by Lucy Worsley
First published 2017
Jane Austen spent her life moving between other people's houses. Historian Lucy Worsley follows her through all of them, from the Steventon Parsonage where she grew up to the cramped Winchester rental where she died. Along the way, Worsley examines the rooms Austen occupied, the possessions she kept close, and the relatives she depended on for shelter. The picture that emerges is not the serene spinster of popular myth. This Austen had at least five serious marriage prospects. She turned them down. She fought, quietly but persistently, for the kind of independence her society rarely offered women. Worsley also traces how homes function in Austen's novels, serving sometimes as places of comfort and sometimes as traps. Locations like Godmersham Park and Chawton House appear both in Austen's biography and in the imaginative world she built on the page. Illustrated with two sections of color photographs, the book gives readers a writer shaped by physical spaces, a woman who refused to settle for less than the life, and the love, she actually wanted.
Genres: biography, history, literary-criticism, british-literature, 19th-century
Vibes: illuminating, intimate, reflective, scholarly, thought-provoking
Tropes: biographical-exploration, life-and-work-connection, spatial-analysis
Setting: Steventon Parsonage, Winchester, Godmersham Park, Chawton House, England
Period: 19th century, Regency era
486 pages · Paperback · Hodder and Stoughton Ltd.