‘Jane Austen, Daphne Du Maurier, the Brontës and Beatrix Potter all found liberation from the strictures of society and the freedom to express themselves (and indeed be themselves) in the British countryside’, says Mariella Frostrup who has a new series on More4 (if you’re in the UK) entitled ‘Britains Novel Landscapes’. Austen was not all prissy manners and corsets, she wrote her books during the Napoleonic wars and Hampshire, where she lived, was packed with soliders. When we choose to think of her as a war novelist we begin a fascinating re-evaluation of her words. Those balls in vast mansions were not all landed gentry fun, they were transactional business…