Actress Felicity Kendal will ensure the 250th anniversary of Jane Austen’s birth is celebrated in style during a gala concert at the West Meon Music Festival.

Felicity, 78, found fame half a century ago as Richard Briers’ wife Barbara Good in The Good Life.

In Jane Austen’s Playbook she will narrate, reading a selection of extracts from Austen's letters, notebooks and novels curated by director Nancy Meckler.

Joining them will be tenor James Gilchrist and the festival’s founders, the Primrose Piano Quartet, with songs and chamber music from Jane Austen’s time, including works by Schubert, Beethoven, Handel, Haydn and Maria Theresia von Paradis.

Highlight of the concert will be the world première of a new work - Notes for a Novel - or ‘how a tune a day inspired the development of Pride and Prejudice’, commissioned by the festival from Call the Midwife theme composer Peter Salem.

Jane Austen’s Playbook, at West Meon’s St John’s Church on September 14 at 3.30pm, is the final concert of the four-day festival, now in its 15th year.

As well as six concerts in West Meon, there will be a harpsichord recital in Warnford’s Church of Our Lady and a morning concert of string quartets at East Meon’s All Saints Church.

Other highlights include a recital by young pianist Clara Isabella Siegle, who made her orchestral début at the age of nine and is gaining worldwide renown as a solo artist.

The opening concert on September 11 will mark the 50th anniversary of the death of Dmitri Shostakovich with a performance of his Second Piano Trio. Completed in 1944, it reflects on the horrors of the Second World War.

Tickets, priced from £10 to £27 (under-16s £1, discounts for full-time students), plus full details of all eight festival concerts, can be found at www.westmeonmusic.co.uk