Jane Austen at Home: A Biography

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This suggestion of Austen as a feminist falls immediately on the probability of Georgian society deciding that the aesthetic democracy of the Austens was a good social model for women to follow. In Mansfield Park, for example, we get a much fuller physical description of Edmund Bertram’s future home in his parish than we do of the great mansion of Mansfield Park itself. 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'.

Jane Austen at Home - Lucy Worsley (paperback) - Chawton House

Its inclusion in this otherwise frequently impressive biography suggests the difficulty of Worsley’s objective: how to revive a topic already plundered almost to extinction during the 200 years since the death of Jane Austen. Worsley is Joint Chief Curator at Historic Royal Palaces but is best known as a presenter of BBC Television series on historical topics, including Elegance and Decadence: The Age of the Regency (2011), Harlots, Housewives and Heroines: A 17th Century History for Girls (2012), The First Georgians: The German Kings Who Made Britain (2014), A Very British Romance (2015), Lucy Worsley: Mozart’s London Odyssey (2016), and Six Wives with Lucy Worsley (2016). The balls, the great houses, the simpler country communities and their gossip, the rounds of visits (with their merciful bounty of surviving letters), the children adopted from one house to another, the early deaths which clear the way in novels for such girls as Jane Fairfax in Emma, the feckless fathers who, like Mr Bennet in Pride and Prejudice do nothing to ensure the financial security of their unmarried daughters.I will swallow that she based Emma off of her two favorite nieces, but not that her writing represents some secret, deep feelings she couldn't otherwise express. It was this sort of thing that was leading the Anglican Church in the later eighteenth century into stagnation, and why alternative sects such as the Methodists were gathering strength.

Jane Austen at Home by Lucy Worsley | Goodreads

We quickly learn that Jane was at the mercy of her father and later her brothers for providing her with a roof over her head as well as a small income on which to subsist. One highlight of these chapters is the explanation of the Stoneleigh inheritance as it related to Jane’s family. As the Austens travelled into Steventon in 1768, the land and the fields around them were going to be just as important as the house. She was amusingly particular about people’s noses,’ we’re told, ‘having a very aristocratic one herself. Lucy Worsley, OBE (born 18 December 1973) is an English historian, author, curator, and television presenter.

Now to get time to re-read her six published novels in light of what I now know about their creation. The only ‘drawback’ I found to reading this book is that I want to drop all my other planned reading and grab my stack of Austen novels and fall in love with them all over again!