Jane Austen at Home: A Biography

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Irene Collins estimates that when George Austen took up his duties as rector in 1764, Steventon comprised no more than about thirty families. [12] Zhu Hong "Nineteenth-Century British Fiction in New China: A Brief Report" pp. 207–213 from Nineteenth-Century Fiction, Volume 37, No. 2. September 1982 p. 213. Southam, B.C. "Grandison". The Jane Austen Companion. Ed. J. David Grey. New York: Macmillan, 1986. ISBN 0-02-545540-0. 187–189 Looser, Devoney (13 December 2019). "Fan fiction or fan fact? An unknown pen portrait of Jane Austen". TLS: 14–15.

In 1768, the family finally took up residence in Steventon. Henry was the first child to be born there, in 1771. [26] At about this time, Cassandra could no longer ignore the signs that little George was developmentally disabled. He was subject to seizures, may have been deaf and mute, and she chose to send him out to be fostered. [27] In 1773, Cassandra was born, followed by Francis in 1774, and Jane in 1775. [28] From the very beginning, from the first moment I may almost say, of my acquaintance with you, your manners impressing me with the fullest belief of your arrogance, your conceit, and your selfish disdain of the feelings of others, were such as to form that the groundwork of disapprobation, on which succeeding events have built so immovable a dislike. And I had not known you a month before I felt that you were the last man in the world whom I could ever be prevailed on to marry. [145] Le Faye (2014) xx–xxii; Fergus (2005), 8; Sutherland (2005), 15, 20–22; Tomalin (1997), 168–175; Honan (1987), 215. 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? A home of her own must have seemed to Jane to be always just out of reach."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. 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. As a family the Austens were highly literate and creative, delighting in games, acting and writing. Many years later, Jane’s niece Anna described their charm as ‘all the fun and nonsense of a large and clever family’. In this atmosphere the young Jane Austen began writing, and between the ages of 11 and 17 she wrote a series of stories, sketches and fragments to entertain her family and friends. Grey, J. David. The Jane Austen Companion. New York: Macmillan Publishing Company, 1986. ISBN 0-02-545540-0.

Halperin, John. "Jane Austen's Lovers". SEL: Studies in English Literature 1500–1900 Vol. 25, No. 4, Autumn, 1985. 719–720 Baker, Amy. "Caught in the Act of Greatness: Jane Austen's Characterization Of Elizabeth And Darcy By Sentence Structure In Pride and Prejudice". Explicator, Vol. 72, Issue 3, 2014. 169–178 Alexander, Christine and Juliet McMaster, eds. The Child Writer from Austen to Woolf. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005. ISBN 0-521-81293-3.

Exhibitions

hubbard, susan. "Bath". seekingjaneausten.com. Archived from the original on 16 June 2019 . Retrieved 27 May 2017. Raven, James. "Book Production". Jane Austen in Context. Ed. Janet Todd. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005. ISBN 0-521-82644-6. 194–203 Doody, Margaret Anne. "The Early Short Fiction". The Cambridge Companion to Jane Austen. Eds. Edward Copeland and Juliet McMaster. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014. ISBN 978-0-521-74650-2. 72–86. Keymer, Thomas. " Northanger Abbey and Sense and Sensibility". The Cambridge Companion to Jane Austen. Eds. Edward Copeland and Juliet McMaster. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014. ISBN 978-0-521-74650-2. 21–38

Kelly, Gary. "Education and accomplishments". Jane Austen in Context. Ed. Janet Todd. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005. ISBN 0-521-82644-6. 252–259

Lucy Worsley gives us Jane's life through the places she lived, and her few possessions. She never had a place of her own, as spinsters and widows were dependent on family charity for their survival in the early 19th century. Jane apparently had at least five chances at marriage, but never found her Mr. Darcy, and decided to let her novels be her children. This biography gives a fascinating history of her and her family, and my only complaint was that I would have liked more information about Cassandra, without whom Jane would not have been able to devote time to her novels. Grey, J. David; Litz, A. Waton; Southam, B. C.; Bok, H.Abigail (1986). The Jane Austen companion. Macmillan. p. 38. ISBN 9780025455405. Richardson's Pamela, the prototype for the sentimental novel, is a didactic love story with a happy ending, written at a time women were beginning to have the right to choose husbands and yet were restricted by social conventions. [140] Austen attempted Richardson's epistolary style, but found the flexibility of narrative more conducive to her realism, a realism in which each conversation and gesture carries a weight of significance. The narrative style utilises free indirect speech—she was the first English novelist to do so extensively—through which she had the ability to present a character's thoughts directly to the reader and yet still retain narrative control. The style allows an author to vary discourse between the narrator's voice and values and those of the characters. [141]