Jane Austen

The little hole I dug in the bottom of the garden to hide in over the last few days has - I'm delighted to say - hardly been used at all.

While the media have predictably attacked like playground bullies (The Times called me a 'boring, grasping wannabe,' as if I didn't hear worse at school), the people that matter - my friends, my family and the general public - have, yet again, choked me with their unexpected loveliness. My grandad cheered me and waved an icecream spoon in the air until my grandma firmly told him to put it down, my sister reassured me that I was 'very strong at maths', and my friends told me they would happily be seen in the street with me again, although if they caught me smoking Lucky Strikes again in public there'd be trouble. Even more surprisingly, I've received nearly 100 messages from people I have never met and will almost definitely never meet: emails that have been encouraging, sweet, positive, and - on occasion - have made me blush purple. The BBC gently tried to prepare me for hate mail ("losers love being nasty on the internet at midnight, Holly: remember that"), but I haven't received anything even approaching vague cattiness yet ('yet' being the operative word: I'm still waiting). 

What has been so amazing about the whole experience, though, is the sudden realisation that - for every TalkSport radio producer (not DJ) who wants to humiliate a girl - there are a hundred men out there who will risk humiliating themselves to save a girl instead. Every single offer to 'sweep me off my feet' has made me want to cry, because it has proved that romance is not dead, and that the world of Jane Austen - the world I want so desperately to be a part of - is still there, in one way or another: even if it's clad in ripped up jeans. And I can't thank everyone enough. Not just for making the aftermath of the documentary easier, and not just for keeping me out of a hole at the bottom of my garden, but for giving me hope: hope that, sometimes, is difficult to cling on to when somebody is holding up a piece of paper with '7.5' written on it, and commenting on how you kiss (the BBC cut that bit out of the programme, thank God). 

Of course, the romantic coin flips itself over just as suddenly. If one area of your life magically fixes itself, so another part just as unexpectedly falls apart. As if the extra emails pushed his out of my inbox, the boy I adore most - who very recently swept me off my feet - has now decided that he 'needs space' again. (This boy needs space so regularly that I'm starting to think he should consider an alternative career as an astronaut.) He's plonked me back onto my feet just when I was getting comfortable being in the air, and - at the same time as I'm marvelling at the greatness of mankind, and of kind men in particular - he has disappeared again. To do whatever it is he does when I give him space: stick tiny little flags in the moon, possibly. 

I'm not losing faith, of course. Not in him, and not in love. I never do: it's my defining feature. But I can't help laughing at the appropriateness of the throw-away comment that encouraged so much public support and kindness in the first place. While Elizabeth, Marianne, Jane, Eleanor and Emma all got the happy endings we all so desperately want, I accidentally - as a slip of the tongue - didn't say that I wanted to be in a Jane Austen: I said I thought I was her. And Jane Austen died single, alone, and wrapped up in a love affair with every man she'd ever created: men who never actually existed in the first place. 

Which is, you could say, the writer's lot. Or maybe it's just ours: the people who are better with words than they are with life. Jane never lost hope, though - she wrote about love until she croaked it just down the road from where my mum lives now - and neither will I. 

Because this week has reminded me that romance is still out there, ready to sweep you off your feet: and it can still be beautiful and old-fashioned, no matter what kind of trousers it's wearing.