Jane Austen's novels are read today as romance, but this BBC documentary argues the world she actually lived in was governed by money, property, and the constant threat of poverty for unmarried women. Reenactments put actors into the drawing rooms, ballrooms, and cramped family houses of Georgian England to show what courtship really required: a suitor's income assessed before his character, and a woman's entire future decided by whether he proposed. Historians and Austen scholars read from her letters and novels, including Pride and Prejudice and Sense and Sensibility, to trace how closely her fiction tracked her own family's financial precarity after her father's death left the Austen women dependent on relatives. The film uses the gap between the comic marriage plots and the letters' anxious talk of income and inheritance to argue that Austen's satire was aimed squarely at a system she had no way to escape herself.