Get this. Somewhere around 230 years ago, teenage Jane Austen wrote the name of someone she fancied on her pencil case. Okay, it was actually the names of two different someones but then it wasn’t a pencil case, she wasn’t at school. She was in a church and she filled out two proper and official marriage records saying she was the wife of these guys.

I like that while she’s still famous, the two men are so forgotten that nobody can tell now whether they were even real. And I just like imagining her doing this, giggling.

And as delighted as I was when this news was reported earlier in the week, it does not surprise me at all that she sounds like a present-day teenager

For a few years ago, BBC Radio 4 did a new dramatisation of Austen’s Pride and Prejudice and I think I was reviewing it for Radio Times. I’m not sure now: either I was reviewing it or I’d taken illicit advantage of having access to the BBC Radio Previews press site.

Either way, I was listening and getting into it apart from one thing. This particular production had decided to use a narrator and I twitch at narrators. Or at least I do when the narration is simply exposition, just trudging out the plot because it’s easier to say it than show it.

This time my bias felt especially right because although it was better than boring exposition, it was witty and entertaining – until the narrator was saying something far too modern. I can’t remember now what it was but there was no chance Jane Austen would’ve approved of it, there was every chance that it would mean I gave the show a bad review.

It was just anachronistic and enough so that I got out my Pride and Prejudice paperback to see how Austen wrote that part of the story.

Yep.

You’re right.

The narrator’s dialogue in this Radio 4 dramatisation was verbatim Jane Austen.

Two centuries after she wrote it down with, I don’t know, a quill pen, Austen’s words sound like she could’ve dictated it into Siri yesterday.

Two centuries.

Imagine writing anything that’s even remembered after two minutes.

I first read her novels starting only about ten years ago but I’ve admired, relished and loved her writing. So I’m just tickled to think she was also a naughty teenager defacing Church records for a laugh.