Our humble heroine, the third daughter in a large working-class family, educates herself to become a teacher, falls in love with a man who is just as clever as her, and ends up living in a grand Georgian house, furnished in Regency splendour, where grand balls take place in beautifully landscaped grounds.

It could be a plot from a Jane Austen novel, but it is a romanticised version of the life of Austen’s latest biographer, Dr Paula Byrne.

She left her job teaching English and drama at Wirral to start a research degree as a mature student at Liverpool University. There she was taught by the Shakespeare scholar Jonathan Bate.

Reader, she married him, and he is now Provost of Worcester College, Oxford, which has a lake to rival the one where Darcy — as portrayed by Colin Firth in the 1995 television adaptation of Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice — famously emerged with a wet shirt.

They live with their three children (Tom, Ellie and Harry) in the Provost’s Lodgings. But Dr Byrne, like Jane Austen, does not fit a romantic stereotype. She is a renowned biographer, having given up teaching following the success of a book based on her PhD thesis, Jane Austen and the Theatre.

Her latest book, The Real Jane Austen: A Life in Small Things, has created quite a stir. It is written, not in chronological order, but by theme, based on a series of objects such as Austen’s precious writing desk, her beautiful vellum notebooks and a necklace given by her brother.

It was a Book of the Week on Radio 4 during January, and has been controversial from the start.

In 2011, when she was halfway through the book, her husband bought her a wedding anniversary gift — a portrait of ‘Miss Jane Austin’, dated about 1815. She believes it is of Austen — the only portrait painted from life. But rival Jane Austen scholar Deirdre Le Faye says it is an ‘imaginary painting’, probably by a curate who liked to portray his favourite authors.

While Austen barely made any money from her books during her lifetime, her popularity has soared in the modern age, with film and TV versions of her novels released almost every year. Three or four solid biographies have come out in the past 20 years, so is there really room for a new one?

“There is always a moment when you feel that the time is right for a new look. This is the bicentenary of Pride and Prejudice, and I did not feel she had quite been done justice,” said Dr Byrne.

“We sometimes assume that she was a cosy writer. But she was much more engaged with her social and political contexts than is often supposed. And although she wrote about romance, it seems to me that she herself didn’t want to get married. What really drove her was getting into print and making a living by her pen.”

Dr Byrne hopes the modern resonances in her book will inspire casual readers who have been lured into Austen’s world via film or television.

“Her laptop — portable writing desk — was important because she could take her work with her when she travelled. There is one occasion when it got lost and almost went to the West Indies and had to be chased. It is a story that could happen today. It shows the desk was important to her.”

Dr Byrne acknowledges that there are dangers in relating Austen’s life to today’s world, or describing her as a feminist, but believes the Georgians saw a flowering of women’s freedom that later disappeared.

“I have always been struck by how the Georgian era has a lot of parallels to our age. There were dozens of women writers — people like Mary Wollstonecraft asking why women couldn’t go to university, why they could not wear trousers. These issues were there. They might have different nuances today, but Jane Austen had something to say about them.”

Dr Byrne points out that Elizabeth Bennett is able to run, because Georgian clothes were less restrictive than Victorian womenswear.

“By the time of the Victorians, things were moving back and women are becoming the domestic angels in the house.”

Since her PhD, Dr Byrne has produced books on Georgian actress Mary Robinson and 20th-century Oxford author Evelyn Waugh, but saids: “I have been thinking about this biography for a long time. I never got Jane Austen out of my head and I felt I had a fresh view.

“There is so much speculation about who she fell in love with and, yes, she accepted one man but turned him down soon after. People ask endlessly why she did not get married. To me the answer is quite simple — she wanted to be a writer.”

Austen’s work was rejected by two London publishers and earned only a few pounds during her lifetime.

“She was published by Egerton, who ran a military library. It is as if Hilary Mantel was published by Pen and Sword. They had not published novels before, and neither of her publishers had had female authors before. It is a small detail, but illustrates her determination to get into print.”

Dr Byrne is not worried by the controversy over the portrait, which is now at the Jane Austen museum in Chawton, with Dr Byrne’s analysis on display alongside the views of Deirdre Le Faye.

“I like it because someone early on wanted to portray her as an author, in London. It fits in with my thesis neatly — too neatly from some people’s point of view. It is an image of her as a professional writer.”

As for Dr Byrne, despite her surroundings, for her next book she has wrenched herself away from Georgian England to enter the jazz age.

* The Real Jane Austen is published by HarperCollins at £25. Paula Byrne will be at the Oxford Literary Festival on March 21. Box office 0870 343 1001, or visit the Oxford Playhouse. www.oxfordliteraryfestival.org