When I was starting out as a writer in my mid-twenties, I drew up a strict timetable of what I planned to achieve and when. First book by thirty, first major prize by forty, household name by forty-five, public honours by fifty. And since writers need to be showered with a constant stream of compliments, or at least I do, I intended to be married by thirty-five (clearly, I hadn’t yet got the hang of what relationships were for). Suffice it to say that I hit none of these deadlines; indeed I came nowhere close. And that, for someone who prides herself on getting things done, is a constant mortification. Or at least it used to be. Age brings perspective, or perhaps exhaustion. These days I am just happy to be allowed to keep on keeping on.

Jane Austen turns 250 this year, on 16 December to be precise. Amid all the brouhaha around the sestercentennial of her birth, it is easy to forget that her death at the age of forty-one, probably from kidney failure, was mourned by her friends and family as an untimely end to youthful promise. As a single gentlewoman in late Georgian England, Austen might have reasonably expected to live into her fifties (good food, fresh air and no hideous complications from childbirth). If you factor in her genetic stock, then her early death becomes even more of an anomaly. The extended Austen clan was strikingly long-lived: Mrs Austen made it to eighty-seven, her father lived to seventy-five and the average for her siblings was also seventy-five. One diligent researcher has crunched the numbers and calculated that, actuarially speaking, Jane Austen had every reason to expect to reach sixty-four and four months. Imagine how many extra novels – three, four, five? – she might have produced in those twenty-three stolen years.

Age matters very much in Jane Austen. Indeed, you could say that the central message of her novels is the importance of acting your age, with a warning about what happens when you don’t. The great cautionary tale here is Lydia Bennet, who has just turned sixteen in Pride and