Jane Austen at Home: A Biography

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Worsley's constant snubs at her 'competitors' were tiring, especially considering that she seems to do exactly the same thing.

Jane Austen at Home: A Biography, by Lucy Worsley — A Review Jane Austen at Home: A Biography, by Lucy Worsley — A Review

Although I did— for the most part—find Lucy Worsley's prose to be compelling, I thought that many of her arguments were unconvincing and biased.

I thought the whole book was fascinating, and the author's examples from Jane's work made me want to reread all her novels. But Jane was most at home in a parsonage like the one she knew from growing up with her parents and brothers and sister in the Hampshire countryside. A much better book about Georgian era homes and women is Amanda Vickery's Behind Closed Doors: At Home in Georgian England. I am definitely a Jane Austen fan, but was always of the opinion that not much was known about her life because her sister Cassandra had burned many of her letters, at Jane's request. It is a trademark of Lucy Worsley's that this is so and why she is such a superb historian and communicator.

Jane Austen at Home: A Biography - Lucy Worsley - Google Books

We learn a great deal about Austen's family life and family members, some of whom were generous and kind while others were quite the opposite. Although Mr George Austen (thirty-eight) and his wife Cassandra (twenty-nine) had only been married for four years, their household was not inconsiderable. Act One: A Sunny Morning at the Rectory” covers Austen’s early life at Steventon Rectory in Hampshire (1775-1801). So Cassandra was quite a catch: born, perhaps, to look down her sharp-bladed nose at people at Oxford dinners, but equally willing to knuckle down and work hard. Jane travelled quite a bit, she had firltations, she danced she went to the beach and met the prince Regent!She would use these powerful weapons to blow open the lock that kept penniless daughters prisoners inside their family homes. You wish me to collect all the anecdotes I can recollect and gather of our Family’, wrote Cassandra Leigh’s cousin, an amateur novelist named Mary. An 18th-century woman might have far different feelings about romance, she argues; Austen, she believes, had a series of suitors, one of whom proposed marriage. Biographies are difficult for me to get through, but I found this one to be engaging enough to keep me curious and reading! Steventon Rectory, as Jane’s parents knew it, had a carriage drive, or ‘sweep’, at the front to bring in vehicles off the road, an important mark of gentility.

Jane Austen’s Stuff, and What We Learn From It

Since 2007, Austenprose has championed Jane Austen and her legacy by featuring information about her work, life, and times. She treats her subject with too much familiarity, and her interjections had an almost jarring effect (there were a lot of “I think” and “I wonder”. All these details and experiences are then shown to form parts of Jane's books and the characters who live within her pages.I have yet to read a single Jane Austen book so why did I pick this hugely enjoyable and insightful read? George Austen’s mother, Rebecca, had died when he was a baby, and his father William, a surgeon of the town of Tonbridge in Kent, had remarried. The author does not attempt to fabricate what is not known, although she does analyze what is not clear. When one biographer has the audacity to say that Austen might've been a bit chubby, Worsley is all fired up with measurements of Austen's surviving pelisse to prove that she was at least 5'7" and had a 24 inch waist.

Jane Austen at Home (Audio Download): Lucy Worsley, Ruth Jane Austen at Home (Audio Download): Lucy Worsley, Ruth

A refreshingly unique perspective on Austen and her work and a beautifully nuanced exploration of gender, creativity, and domesticity. A woman who far from being a lonely spinster in fact had at least five marriage prospects, but who in the end refused to settle for anything less than Mr Darcy. At first reading, these are stories about love and marriage and the conventional heterosexual happily-ever-after. I was shocked to learn that wealthier Austen relations were not necessarily generous with their money when it came to offering a more comfortable life for both Jane and her unmarried sister Cassandra.With Steventon demolished and several of the Bath townhouses bombed out or divided into flats, Worsley encourages Janeites to visit the homes that are still standing, especially Chawton Cottage, now Jane Austen House Museum, and Chawton House, a library dedicated to women’s literature. Her great contribution was to push those doors open, a little bit, for us in later generations to slip through. Through Worsely's eyes, we get to know Austen and her stoical, loving and humorous personality along with the part of her which could be a bit cutting towards people, authors and their books. On the 200th anniversary of Jane Austen’s death, historian Lucy Worsley leads us into the rooms from which our best-loved novelist quietly changed the world.