Jane Austen at Home: A Biography

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She signalled her intentions by dressing for the ceremony in a sturdy red riding habit, which would become her practical daily outfit for the early years of her married life, and which ‘in due course was cut up into jackets and trousers for her boys’. Backed by extensive source documents, letters, and full-color and black and white images, Jane Austen at Home shines with engaging storytelling and enthusiasm. Historian Lucy Worlsey focused on Jane's experiences in her different homes and on how her novels treated life at home. Over his lifespan, country clergymen would become better and better off, because technological improvements to agriculture would allow them to extract more money from their glebe lands and tithes.

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You could not think her lacking in temper once you have seen her private letters to Cassandra, which crackle, sometimes, with wickedness and rage. Her niece Marianne, shown here with two of her sisters, described how Jane would sit sewing quietly, then suddenly burst out laughing as she thought of a joke for one of her books.

Appropriately, given the higher status of its inhabitants, the Rectory was Steventon’s last house, at the junction of Church Walk and Frog Lane. With their poor and illiterate neighbours, some young clergymen moving as Mr Austen had done from Oxford to Hampshire found their harsh new lives in rural parishes to be quite shockingly lonely.

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

What she shows us instead is their subtle effect upon the hearts and minds and daily lives of individuals. According to one of Mr Austen’s predecessors as rector, its management should give little trouble as it contained no Papists, nor Dissenters, nor any ‘nobleman, gentleman or person of note’. Each fabric is 44" wide and printed on a 100% cotton, grade AA base cloth with a light schreiner finish. At the sight of the stranger, they ‘all fixed their eyes upon me, and, upon my smiling, they bursted out into laughter’. We can only suppose how perhaps the events of Jane’s own life are mirrored in her characters’ lives and the choices they make.

The men grew turnips and beans, while the women worked at home, spinning flax, or wool from the sheep that wandered Hampshire’s hills. chief curator of Historic Royal Palaces, is steeped in the world of Georgian England, where Jane Austen (1775-1817) lived, wrote, and set her novels.

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

In her work, the enormous upheavals of her age, such as the French Revolution, or the Industrial Revolution, or the agricultural revolution, are played out off stage. 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. This idea that a house and land were not owned by a family, but held on behalf of others, would permeate Jane’s novels. There is too much effort in these linkages and assertions which are sometimes matched by the application of quotes taken out of context from the novels.Después de pasar unas cuantas semanas sumergida en la vida de Jane Austen me resulta muy difícil cerrar definitivamente esta admirable biografía. She reads Austen’s correspondence with uncommon empathy, discovering “dense detail of domestic life” in letters that some biographers have dismissed. A plough that worked perfectly well in Suffolk ‘totally failed in the stiff ground round Steventon’. At nearby Dummer, another young clergyman ‘would have given the world for one of his Oxford friends, and mourned for the want of them like a dove’. During this time, Jane’s father died, leaving the Austen women dependent on Jane’s brothers for financial support.