Jane Austen at Home: A Biography

Product Information

Of course historians have their biases, but shouldn't they at least try to distance themselves from their subject?

Jane Austen | Behind Closed Doors The Untold Story Of Jane Austen | Behind Closed Doors

My favorite part of the book was the comment by Austen’s niece about her sitting quietly sewing and then bursting out laughing while thinking up a funny scene for her next novel! I can totally envision that happening. This idea that a house and land were not owned by a family, but held on behalf of others, would permeate Jane’s novels. She always praised a landlord for reinvesting, working for the community, and not selfishly enriching himself alone. In fact Mansfield Park, her novel most concerned with ownership and stewardship, is really about who had looked after England best, and who therefore deserves to inherit it. One of Jane’s characters in Northanger Abbey hankers after the ‘unpretending comfort of a well-connected parsonage’, and what elevated you into the status of ‘gentility’ was not so much your grand house, but your way of living: hospitable, responsible, civilised.

Worsley tries to elevate herself, suggesting time and again that only she views the true Austen (going against her very own words since she initially stated that her Austen was very much hers). Yet, to me, the Worsley's Austen is an unconvincing and unabashedly fictionalised version of the real author. He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.

Jane Austen at Home by Lucy Worsley | Goodreads

As Chief Curator of the Historic Royal Palaces, Lucy Worsley is a popular historian and writer well known for her television programmes on aspects of British history. In these however she lightens her erudition with simpering innuendo and sadly indulges some of that characteristic here. There are occasional rather desperate attempts to provide sensation: ‘The sea in Emma stands firmly for sex’ is one of the more lurid. In some respects, this book was a worthy addition to the saturated world Jane Austen biographies. It centers around the idea of the importance of a home in Jane Austen's life and writing. I enjoyed the author's emphasis about the single - and married - women who impacted Jane Austen's life and the way they banded about her. This is particularly contrasted with her more erratic brothers' behavior. A refreshingly unique perspective on Austen and her work and a beautifully nuanced exploration of gender, creativity, and domesticity.' Amanda Foreman Throughout the biography, Worsley provides vivid details of the homes, furnishings, gardens, and neighborhoods where Jane Austen lived, bringing these places to life. We also see the influence that these homes exerted upon Jane and her work. Worsley takes us through the ups and downs of Jane’s life, the family celebrations and disasters, and most revealingly, the everyday aspects of life that she so realistically observed and captured in her novels. The only improvement to the virtual tour of Jane Austen at Home that I could wish for would be an actual tour with Lucy Worsley as a guide. I thought the whole book was fascinating, and the author's examples from Jane's work made me want to reread all her novels. (Although this is not a new phenomenon; on any given day, whatever I'm doing, I'd likely rather be reading a Jane Austen novel. Or watching one of the movies.)

I love Shakespeare, and this sounds so intriguing! Plus that cover is dreamy. Will definitely be adding to my TBR Jane’s closest and dearest confidante in all this and throughout her life was Cassandra; together they lived, making and mending, at the edges of Georgian gentility, an environment which explains Austen’s fictional arrangement of some fantastic marriages and inheritances. But wishful thinking did not blind this author to the realities of lives more ordinary. She wrote directly from her own society and its times making, as Worsley writes, ‘the political into the personal’. Her first readers would have been familiar with her portraits, for example, of warfare at sea through her depictions of young William in Mansfield Park and of the older Captain Wentworth in Persuasion. I suoi romanzi, in parte per problemi editoriali (c’erano pure allora), conquistarono all’inizio un numero ristretto di lettori che aumentarono nel corso del tempo, destinati ad essere interpretati da molti lettori come romanzi d’amore (lettrici comprese ***) o letti con diffidenza da molti uomini che navigano nelle secche del pregiudizio.