic building, rather like Rosings Park in Pride And Prejudice, but with more drunken rugby players.

So one of the things that impressed me about Lizzy Bennet was the way she went on being exactly herself, in the face of misfortune, embarrassment, the hauteur of Mr Darcy, or the snobbery of his aunt, the terrifying Lady Catherine de Bourgh of Rosings.

I later discovered that Jane Austen herself learned the hard way how to be brilliant under pressure. In real life, she drafted Pride And Prejudice after staying with grand relatives at their mansion Godmersham Park in Kent. Letters written by her relatives at the time tell us how unwelcome she must have felt.

‘Aunt Jane,’ writes one of them, ‘was not so refined as she ought to have been.’ Jane’s family background was all wrong: ‘not rich...not at all high bred, or in short anything more than mediocre’. This could be Lady Catherine talking, but, in fact, it’s Jane’s own niece.

Now I absolutely don’t think that my own education was mediocre — it set me up in life very nicely, thank you — but I am certainly not ‘high bred’.

And one of the priceless gifts of breeding, also provided by a private education, is a sense of confidence, indeed, of entitlement. Many of my fellow students exuded it. Not necessarily in a nasty manner, but blithely and unwittingly.

There was more than a touch of Darcy about my tutorial partner, let’s call him Henry. He would dominate the conversation with his historical theories, while I tried to look unimpressed. But secretly, I was: as much by his confidence as his knowledge.

By the time the results came out, I’d got myself a job in Cambridge. And so it was by telephone that I learned I’d got a first-class degree, and Henry a second. I phoned again. ‘Are you absolutely sure you haven’t mixed us up?’ After three phone calls, the lady in the examination office snapped. ‘Get over yourself,’ she said, ‘you deserve your First’.

I would never consider myself inferior to Henry again.

lUcY WOrSleY’S new biography, Jane austen at home, will be published by hodder & Stoughton in May next year.