Jane Austen at Home: A biography - Lucy Worsley Audiobook

Written by Lucy Worsley
Read by Lucy Worsley, Ruth Redman
Format: MP3
Bitrate: 64 Kbps
Unabridged

Publisher: Macmillan Audio
Release date: July 11, 2017
Duration: 14:15:14

“Jane Austen at Home offers a fascinating look at Jane Austen’s world through the lens of the homes in which she lived and worked throughout her life. The result is a refreshingly unique perspective on Austen and her work and a beautifully nuanced exploration of gender, creativity, and domesticity.” –Amanda Foreman, bestselling author of Georgianna, Duchess of Devonshire

Take a trip back to Jane Austen’s world and the many places she lived as historian Lucy Worsley visits Austen’s childhood home, her schools, her holiday accommodations, the houses—both grand and small—of the relations upon whom she was dependent, and the home she shared with her mother and sister towards the end of her life. In places like Steventon Parsonage, Godmersham Park, Chawton House and a small rented house in Winchester, Worsley discovers a Jane Austen very different from the one who famously lived a ‘life without incident’.

Worsley examines the rooms, spaces and possessions which mattered to her, and the varying ways in which homes are used in her novels as both places of pleasure and as prisons. She shows readers a passionate Jane Austen who fought for her freedom, a woman who had at least five marriage prospects, but—in the end—a woman who refused to settle for anything less than Mr. Darcy.

Listeners familiar with British historian Lucy Worsley’s documentaries will recognize both her distinctive voice and her cheeky approach to illuminating history. Worsley narrates the introduction and epilogue herself, and Ruth Redman takes over the narration of the main text, an exhaustive and intimate examination of how Jane Austen’s domestic circumstances influenced her writing. In a pleasant English accent, Redman details the minutiae of home life in Georgian England. Worsley argues that all of it shows up in Austen’s books, from the financial struggles that forced her to move houses many times to the expectations placed upon her as an unmarried aunt. It’s fascinating whether or not you’re a die-hard Austen fan, and listeners will want to revisit Austen’s works, equipped with new understanding. J.M.D. � AudioFile 2018