Jane Austen at Home: A Biography

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Watt, Ian, ed. Jane Austen: A Collection of Critical Essays. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1963. Kirkham, Margaret. "Portraits". Jane Austen in Context. Ed. Janet Todd. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005. ISBN 0-521-82644-6. 68–82 Honan points to "the odd fact that most of [Austen's] reviewers sound like Mr. Collins" as evidence that contemporary critics felt that works oriented toward the interests and concerns of women were intrinsically less important and less worthy of critical notice than works (mostly non-fiction) oriented towards men. [126] 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. The first French critic who paid notice to Austen was Philarète Chasles in an 1842 essay, dismissing her in two sentences as a boring, imitative writer with no substance. [160] Austen was almost completely ignored in France until 1878, [160] when the French critic Léon Boucher published the essay Le Roman Classique en Angleterre, in which he called Austen a "genius", the first French author to do so. [161] The first accurate translation of Austen into French occurred in 1899 when Félix Fénéon translated Northanger Abbey as Catherine Moreland. [161]

Foster, Joseph (1888–1892). "Austen, George (1)". Alumni Oxonienses: the Members of the University of Oxford, 1715–1886. Oxford: Parker and Co – via Wikisource. Looser, Devoney (13 December 2019). "Fan fiction or fan fact? An unknown pen portrait of Jane Austen". TLS: 14–15. From at least the time she was aged eleven, Austen wrote poems and stories to amuse herself and her family. [50] She exaggerated mundane details of daily life and parodied common plot devices in "stories [] full of anarchic fantasies of female power, licence, illicit behaviour, and general high spirits", according to Janet Todd. [51] Containing work written between 1787 and 1793, Austen compiled fair copies of twenty-nine early works into three bound notebooks, now referred to as the Juvenilia. [52] She called the three notebooks "Volume the First", "Volume the Second" and "Volume the Third", and they preserve 90,000 words she wrote during those years. [53] The Juvenilia are often, according to scholar Richard Jenkyns, "boisterous" and "anarchic"; he compares them to the work of 18th-century novelist Laurence Sterne. [54] Portrait of Henry IV. Declaredly written by "a partial, prejudiced, & ignorant Historian", The History of England was illustrated by Austen's sister, Cassandra (c.1790).

Anna Geary: 14-hour workdays are a walk in the park compared to motherhood

Polhemus, Robert M. "Jane Austen's Comedy". The Jane Austen Companion. Ed. J. David Grey. New York: Macmillan, 1986. ISBN 0-02-545540-0. 60–71 I loved this biography of Jane Austen so much that while reading it I was bursting with enthusiasm and couldn't stop talking about it. Worse still is that Worsley bases many of her arguments regarding Austen's personality and actions on the author's own novels. While I'm sure that when writing her novels Austen will have drawn inspiration from some of her own experiences, to solely link her life to those of her fictional characters makes for a rather skewed account of the author herself. These comparisons were thin at best, and most of the time plainly misleading.

Litz, A. Walton. "Chronology of Composition". The Jane Austen Companion. Ed. J. David Grey. New York: Macmillan, 1986. ISBN 0-02-545540-0. 47–62 This is a non-fiction book about the Georgian author Jane Austen (1787 – 1817). The Georgian era covers the period in British history from 1714 to 1830 when the Hanoverian kings George I, George II, George III and George IV reigned. The Victorian era followed. The literature of the two periods differ, each mirroring the social customs that held sway. Georgian society is typified by joie de vivre, dancing and theater, as well as dissipation and extravagance, for those with means. There is less fixation on moral constraints in the former, more in the latter. The pendulum swings, changing direction from debauchery to prudery. Stovel, Bruce. "Further reading". The Cambridge Companion to Jane Austen. Eds. Edward Copeland and Juliet McMaster. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014. ISBN 978-0-521-74650-2. 248–266. Jenkyns, Richard. A Fine Brush on Ivory: An Appreciation of Jane Austen. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004. ISBN 0-19-927661-7. 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).

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Jane Austen was born in 1775 and grew up in the small Hampshire village of Steventon, where her father was a Church of England clergyman. The Austen household was large, with eight children – six boys and two girls – as well as additional pupils, for Rev. George Austen supplemented his clerical income by taking in boy pupils as boarders. There was also a small farm, to supply the family with meat and vegetables, and there were maids and manservants to help with the work. Although at first they seem to be worlds away from her mindful and sedate adult novels, these early writings are clearly where she found her voice. They are little experiments in the art of novel writing, and full of clues about what was to come. Austen wrote in her first surviving letter to her sister Cassandra that Lefroy was a "very gentlemanlike, good-looking, pleasant young man". [67] Five days later in another letter, Austen wrote that she expected an "offer" from her "friend" and that "I shall refuse him, however, unless he promises to give away his white coat", going on to write "I will confide myself in the future to Mr Tom Lefroy, for whom I don't give a sixpence" and refuse all others. [67] The next day, Austen wrote: "The day will come on which I flirt my last with Tom Lefroy and when you receive this it will be all over. My tears flow as I write at this melancholy idea". [67]

The Prince Regent's admiration was by no means reciprocated. In a letter of 16 February 1813 to her friend Martha Lloyd, Austen says (referring to the Prince's wife, whom he treated notoriously badly) "I hate her Husband". [112] Austen, Jane. The History of England. Ed. David Starkey. Icon Books, HarperCollins Publishers, 2006. ISBN 0-06-135195-4.Halperin, John. "Jane Austen's Lovers". SEL: Studies in English Literature 1500–1900 Vol. 25, No. 4, Autumn, 1985. 719–720 The original is unsigned but was believed by the family to have been made by Austen's sister Cassandra and remained in the family until 1920 with a signed sketch by Cassandra. The original sketch, according to relatives who knew Jane Austen well, was not a good likeness. [1]