Jane Austen at Home

 Lucy Worsley admits to being a Janite, so her biography of Austen is written from a fan's perspective. Worsley is also from the "warts and all" school of historians, so she's not afraid to delve into the family feuds and societal divisions that made up Jane's family. Quiet, observant, acid-penned Jane then crafted her narrow worlds into six near perfect novels.

The Austens were near-gentry; her clergyman father associated with those above him socially but her mother had to be hands on in the garden and dairy. Children were not seen as sentimentally as a generation or two later and all eight siblings were sent out for a few years and her disabled brother (he most likely had epilepsy) never returned.

Jane also grew up in a world of extended families with great differences in wealth and status. Her mother's brother married up, but never shared his wealth (as the Gardiners appear to, or were expected to by Mrs. Bennett) thanks to a parsimonious wife scandalously accused of shoplifting. One of Jane's brothers, Edward, was adopted by childless relations and settled in as a lord of the manor. Two brothers made their fortune (like Admiral Croft, Captain Wentworth, and William Price) in the Royal Navy, and James Austen succeeded his father s rector of Stevenson. Then there was Henry, who both rose and fell as a private banker who eventually went bankrupt. Married to his cousin Eliza, the scandalous widow of a French nobleman and the illegitimate daughter of Mr. Austen's sister Philadelphia, he was Jane's literary agent and supporter but also a bit of schemer and a partial model for Henry Crawford. As unmarried women, Jane's and Cassandra's fates rose and fell with those of their brothers, depending on Edward's grace and favor lodge (in unofficial exchange for child care) after their father had died.

What about her writing? Worsley disagrees with the theory the Jane only wrote when she had a "home" in Stevenson and Chwton. While she wrote the first drafts of three novels before her father gave up Stevenson and three after being published in 1811, it's likely that she was revising and rewriting the manuscripts that would become Sense and Sensibility and Pride and Prejudice while moving among rental lodgings in Bath and Southampton. We don't realize that because of class and era. Jane was a Georgian, product of an era where woman's work was necessary. Her first biographers were her brother Edward's wealthy and Victorain descendants who felt that seeing Dear Aunt Jane as a professional would be insulting.

Worsley also explores Jane's romantic life. She had one known thwarted romance and turned down one proposal. Jane Austen at Home mentions another potential suitor, an associate of Henry Austen's who never got up the nerve to ask, and a few unnamed men with whom she danced and flirted. In the end, Jane chose a career and a life among women, living with her mother and sister and with sisters by choice like Martha Lloyd (who lived with the Austen women as sort of a regency Golden Girls) and the Biggs sisters (one widowed, one thrown out by her brother, Jane's almost-fiance). Creativity or childbirths -one of the few women able to make that choice. To be honest, it probably wasn't entirely hers because she was dowry less in an era with a war-created shortage of eligible men. But unlike Marianne Dashwood and (at least in my opinion) Emma Woodhouse, she never had to settle.