Kirkham, Margaret. "Portraits". Jane Austen in Context. Ed. Janet Todd. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005. ISBN 0-521-82644-6. 68–82 Waldron, Mary. "Critical Response, early". Jane Austen in Context. Ed. Janet Todd. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005. ISBN 0-521-82644-6. 83–91 Johnson, Claudia. "Austen cults and cultures". The Cambridge Companion to Jane Austen. Eds. Edward Copeland and Juliet McMaster. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014. ISBN 978-0-521-74650-2. 232–247. Austen-Leigh, James Edward. A Memoir of Jane Austen. 1926. Ed. R.W. Chapman. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1967.

Lucy Worsley gives us Jane's life through the places she lived, and her few possessions. She never had a place of her own, as spinsters and widows were dependent on family charity for their survival in the early 19th century. Jane apparently had at least five chances at marriage, but never found her Mr. Darcy, and decided to let her novels be her children. This biography gives a fascinating history of her and her family, and my only complaint was that I would have liked more information about Cassandra, without whom Jane would not have been able to devote time to her novels. The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the sphere of suffering shared, and in this case extended to the death march itself, there is no spiritual or emotional legacy here to offset any reader reluctance. During this period of her life, Jane Austen attended church regularly, socialised with friends and neighbours, [e] and read novels—often of her own composition—aloud to her family in the evenings. Socialising with the neighbours often meant dancing, either impromptu in someone's home after supper or at the balls held regularly at the assembly rooms in the town hall. [38] Her brother Henry later said that "Jane was fond of dancing, and excelled in it". [39] Education Silhouette of Cassandra Austen, Jane's sister and closest friendSutherland (2005), 16–17, 21; Le Faye (2014) xxii–xxiii; Fergus (2014), 10–11; Tomalin (1997), 210–212, 216–220; Honan (1987), 287. First, thanks to Candi for bringing this to my attention. I am definitely a Jane Austen fan, but was always of the opinion that not much was known about her life because her sister Cassandra had burned many of her letters, at Jane's request. But in fact, a great deal is known about her because a great many letters survived, she had a large family interested in preserving her legacy, and her novels themselves contain many clues to her life and times. Todd, Janet. The Cambridge Introduction to Jane Austen. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015. ISBN 978-1-107-49470-1. Le Faye (2014), xviii–xiv; Fergus (2005), 7; Sutherland (2005), 16–18, 21; Tomalin (1997), 120–121; Honan (1987), 122–124.

Scott, Walter. "Walter Scott, an unsigned review of Emma, Quarterly Review". Jane Austen: The Critical Heritage, 1812–1870. Ed. B.C. Southam. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1968. ISBN 0-7100-2942-X. 58–69. 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. Jane’s teenage stories are spoofs, imitations and parodies of the kinds of books she was reading at the time: schoolroom textbooks and her favourite fiction. The teenage stories are full of action; in them, girls behave badly, eat too much, get drunk, steal money, get into fights and run off with each other’s fiancés. While Lucy Worsley is a fun and engaging TV presenter, her writing style is a bit dry. This reads like a traditional biography and not one of her TV shows, unfortunately. Having read extensively about Jane Austen's life and times, this biography wasn't exactly what I was looking for. What I really liked was the quotes from diaries and letters of Jane Austen's contemporaries to give a better sense of what was going on at the time and what other women's lives were like. I also liked learning more about the extended Austen family and the affair of Stoneleigh Abbey. Also new and interesting is the fates of the Austen family homes.Although I did— for the most part—find Lucy Worsley's prose to be compelling, I thought that many of her arguments were unconvincing and biased. 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. Austen, Jane. Catharine and Other Writings. Ed. Margaret Anne Doody and Douglas Murray. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993. ISBN 0-19-282823-1.

Last, we learn of the life events which shaped Austen. All of these details are stitched together beautifully throughout this biography and we are given examples of how Austen's life and thoughts about the society in which she lived, the people she knew, and all other aspects of her life were fodder for her beloved novels. We are given many examples of how all of these were worked into the novels, but also how and why she had to be very careful about what she included. Fascinating! This was my favorite part of the biography. Austen wrote about what she knew and even advised a beloved niece aspiring to write a novel to do just that. Said, Edward W. (1994). Culture and imperialism (1st Vintage booksed.). New York. ISBN 0-679-75054-1. OCLC 29600508. {{ cite book}}: CS1 maint: location missing publisher ( link) In Britain, Austen gradually grew in the estimation of the literati. Philosopher and literary critic George Henry Lewes published a series of enthusiastic articles in the 1840s and 1850s. [162] Later in the century, novelist Henry James referred to Austen several times with approval, and on one occasion ranked her with Shakespeare, Cervantes, and Henry Fielding as among "the fine painters of life". [163]

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Le Faye (2014), xxv–xxvi; Sutherland (2005), 16–21; Fergus (2014), 12–13, 16–17, n.29, 31, n.33; Fergus (2005), 10; Tomalin (1997), 256. Looser, Devoney (13 December 2019). "Genius expressed in the nose The earliest known piece of Jane Austen-inspired fan fiction". TLS. Le Faye, Deirdre, ed. Jane Austen's Letters. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995. ISBN 0-19-283297-2. Rajan, Rajeswari. "Critical Responses, Recent". Jane Austen in Context. Ed. Janet Todd. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005. ISBN 0-521-82644-6. 101–10. In mid-1815 Austen moved her work from Egerton to John Murray, a better known London publisher, [k] who published Emma in December 1815 and a second edition of Mansfield Park in February 1816. Emma sold well, but the new edition of Mansfield Park did poorly, and this failure offset most of the income from Emma. These were the last of Austen's novels to be published during her lifetime. [117]

Todd, Janet, ed. Jane Austen in Context. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005. ISBN 0-521-82644-6. Austen's works have attracted legions of scholars. The first dissertation on Austen was published in 1883, by George Pellew, a student at Harvard University. [167] Another early academic analysis came from a 1911 essay by Oxford Shakespearean scholar A. C. Bradley, [168] who grouped Austen's novels into "early" and "late" works, a distinction still used by scholars today. [169] The first academic book devoted to Austen in France was Jane Austen by Paul and Kate Rague (1914), who set out to explain why French critics and readers should take Austen seriously. [161] The same year, Léonie Villard published Jane Austen, Sa Vie et Ses Oeuvres, originally her PhD thesis, the first serious academic study of Austen in France. [161] In 1923, R.W. Chapman published the first scholarly edition of Austen's collected works, which was also the first scholarly edition of any English novelist. The Chapman text has remained the basis for all subsequent published editions of Austen's works. [170]This book is a superb telling of 18th century society and life - Jane's life - through her homes and it is ably done with passion and care that brings our subject and her family in to being. We read of early life at home in Hampshire and how the family lived together but with financial challenges that saw her mother and (especially) father try their best for the children. In 1804, while living in Bath, Austen started, but did not complete, her novel The Watsons. The story centres on an invalid and impoverished clergyman and his four unmarried daughters. Sutherland describes the novel as "a study in the harsh economic realities of dependent women's lives". [92] Honan suggests, and Tomalin agrees, that Austen chose to stop work on the novel after her father died on 21 January 1805 and her personal circumstances resembled those of her characters too closely for her comfort. [93] Finally, what annoyed me most consistently about this book was the way Worsley persists in "finding" Austen in her novels. She pushes the idea that Austen represented her views about life in this character or that; Austen's plots must reflect 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). Keymer, Thomas. " Northanger Abbey and Sense and Sensibility". The Cambridge Companion to Jane Austen. Eds. Edward Copeland and Juliet McMaster. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014. ISBN 978-0-521-74650-2. 21–38