Jane Austen could never be entirely known as a person at this remove of over 200 years, but this biography takes a darn good shot at it. One can tell she is intrigued and inspired by the connections she is making and the conclusions she is drawing. Lucy Worsley writes in a spirit of great appreciation for the genius and personality of Jane. This is a fascinating new take that allows for freedom of exploration of Jane's world. As the title suggests, it is written in the context of all the places Jane Austen spent time.
The result is an extremely satisfying and fairly thorough biography. Many of her letters were destroyed there are no satisfactory pictures of her (just a sketch or two), and her family filtered her legacy in the decades following her death.īut there is so much in this book! The author has pulled references from letters of all of Jane's friends and family, chance remarks of acquaintances, and contemporary accounts of places and things that Jane would have been familiar with. As far as I could tell, details were a bit on the sparse side. I thought I knew what there was to know about Jane Austen's life. I have read several, but I love this one. This is a beautiful biography of Jane Austen.
Illustrated with two sections of color plates, Lucy Worsley's Jane Austen at Home is a richly entertaining and illuminating new book about one of the world's favorite novelists and one of the subjects she returned to over and over in her unforgettable novels: home"- … ( more) She shows readers a passionate Jane Austen who fought for her freedom, a woman who had at least five marriage prospects, but - in the end - a woman who refused to settle for anything less than Mr. Worsley examines the rooms, spaces and possessions which mattered to her, and the varying ways in which homes are used in her novels as both places of pleasure and as prisons. In places like Steventon Parsonage, Godmersham Park, Chawton House and a small rented house in Winchester, Worsley discovers a Jane Austen very different from the one who famously lived a 'life without incident'. On the eve of the two hundredth anniversary of Jane Austen's death, take a trip back to her world and the many places she lived as historian Lucy Worsley visits Austen's childhood home, her schools, her holiday accommodations, the houses - both grand and small - of the relations upon whom she was dependent, and the home she shared with her mother and sister towards the end of her life. The result is a refreshingly unique perspective on Austen and her work and a beautifully nuanced exploration of gender, creativity, and domesticity." - Amanda Foreman, bestselling author of Georgianna, Duchess of Devonshire. ""Jane Austen at Home offers a fascinating look at Jane Austen's world through the lens of the homes in which she lived and worked throughout her life.
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