“Are you Teddy?”

Lucy Worsley is peeping around the corner of the office door looking for me. There is no doubting who she is. That familiar neatly bobbed blonde hair, clips in place, a bright kiss of lipstick, white coat covering a summer dress. Her whole headgirl gone glam look in place and picture perfect. The BBC’s most photogenic TV historian (probably; I don’t want to alienate Bettany Hughes or Dan Cruickshank) is in the building.

It’s quite a building by the way. The instructions for this morning’s interview were simple enough. “Go to the Tower of London and ask for Lucy.” As chief curator at the Historic Royal Palaces, the tower is just one of the buildings she is responsible for (there are five others, including the Hampton Court and Kensington Palaces).  That’s her day job. She is very proud of it.

But that’s plainly not enough for her. The fact is we know Worsley best as a broadcaster, discussing Henry VIII’s codpieces or wandering around Romanov Russia for BBC4.  Often dressed as a maid or lady in waiting (she is no stranger to the dressing up box).

On top of that she is also a writer. It’s why I’m here today. Her latest book Jane Austen at Home (based around all the houses Austen lived in) is now in shops and there’s a TV documentary tie-in on the telly tonight. Where does she find the time, you wonder?

“I’m in the really fortunate position where my work is my pleasure,” she tells me when we finally settle down to talk in a disappointingly unblingy room in the Tower (not one bleeding crown, not even a tiara, I ask you).

Sorry, Lucy. You were saying? “I don’t see any distinction between work and pleasure so I do spend a lot of what other people might consider my leisure time doing history things.”

Worsley in person seems little different than Worsley on screen. She’s chatty, approachable, amusing. Unflappable too. Hundreds of tourists heading to the Tower stream past her as she poses for pictures and she doesn’t bat an eye. She tells Paul the photographer to watch out for her wide nostrils. Not great for photos, but fine for when she’s running, she says.

Talking to her is not a monologue. It’s a conversation.  “What’s your opinion of Jane Austen?” she asks me almost as soon as we sit down. “Honestly? I’d be on team Bronte,” I tell her. “Ah, you’re a wild, tempestuous extrovert,” she says. In my dreams, Lucy.

At the same time she is more than capable of playing a safe bat to any enquiry she doesn’t want to answer. She will veer off into an anecdote about Austen or jump onto another subject if we get too close to home. When I bring up her husband – architect Mark Hines – she politely tells me “he doesn’t like me talking about him.” So she doesn’t.

Talking Jane Austen, though, she’s understandably all up for. Yes, she says, she is definitely on Team Austen.  “I’m signed and sealed and delivered,” she agrees. “I’m a Janeite. It’s in no way objective, my book.”

Who is her Jane Austen, I wonder? “For me she is somebody who didn’t take an obvious path through life. She took some risks as a Georgian woman of the pseudo-gentry. I like this word pseudo-gentry because it means that you want to be part of the landed gentry but you haven’t got any land.

“She made some unusual life choices and they were aimed at producing books and not producing babies, shall we say. I believe she was writing books that had secret message which was: ‘Look how rubbish it was for these Georgian women who think they have to marry for money.”

Hmm, I wonder if we can see a shadow vision of Worsley herself in that pen portrait. The driven, self-motivated woman who saw work as her lifegoal. (Worsley once joked that she had been “educated out of normal reproductive function.”)

My main takeaways from the book, I tell her, are that Jane was a Tory, probably never had sex in her life and didn’t like the French.

There are other Jane Austens available of course, she admits “You see, there’s another argument that she’s a deeply Conservative writer and I understand there are people in America who are part of the Alt-Right movement and they see her still as a deeply conservative writer, somebody who is supporting the status quo. But her work is big enough for both of our viewpoints to exist.”

The publication of Worsley’s book has arrived, it should be said, with a measure of controversy. She was accused of plagiarism in Private Eye, which suggested she had leaned a little too heavily on the work of Austen scholar Paula Byrne (whom Worsley references generously in her acknowledgements)

On her website Worsley has rebuffed the claims and suggests Private Eye have made false claims about her before. “I shall of course be cancelling my subscription,” she jokingly concludes.

When I bring it up she says that the claims were hurtful. “But I think it’s important to say in response that it’s really difficult to be a female historian. It’s a difficult thing to do. I think that it’s important to keep going. I am a big fat target.”

Yes, she does seem to be.  Alongside the predictable internet trolls, she has been criticised by fellow historians including David Starkey and Horrible Histories author Terry Deary who had a go at her “posh little voice” and her “insistence on play acting.”

The Herald:

Poshness, a slight lisp and the dressing up seem to be the recurring criticisms of Worsley. Her gender is the hate that dare not speak its name (unless you are Starkey and you can moan about “feminised history”).

The poshness is debateable quite frankly. She’s the daughter of a geologist and a town planner after all. And what sort of person gets upset because someone speaks with a lisp?

The dressing up is the thing that gets her most grief. But her answer is why not? She wants to engage the general viewer and she’ll use whatever comes to hand.

“I see it as my job to try to make history to be a popular thing,” she says simply. “The longer I keep going the less weird it will be to be a female historian.

Why is being a female historian weird in the first place? “Exactly. Why is it weird? Why is there a category of military historian, social historian and female historian? That shouldn’t exist. The more historians there are it will eventually not be weird and we’ll all be just historians.”

Actually, I tell her, it’s not the how of TV history that bothers me, it’s the who. We are constantly given Henry VIII’s story (Worsley gave us her take on that with her series about his six wives last year), Elizabeth I’s story, Queen Victoria’s story. It’s royal history. It’s often specifically English history and it is, at heart, conservative history with both a small and a big C.

“Yeah,” she concedes, “yeah it is.” But, she adds, “there is nothing wrong with updating an old story. With the six wives we gave a 2016 version of them last year which was very different from the 1916 version of them so that’s one thing.

“Secondly, celebrity is a gateway drug. We’ve heard of Queen Victoria. OK, let’s start there. Then we will take you on from that. And what my hope is by producing any kind of mass market history product - whether it’s an exhibition or a television programme or a book - that will be the first stop.

“And then people will think: ‘Is this right? Did this really happen? I need to read another book on the subject.’

“And then maybe they’ll sign up for an evening class. And then an Open University degree. And then they’ll be writing to me saying|: ‘Look, I’m ready to work for you now. I’ve got my qualifications.

“And this really happens. I’ve seen people go on that journey. And that’s my goal to suck them in, get them over the threshold. I think that’s laudable work.”

Well indeed. But we have travelled, you may have noticed, rather far from my original question. Never mind. Her positioning herself as an entry-level historian is a valid one. Worsley is an enthusiast and that communicates.

How did she get here? Worsley, now 43, was raised in Reading and in feminist thinking, thanks to her mother. “I remember her saying very explicitly, very overtly, that girls are as good as boys and that we could do anything that we wanted. She wanted me to become Dame Helena Kennedy.”

She recalls her mum coming into her bedroom on the night of the 1979 general election when she was just six and asking her who she wanted to win?  Mr Callaghan or Mrs Thatcher? “And I said Mrs Thatcher, because she’s a lady.

“And that was the right and the wrong answer at the same time.”

The teenage Lucy Worsley, she says, “was a bit of a geeky nerd and a nerdy geek. Bespectacled bookworm. I’m sure that there are still kids who are nerds but nerdery and geekery are much cooler now than it was then, which I am very happy about.”

Was she picked on? “I was and I wasn’t. I was a bit, but I didn’t mind it all that much. I had a lot of friends from outside my school rather than the ones who saw me in geek mode every day.”

The Herald:

Although she played music and ran a bit (those wide nostrils) history was always the geekery of choice, it seems. “History was the subject that didn’t seem like work. It was enjoyable. That’s why I was drawn to doing it really.

“What I didn’t enjoy about school was the regimented controlling boredom of it, having to be in the same place at the same time and do things at the same speed as other people. Adult life is much better.”

What were her teenage ambitions? “Oh, it was either to be a witch or a spy or a nun. Those were the career choices I was considering.”

Epic fail there, then. She breaks from the jokes to ask me another question. “Did you see that letter Hillary Clinton wrote to NASA when she was a little kid saying she wanted to be an astronaut? And they wrote back and said; ‘No, girls can’t be astronauts and then she became in charge of NASA. That was a very nice thing to happen.”

There is a very polite, very well-mannered gender warrior in Lucy Worsley. She got a letter of complaint recently, she says. It was sent to her boss and said ‘Lucy Worsley is ambitious.”

“And I thought: ‘That is so gendered.’ Is it bad to be ambitious? I don’t think it is bad for a man to be ambitious. But it is bad for women to be ambitious. So I proudly claim it.”

Outside of work she cooks, fun runs, meets friends as often as she can. But the fact is work appears to be front and centre for her. “You’ll notice that I haven’t given up my day job and I hope never to give up my day job.”

She started work for Historic Royal Palaces in 2004, after six months working in Glasgow Museums. “Once you become a curator, she says, “you will inevitably end up on TV, if only to talk about your latest exhibition.”

And after a few appearances as an interviewee she turned presenter in 2011 with the four-part series If Walls Could Talk: The History of the Home.

She sets a lot of store by the domestic and what it can tell us about the past. The Austen book is just the latest iteration of this impulse. What, though, Lucy, is your own definition of home?

“I don’t want a big house. I don’t like the responsibilities of that. I just want somewhere where I can get good Wi-Fi access and get on with my writing.”

Actually, she tells me, she was once asked to appear on Ant and Dec’s I’m a Celebrity Get Me Out of Here but she told ITV she’d only do it if she could get  Carson the butler from Downton Abbey to buttle for her for a year. ITV didn’t agree, unsurprisingly.

How did appearing on the telly alter her view of herself, I wonder? “I think as an art historian it sort of screws with your mind a bit. Because you send a lot of time looking at how dead people have constructed their identities and their image and what have you and then you realise you’re forced to do the same thing yourself.

“Because what is seen on the screen is a little sock puppet. It’s not really me. It’s a confection. I don’t even have all that much say in it because television’s a very collaborative venture. That’s one of the lovely things about it. I’m part of a very close-knit team working together.

“The advantage is if somebody doesn’t like the sock puppet it’s the sock puppet that gets the hatred, not me.”

There’s an active distancing going on there, isn’t there?  But maybe that’s necessary.

She can speak up for herself when required but she is not one of those who natural enjoys the cut and thrust of argument.

“I’m not that sort of person. No, I’m quite a stereotypical good girl; do the homework be prepared, stick to my comfort zone. I’m not one of those people who have been brought up in a tradition of debating societies.”

What’s the greatest challenge she has overcome, I ask? Shyness, she says. “I’m definitely a show-off, but I’m a shy show-off. And over time I’ve learned to pass for normal. But there’s still a little bit of social anxiety at the core of me.”

No good at parties then? “Oh no, terrible. Parties are torture. But the world is not set up for introverts and all introverts have to find means of adapting and getting through.”

The Herald:

Other things Lucy Worsley tells me. She loves detective fiction, is scared of serial killers, and doesn’t believe in God (“No, because my dad told me about Mr Darwin before he told me about God.”)

And she believes in Jane Austen. Does that make her a romantic then?

“I’m a buttoned-up, repressed, dysfunctional kind of romantic, but, yes, I’m a romantic.”

Jane Austen at Home by Lucy Worsley is published by Hodder & Stoughton, priced £25. Worsley’s documentary Jane Austen: Behind Closed Doors is on BBC2 at 9pm tonight.