Jane Austen danced the night away at the Earl of Portsmouth’s country ball at Hurstbourne Park in Hampshire – and woke up with a terrible hangover the next morning.

Oh dear, not the kind of behaviour the nation expects from our favourite lady novelist.

‘I believe I drank too much wine last night... I know not how else to account for the shaking of my hand today,’ a 24-year-old Jane wrote to her sister Cassandra that morning in November 1800.

Historian Lucy Worsley looks at the houses Jane lived in to show how they influenced her in a new BBC2 documentary Jane Austen: Behind Closed Doors

She was scathing about her dancing partners and mean about the ladies, especially three to whom ‘I was as civil... as their bad breath would allow me’.

Poor Jane; by this point she must have been well aware that she had little chance of meeting a Mr Darcy among her limited social circle in Hampshire, where she’d lived all her life (another dazzling engagement that same week involved dinner with neighbours, card games and being read to aloud from a pamphlet on cow-pox).

A ball could mean simply rolling back the carpet and inviting a few neighbours for a dance.

‘This meant that when Jane went to balls she wasn’t always meeting new people. There were a lot of familiar faces,’ says historian Lucy Worsley, who looks at the houses Jane lived in to show how they influenced her in a new BBC2 documentary Jane Austen: Behind Closed Doors.

Unfortunately, when Jane had met an interesting man at a ball in 1796 – an Irish law student, Tom Lefroy, who was visiting on holiday – it had quickly become apparent they had no future together.

As an eldest son with ten siblings, Tom had to marry money. Jane, a country parson’s daughter, could only be a youthful flirtation.

A portrait of Jane Austen circa 1790

‘I don’t think it’s a coincidence,’ says Lucy, ‘that this is the year Jane wrote the first draft of Pride And Prejudice. In fiction she could make sure the poor but clever heroine won both the man and his impressive house.’

The Austens struggled financially; they were gentry without the money to fund a genteel lifestyle. They had rich relations but their hopes of a substantial inheritance were never fulfilled.

‘Jane Austen’s novels revolve around homes lost and mansions gained, the threat of poverty and the promise of wealth,’ explains Lucy, whose latest book Jane Austen At Home – released for the 200th anniversary of her death – charts Jane’s experiences as a poor relation.

Her life began in 1775 at Steventon Rectory in Hampshire where she would spend 25 years – more than half her life – living in the house where she was born. George Austen, her father, was a clergyman-farmer and boosted his income to £1,000 a year by running a boarding school.

There were servants, but Jane’s mother still had her hands full with eight children. Not that they were all at home. Jane’s brother Edward was adopted as a teenager by wealthy childless cousins – common at the time to advance a relative’s prospects – who made him their heir. Another brother, George, who was epileptic, lived with a foster family, paid for by the Austens.

As a young woman, Jane had an allowance of £20 a year from her father, which had to cover everything except board and lodging. When Mr Austen decided to retire to Bath in 1801, when Jane was 25 and Cassandra 28, they had no choice but to tag along. Jane fainted when she was told.

They took lodgings at 4 Sydney Place, still available to rent today as holiday flats. The £150 annual rent made quite a dent in Mr Austen’s income, and when the lease ran out they moved downmarket to a house they had rejected as being damp. Soon Mr Austen fell ill, possibly from malaria, known as ‘the ague’ and rife in Britain then. He died in January 1805.

It was the start of a downward spiral for his widow and daughters, who were reduced to living on the charity of their male relations. They left Bath in July 1806 for Southampton, on the very same day that a wealthy old lady died: the Honourable Mary Leigh, mistress of Stoneleigh Abbey in Warwickshire and a distant cousin of Jane’s mother.

The women hurried there in an unedifying scramble to claim part of this potentially life-changing inheritance.

‘It was far and away the grandest mansion in Jane’s life,’ says Lucy. There were two prospective heirs: Mrs Austen’s wealthy cousin the Rev Thomas Leigh and her rich brother James.

Chawton Cottage in Hampshire, where Jane spent her final years

Jane’s uncle James struck a deal to give up his claim to Stoneleigh in exchange for the enormous sum of £24,000, plus £2,000 a year for life. The bulk of the estate, which by the mid-Victorian era was worth £30,000 a year, went to the cousin and the Austens left without a penny.

At the lowest ebb of her fortunes, Jane became a ‘visiting aunt’, earning her keep on long stays with her brother Edward by entertaining his children. Edward had an income of £15,000 a year thanks to his adoptive family; more than Jane’s fictional Mr Darcy.

Jane enjoyed the luxury of his home, Godmersham Park in Kent (thought to be the inspiration for Mr Darcy’s Pemberley), but was embarrassed at being unable to tip the servants properly. Even the visiting hairdresser noticed and gave her a cut-price haircut.

After the death of his wife, Edward decided to spend more time at his other property, Chawton House in Hampshire, and offered his mother and sisters a rent-free cottage nearby. Here was a home at last. In 1811, Jane’s first book was published – Sense And Sensibility, the story of sisters who lose their home. It made £140, enough to keep her for three years.

And yet Jane could have married and had a home of her own. She had her chances. As Lucy points out, she accepted one proposal from Harris Bigg-Wither, heir to a large estate, then turned it down in a panic.

When it came down to it, Jane Austen was no romantic: a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife – a single woman of ambition might get along better without him.

Jane Austen: Behind Closed Doors, tonight, 9pm, BBC2. Jane Austen At Home by Lucy Worsley is published by Hodder & Stoughton, £25.