Jane Austen at Home: A Biography

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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.

Jane Austen at Home (Audio Download): Lucy Worsley, Ruth Jane Austen at Home (Audio Download): Lucy Worsley, Ruth

In appearance, Jane’s mother was striking rather than beautiful, with her dark hair, ‘fine well cut features, large grey eyes, and good eyebrows’. ‘She was amusingly particular about people’s noses,’ we’re told, ‘having a very aristocratic one herself.’18 At this juncture, Jane’s brother Edward offered Mrs. Austen and her daughters the use of a cottage on his estate in Hampshire. “Act Three: A Real Home” covers the period of Jane’s life at Chawton Cottage where Worsley describes the “established routine that allowed Jane to be extremely creative.” (250) During this time (1809-1817), Austen’s early novels were published, and she had time to devote to writing her later works, while Mrs. Austen and Cassandra handled most of the housekeeping duties. 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.Although Mr George Austen (thirty-eight) and his wife Cassandra (twenty-nine) had only been married for four years, their household was not inconsiderable. It included Mrs Austen’s own mother, Mrs Jane Leigh, and the couple’s three boys: James (‘Jemmy’), George, and Edward (‘Neddy’), the latter less than one year old. There would also have been maids and manservants, of name and number unknown. They probably included Jane Leigh’s servant Mary Ellis. But there were also other ways for a Georgian clergyman to supplement his income. 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. Steventon parish was three miles long and three-quarters of a mile wide.25 The living included the Rectory itself, and ‘glebe’ lands of three acres that were to be farmed specifically for the maintenance of the parish priest. In Steventon, the former common fields of the village had been ‘inclosed’ and made into private farms. This meant that George wouldn’t have to go through the arduous business of collecting his tithes in kind from each individual family. He would just take 10 per cent in money from the profits of his farmer neighbours. The fact that he collected his tithes directly, rather than via a landowner, was what made Mr Austen a rector rather than a plain parson. But the business of the tithes did mean that his fortunes were still very closely tied to those of the land. Several of the homes in which Austen lived were in Bath. Before reading this biography my only notion about the city of Bath was from her novels. Well, she left a lot out of the novels. Worsley draws a marvelous picture of the town, the squalor and the fading grandeur, the bathing habits and the coed baths. One would naturally think of Bath as a place of recuperation and health, but one risked one's life to actually live and bath there. I will say no more other than that I will never forget the Bath of the early 1800s as described by Worsley.

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This is a superb book. The discovery, research and creation of the story of Jane through and within her homes is superb. It is a trademark of Lucy Worsley's that this is so and why she is such a superb historian and communicator. Of course historians have their biases, but shouldn't they at least try to distance themselves from their subject? 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. 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. I will certainly be seeking out Lucy Worsley's other books, and will be making a pilgrimage to some of the places described in such great detail.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 Book review: Jane Austen at Home, by Lucy Worsley

Worsley's cleverly implements certain sections of Austen's own letters to corroborate with her image of this author. At times her suppositions and speculations regarding Austen's character and motivation are made to seem as facts. Unlike other historians and biographers, who often misconstrued Austen's personality and life, Worsley seems to imply at a personal connection to her subject, one that makes her into one few capable to discerning the truth about Austen. Curiously enough Worsley reveals that: “I was once a pupil at the Abbey School myself, and Jane Austen was our most famous ex-student”. Worsley offers us much that Austen's admirers wish to know...with humor and poignancy and common sense, just as Austen would have wished."—Amy Bloom, New York Times Book Review 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.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 love Shakespeare, and this sounds so intriguing! Plus that cover is dreamy. Will definitely be adding to my TBR The rector of a parish has much to do …his parish duties, and the careand improvement of his dwelling.’

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Accessories Fashion For Children Fashion To Make Fashionable Furnishings Men's Fashion Women's Fashion 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. 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.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. 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. 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). This is my kind of history: carefully researched but so vivid that you are convinced Lucy Worsley was actually there at the party - or the parsonage.' Antonia Fraser You only have to read Sense and Sensibility and appreciate the earthy vulgarity of Mrs Jennings to know that Jane Austen must have been aware of aspects of life which would not automatically be associated with a maiden aunt. Her letters show she was something of a flirt and had many possible suitors - all of whom she refused in the end. Jane Austen was very much aware of the facts of life.