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Jane Austen at Home: A Biography

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Both Worsley and Austin zoom in on the lives of British middle- and upper-class women. Men are discussed in relation to their controlling influence upon women. Feminism is not a new phenomenon! Women were writing and having their voices heard even before the turn of the 19th century. While Lucy Worsley is a fun and engaging TV presenter, her writing style is a bit dry. This reads like a traditional biography and not one of her TV shows, unfortunately. Having read extensively about Jane Austen's life and times, this biography wasn't exactly what I was looking for. What I really liked was the quotes from diaries and letters of Jane Austen's contemporaries to give a better sense of what was going on at the time and what other women's lives were like. I also liked learning more about the extended Austen family and the affair of Stoneleigh Abbey. Also new and interesting is the fates of the Austen family homes.

Jane Austen at Home - Macmillan Jane Austen at Home - Macmillan

Worsley's biography on Austen isn't as poignant or as revolutionary as its biographer seems to think. 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”. An example being: “I hope that he hadn’t told Jane what he was doing, so that she did not have to face the instant rejection.”) The story of the Austens at Steventon Rectory really begins in the late summer of 1768, when a wagon heavily loaded with household goods made its way through the Hampshire lanes from nearby Deane to the village of Steventon. Its members had no notion that so many historians and biographers would scrutinise this ordinary event in the life of an ordinary family. thing to do with the death of Jane’s father, even though his guilt at not providing for her and her elder sister Cassandra is all too obvious to them both. What can the places that Jane Austen called home tell us about the author’s life and work? In Jane Austen at Home, historian, author, and BBC presenter Lucy Worsley looks at the author’s life through the lens of Austen’s homes. As Worsley notes in the book’s introduction, “For Jane, home was a perennial problem. Where could she afford to live? Amid the many domestic duties of an unmarried daughter and aunt, how could she find the time to write? Where could she keep her manuscripts safe?” (1) Worsley seeks to place Jane Austen “into her social class and time” while admitting that, as an Austen reader and biographer, she has a vision of the beloved author that allows Jane to speak for her and to her circumstances. “Jane’s passage through life, so smooth on the surface, seems sharply marked by closed doors, routes she could not take, choices she could not make. Her great contribution was to push those doors open, a little bit, for us in later generations to slip through.” (4)

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Lucy Worsley, OBE (born 18 December 1973) is an English historian, author, curator, and television presenter. 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. When William Austen died too, it emerged that he had not updated his will at the time of his second marriage. This meant that George Austen’s stepmother could legitimately claim that her interest in her husband’s estate took priority, and that she intended not to bother any more with her stepchildren. Six-year-old George and his two sisters Philadelphia and Leonora had to leave the family home in Tonbridge. They were now under the care of their uncles. The heroine of any story, George Austen’s daughter Jane would write, really ought to ‘have the misfortune, as many heroines have had before her, of losing her Parents when she was very young’. This was true in real life of Jane’s father, both of whose own parents had died before he was nine. Indeed, his story was even more traumatic than that. Lucy Worsley loves Jane Austen. It's very sweet to see her flare up, jumping into the text, not caring that she's got her authorial opinion all over the nice clean history. When Austen's ungrateful niece sneers at Austen for being less than a lady, Worsley leaps in to point out that the niece is prejudiced by her Victorian priggishness. When a nephew asserts that his aunt was certainly a lady who had no part in housework, Worsley stoutly defends the immense amount of work that the Austen women did as they clung onto gentility by their finger nails. 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. 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.

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

As the book and Jane's life progresses the writing, the talent and the struggle to be published are covered; so well and so clearly with detail that one feels in the room when Jane meets a publisher or writes to seek a deal or help. We read of her brother's help to get a deal...but it is neither perfect or the step hoped for. If the authors are serious, this is a silly, distasteful book. If they are not, it’s a brilliant satire. I was born in Reading (not great, but it could have been Slough), studied Ancient and Modern History at New College, Oxford, and I've got a PhD in art history from the University of Sussex.Jane Austen at Home is divided into four major sections, titled as acts in a play. I thought this a lovely touch by Ms. Worsley, reminding readers of the Austen family’s love of amateur theatricals. “Act One: A Sunny Morning at the Rectory” covers Austen’s early life at Steventon Rectory in Hampshire (1775-1801). During this period, Jane traveled to relatives’ homes and even lived away at boarding schools for several years. Nonetheless, Steventon remained her place of safety until her father’s retirement forced Mr. and Mrs. Austen, along with Cassandra and Jane, to move to Bath. To return to what Jane might have looked like, Lucy suggests she was around five feet seven, with a twenty-four inch waist (the alarming consequence of wearing tight stays as a girl). She rebukes biographers who describe her as a ‘plump, dumpy woman’ based on Cassandra’s portrait rather than the evidence. Similarly, the romantic image of a lonely writer fits poorly with the known facts. Overall however I don't recommend reading this if you are looking for to read some informative, or credible, material about Austen. Worsley's constant snubs at her 'competitors' were tiring, especially considering that she seems to do exactly the same thing.

Jane Austen at Home, by Lucy Worsley Book review: Jane Austen at Home, by Lucy Worsley

What a treat. And just up the road from the cottage, at Chawton Great House, lived one of Jane’s favourite girls in the whole family, Fanny Austen.” L’amatissima sorella Cassandra distrusse centinaia di lettere, molte altre furono espurgate dai nipoti vittoriani che misero le mutande ad ogni frase o parola potesse ledere il santino. 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.A new biography focusing on the domestic life of Jane Austen by historian and curator Lucy Worsley. Lucy Worsley takes into consideration the most recent scholarship on Austen and draws conclusions from examining private papers to attempt to flesh out the mere facts known about Jane Austen's life. This new telling of the story of Jane’s life shows us how and why she lived as she did, examining the places and spaces that mattered to her. It wasn’t all country houses and ballrooms, but a life that was often a painful struggle. Jane famously lived a ‘life without incident’, but with new research and insights Lucy Worsley reveals a passionate woman who fought for her freedom. 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.

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