Sometimes it seems as though Lucy Worsley is single-handedly keeping BBC4 in business. Every couple of months the chipper, blonde-bobbed historian will pop up with another quirky three-part series – the most recent, British History’s Biggest Fibs with Lucy Worsley, aired in February – in which sheenthusiastically informs and entertains, rummaging through her trusty dressing-up box all the while.

And it’s not just BBC4 that’s in thrall to her charms. Worsley’s take on the Six Wives of Henry VIII aired on BBC1 late last year, she has a book on Jane Austen coming out next month with an accompanying television series due later in the year, her second historical novel for children, My Name is Victoria, was published last month to strong reviews and it has been announced that she is to head a major two-part series on the history of opera for BBC2.

Then there’s the day job. By night the 43-year-old Worsley may be a puckish screen presence, gamely jumping on horses and twirling parasols with panache, but by day she is the joint chief curator of the UK’s Historic Royal Palaces (alongside Tracy Borman), responsible for everything from arranging exhibitions and refurbishments to lectures and tours. It is a career she has described as being “like intelligent play” telling the Sunday Times in 2015: “I like all the types of supposed work that I do. It’s a privilege: I can’t believe I get paid for it.”

This last statement is the key to Worsley’s appeal. She clearly has fun with history and makes no secret of the fact she believes it should be populist. “I don’t want to be definitive or the last word on anything,” she said in an interview with the Times in March. “I’m an entry-level historian. It’s my job to lead people to that kind of thing.”

Her programmes, a clever mix of the light-hearted and the erudite, reflect that: she’s as fond of a good bit of royal gossip as she is a trawl through the archives. Her job is to entertain and if she occasionally has to pull on a silly costume to do so, that’s fine: “When it comes to history I am shameless,” she has said. “I will do whatever it takes to get people involved.”

Not everyone is so convinced this is a good thing, and Worsley’s concentration on the domestic side of history has left her open to attack from more traditional historians, who claim she ignores the weighty subjects of the time – the political machinations and constitutional changes – in favour of fashion, furniture and frivolity.

In 2009 David Starkey criticised the “feminisation” of history, noting that female historians were “usually quite pretty” and condemning their work as “historical Mills & Boon”. In 2012, Sir Keith Thomas, then judge of the Wolfson history prize, took aim at telly-dons, asserting that too many young historians “sought popularity for popularity’s sake”. Horrible Histories author Terry Deary was more vitriolic in February, describing Worsley as “spiteful” and attacking her for her “posh little voice, her insistence on play-acting and thinking her performances are actually quality drama”.

Worsley, who has an impressive ability to laugh off criticism – she infamously compared Starkey to a “cross owl”, though the two subsequently made up and presented a TV show on Hampton Court Palace together – declined to respond beyond noting: “I respectfully disagree with his [Deary’s] views against history teachers.” (Deary has long been an outspoken critic of the way history is taught in schools.)

She has, however, admitted that her inability to say her Rs can infuriate people. “What really seems to enrage people is my slight lisp,” she told the Times. “I apologise for being irritating and I can see that some people would so find me, but there’s not much I can do about it.”

In fact, she worried about it enough to seek help from a speech therapist before presenting Fit to Rule: How Royal Illness Changed History in 2013 (“I thought I can’t just be going ‘fit to wuule’ the whole time,” she told the Independent) but in the end decided that the treatment (saying the letter R correctly as many times as she’d already said it incorrectly) was “impractical”. She is similarly pragmatic about the occasional insults yelled at her in the street (“Fuck off back to 1909” was a particular favourite) and remains an enthusiastic and witty tweeter, although she worries that the social-media abuse handed out to women in the public eye will “put off other female historians from coming forward”.

The historian takes on the role of Elizabeth I in British History’s Biggest Fibs with Lucy Worsley. Photograph: Jim Petersen/BBC

Her willingness to roll up her sleeves and get stuck in, both on TV and when dealing with her critics, makes it easy for casual viewers to see Worsley as some kind of jolly hockey sticks archetype – the sort of woman who would have been marvellous in the war effort, an inspirational headmistress at a minor girl’s boarding school or the admirable backbone of her local Women’s Institute (unsurprisingly she made a programme celebrating 100 years of the WI in which she successfully argued that the organisation was an unfairly maligned force for social change).

The truth, however, is somewhat more complex. For starters she isn’t particularly posh. Instead, she describes her upbringing as “classically middle class”. Her father Peter is a geology professor, her mother Enid an educational consultant, and her childhood was spent on the move from one university town to another, with spells in Reading, Nottingham and Ottawa, Canada. “I would love to say I’m from X – it would be really nice to have that sort of connection – but I guess it makes you a bit tougher to have to find new friends and have new teachers and new schools,” she told the Times, adding that she was very close to her younger brother, Tom.

She admits to having been strong-willed from an early age, telling her family that she wished to attend a state secondary school (she went to St Bartholomew’s in Newbury) and switching from science to arts A-levels before studying history at New College, Oxford, despite opposition from her father who told her she’d never make a living from it. “So now I take a lot of pride in saying ‘Ha, dad! Ha, ha, ha.”

People somehow expect me to live in a Georgian rectory but I’m not particularly keen on housework

For all her flamboyance on television – the dressing up, the smart asides, the sense, as one Twitter commenter had it, that “you’re watching the cleverest girl in the school” – she is reserved and self-contained off air.A colleague who met her recently described her as “good company” but “quieter than I would have expected”.

In truth, she is that rare thing: an introverted show-off. She has admitted to being shy when younger, to needing time alone, and she has a surprisingly ascetic streak when the cameras aren’t present. She lives in a minimalist flat in London’s Southwark with her husband, architect Mark Hines, which she has described as “low key and functional … people somehow expect me to live in a Georgian rectory, but I’m not particularly keen on housework”.

She is also frugal, admitting it “would hurt to wear a truly expensive dress” and adding that she does most of her shopping on Etsy or “in the John Lewis online sale”. The two exceptions are her presenting wardrobe, which consists of well-fitted dresses in bright jewel colours and red lipstick – “I want to look like I’m friendly, approachable and jolly,” she told the Independent in 2014 – and her fashion weakness, an eye-catching coat. “I have two wardrobes’ worth of coats,” she admitted to the Evening Standard magazine. “They’re all pretty much from the high street though I rather extravagantly had a Harris tweed coat specially made for me by the bonkers-but-brilliant Selina Blow.”

Hines apparently requested that she never mention him in interviews, although she has let slip the odd titbit including the fact that his one pre-marital request was that she never participate in Strictly Come Dancing. The couple chose not to have children and Worsley ran into controversy when joking with the Radio Times that she’d been “educated out of the natural reproductive function”. It’s clear she enjoys her work and her life far too much to allow anything to interrupt it: she has stated that being child-free has allowed her to work hard and take on numerous projects, while noting, correctly, that her choice shouldn’t be seen as “weird”.

This year looks set to be her busiest yet with the much-anticipated book on Austen expected to shed new light on a woman too often dismissed for dealing with the domestic in a time of upheaval and war. If you’re noting the parallels, don’t worry, Worsley has got there before you. “I have found her to be a far, far better version of myself,” she said recently. “Clever, kind, funny but also angry at the restrictions of her life, someone tirelessly searching for ways to be creative and free.” Prepare the dressing-up box, people: she’s going in.

Jane Austen at Home: A Biography, is published by Hodder & Stoughton on 18 May, £18; My Name is Victoria, Bloomsbury Children’s Books, is out now, £6.99