In an era when many people lived their entire lives in the house they were born in, the Austen family moved house a surprising number of times, and, Worsley argues, these moves and the quality of accommodation they ended up in played an important part in Jane’s state of mind and its effect on her creativity.Īs is still so often the case, the reason for all these moves was closely tied in to the family’s economic condition. As the title suggests, Worsley has chosen to focus her exploration on the various homes in which Jane Austen lived during the course of her relatively short life. Perhaps surprisingly, I think the answer has to be a cautious yes. But is she the right person to write a biography of Jane Austen? She’s also produced a number of popular history books, frequently tied in to the series she’s been presenting. Illustrated with two sections of color plates, Lucy Worsley's Jane Austen at Home is a richly entertaining and illuminating new book about one of the world's favorite novelists and one of the subjects she returned to over and over in her unforgettable novels: home.If you’re a watcher of historical TV documentaries, you won’t need introducing to Lucy Worsley, who presents history programmes for the BBC, in which she often dresses up in the costumes of the period. She shows readers a passionate Jane Austen who fought for her freedom, a woman who had at least five marriage prospects, but-in the end-a woman who refused to settle for anything less than Mr. Worsley examines the rooms, spaces and possessions which mattered to her, and the varying ways in which homes are used in her novels as both places of pleasure and as prisons. 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. Amy Bloom, New York Times Book Review Take a trip back to Jane Austen's world and the many places she lived as historian Lucy Worsley visits Austen's childhood home, her schools, her holiday accommodations, the houses-both grand and small-of the relations upon whom she was dependent, and the home she shared with her mother and sister towards the end of her life.

Worsley offers us much that Austen's admirers wish to know.with humor and poignancy and common sense, just as Austen would have wished.

Jane austen at home by lucy worsley