A sparkling, assiduously researched and deeply moving biography which brings Jane Austen and her world to vivid, reach-out-and-touch-it life - so much so that I approached the inevitable end (of both the book and Jane's life) with mounting dread. Oh, you know how it's going to turn out, but by then Worsley has made you care so much that you can't help but delude yourself, just a little, by hoping and wishing for a different ending. When the moment comes, as you know it must, Worsley treats it with such care that you feel as though she, and you, have lost a personal friend. In her hands, Austen is not just a vaguely sketched figment more than two centuries in the past, but utterly real.

Worsley's biography is a searching, eminently readable examination of Austen, the woman, and the context in which she lived, loved and wrote. It's wonderfully thorough, too, considering just how much material was deliberately destroyed by the Austen family and how hard they worked to stage manage their increasingly famous relative's image in the decades following her death. It makes a compelling case for Austen's significant contribution to the development of the novel - the lessons she learned from those who came before, the rules she bent, and the path she forged for those who followed - and rages a little, here and there, at the way Austen was dudded in life or dismissed in death. Something I noted and enjoyed was the way Worsley seamlessly drew on historical material and the contemporaneous recollections of others to add small, pertinent details not necessarily directly related to Austen, but which painted a fuller picture of the events and mores of the time.

Like Austen, Worsley has a distinctive authorial voice...smart, well-informed, tart and fun. By the end of it, you're left feeling that if you can't meet Jane, Lucy might well be a lovely substitute. Based on this, I'll happily search out more of her work. ( )

Written with a lot of love for Jane Austen... Somehow, I never found my way to a "proper" biography of one my favourite authors. I picked up bits and pieces here and there over the years - prefaces, articles, blogs, literary criticism etc. It was rather nice to have it all organised in a more or less chronological order and say to myself "Yes, this. Yes, that person. Yes, this place..." Some things were not as clear-cut as I had fixed them in my mind (well, of course not!) - there are interpretations, looking at facts through too modern eyes, relatives not remembering things or embellishing them. So, one of the pleasures of this book was discovering new things and new perspectives. "Jane Austen at Home" might not dive as deep as some Janeites would like, but as my first Jane Austen biography, it was geeky enough for me :-)
A good biography paints events that you already know about in such a way as to pierce your heart - and this one did exactly that. ( )

I loved this very approachable biography of Jane Austen who, of course, has attracted the attention of many previous biographers. Worsley's credentials and access to the papers, plus her visits to the surviving places where Jane and her family stayed, and her approach to Jane's surviving letters, make for an interesting read, despite the fact that I knew the basic outline from other works some years ago.

This is a very personal book where Worsley appears as 'I' and 'me' in defiance of the usual biographical convention, but it does serve to make it clear that some conclusions are speculation based upon first, what is likely in the context of the period and Jane's life, and secondly are draawn from the characters and situations in her novels. It is always a bit dangerous to assume that a writer's work is their life, of course, but in the case of Austen it is also clear that major themes such as the precariousness of retaining a place on the lower ranks of the gentry when you are a single woman with no income and dependent on the charity of far richer relatvies, come directly from Austen's own experience. Worsley does succeed in drawing out the sly humour in Jane's correspondence - and throws light on why so much was destroyed by her older sister Cassandra with whom Jane enjoyed a close lifelong friendship. Jane was just so inclined to make naughty jokes about the various family members or acquaintances and their foibles etc. Some of these jokes have been taken literally by later commentators, not least her own family.

It is also interesting to read how, after her death, her family mostly closed ranks (one niece had a more balanced view in private correspondence) in an attempt to prettify her character and make her acceptable to the staid Victorian age that followed, emphasising such things as what a placid, demure, well-beloved aunt she had been; how well formed her handwriting and how she had played at spillikins and other sedate pastimes with her many nephews and nieces. No mention of how she had loved to dance and drink till the early hours of the morning at the many balls she had attended in her youth, for example. Worsley puts this into the context of the burgeoning primness and disdain for the behaviour of the Georgians as the Nineteeth century progressed: even the fact that Jane's childhood had been spent in a Rectory where her mother had worked hard in the garden, digging potatoes and looking after livestock, or where Jane and Cassandra had had to help out in the kitchen, had to be expunged from the family's official histories which made out their origins to be much more genteel.

Another interesting element is the discussion of older women mentors who helped and influenced Jane, as well as the novelists she enjoyed and those she found too melodramatic. These friendships, often cut short by the untimely deaths of the older women, were nevertheless an important support to Jane and her morale given the many obstacles to her path in becoming a published novelist.

Her story is in some ways a sad one, though not because of the various lost opportunities to marry, which Jane had, and in one case to marry into property: the author is clear that if she had done so, there would, instead of the novels we love, have most probably been a lifetime of childbearing, such as friends, sisters-in-law or nieces had endured, which in many cases had cut short their lives. The sadness is more in the failure of certain members of the family, especially the wealthiest brothers who inherited even more wealth, to make the lives of Jane, Cassandra and their mother more comfortable. If they had not been forced into living in a damp and mosquito ridden area of Bath, following Mr Austen's retiring and handing over the Rectory to eldest son, James, Mr Austen may not have suffered a sudden illness and died, leaving both wife and daughters in severe financial difficulties. Possibly the often insalubrious surroundings in which they had to eke out a cheap living, especially after that, downwardly mobile as they moved from place to place in Bath, might have led ultimately to Jane's own premature death. I found the chapter dealing with the decline of her health and her inability to finish her last work, moving, despite knowing beforehand how it would all end.

Although Jane was of her time, Worsley makes it clear just how remarkable her writing was, at a time when other novelists, both women and men, were reliant on melodrama and action in their works. Despite the odd elopment or fall from the Cobb in Lyme Regis, her stories are based around the social interaction and everyday conversation and niceties of convention that constrained people of the gentry class - and the contrast between them and richer folk, witnessed by her as a 'poor relation' guest at grander homes. Worsley forgrounds the importance for women of finding a home of their own, which in the case of her characters is through marriage, but in her own case was in her wealthy brother Edward finally giving his mother and sisters rent free accommodation at a cottage in Chawton.

All in all, I thorougly enjoyed the book and would only fault it for not having a family tree: there were a lot of branches of the linked Austen and Knight families in which names were commonly reused - several Cassandras for example. That would have made things a little clearer in places. But despite that this was a keeper for me and I would rate it at 5 stars.

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I love Lucy Worsley's historical work. She focuses on Jane's homes and how where she lived affected her life. She brings out how the Austen family sanitized Jane's story and the questions about who Jane really was result from that. ( )

This is a beautiful biography of Jane Austen. I have read several, but I love this one.
I thought I knew what there was to know about Jane Austen's life. As far as I could tell, details were a bit on the sparse side. Many of her letters were destroyed; there are no satisfactory pictures of her (just a sketch or two), and her family filtered her legacy in the decades following her death.

But there is so much in this book! The author has pulled references from letters of all of Jane's friends and family, chance remarks of acquaintances, and contemporary accounts of places and things that Jane would have been familiar with. The result is an extremely satisfying and fairly thorough biography. As the title suggests, it is written in the context of all the places Jane Austen spent time. This is a fascinating new take that allows for freedom of exploration of Jane's world.

Lucy Worsley writes in a spirit of great appreciation for the genius and personality of Jane. One can tell she is intrigued and inspired by the connections she is making and the conclusions she is drawing. Jane Austen could never be entirely known as a person at this remove of over 200 years, but this biography takes a darn good shot at it. ( )