Worsley is like Child in her thoroughness her fascination with the process and the product her memorable, energetic style of speaking, which is quite like her writing style - lively and “educated but not too posh,” as one of her producers put it - and in her wild, often contagious, occasionally exhausting enthusiasm for her subject. It may not be possible to spend days reading Jane Austen and reading about Jane Austen without writing phrases like “I would find even more to praise in these pages.” But it’s not a great biography, and if it hadn’t been described as one on the cover, I would find even more to praise in these pages. “Jane Austen at Home” is more than just an account of pokers, fire screens, writing desks, Jane’s round spectacles, handsome carriage sweeps in front of handsome houses, some very good and some very disappointing apple pies, the elm-lined walks of the Steventon rectory and the flimsy doors and uneven stairs of a rented house in Bath. ” - A letter from Mary Russell Mitford to Sir William Elford, April 13, 1815

“And a friend of mine, who visits her now says that … till ‘Pride and Prejudice’ showed us what a precious gem was hidden in that unbending case, she was no more regarded in society than a poker or a fire screen. “Where shall I begin? Which of all my important nothings shall I tell you first?” - A letter from Jane Austen to her sister, Cassandra Worsley’s careful research delivers no dramatic new revelations about Austen’s life or writing, but Janeites will flock to the book nevertheless for its fresh perspective on their idol.JANE AUSTEN AT HOME By Lucy Worsley Illustrated. When she moved into Chawton Cottage, Austen completed Mansfield Park, a novel that disparages the idea that an individual’s birthplace is more important than “life experience or talent.” In her final novel, Persuasion, Austen opens with the loss of a home and a period of rootlessness, and ends with the protagonist’s finding a permanent home, brings this thematic preoccupation of hers full circle. Living for a short time in straitened circumstances after her father’s death, Austen, according to Worsley, refused to sink into misery but instead turned her situation into art.

In her years at Steventon, Austen wrote an early draft of the novel that later became Sense and Sensibility and she observed many of the details of domestic life that she would include in her novels. As a young girl in Steventon Rectory, for example, Austen became a consummate novel reader who dreamed of joining the cadre of popular female novelists of the time, such as Fanny Burney and Ann Radcliffe. This enthusiastic, though often slow-going, biography by Worsley ( The Art of the English Murder) delivers a portrait of the novelist in her successive homes, pondering the differences that place makes to Austen’s fiction.

Jane Austen at Home by Lucy Worsley