Jane Austen At Home by Lucy Worsley

"The Austens ‘were not rich’, yet they lived among rich people, landed squires and well-educated clergymen.  They belonged to what’s been called the ‘pseudo-gentry’, aspiring to a genteel lifestyle without having quite enough cash to pay for it. Members of the ‘pseudo-gentry’ did not own land, but were still ‘gentry of a sort, primarily because they sought strenuously to be taken for gentry’.They thought of themselves as being above ‘the middling sort’, who were connected with trade and enterprise, and, ironically, often richer than the Austens" - Lucy Worsley, Jane Austen At Home

I am a little late for Jane Austen July but I am so glad I have  gotten around to reading Jane Austen at Home (2017) by Lucy Worsley.  And thank you Cath at Read-warbler for recommending this Austen biography which I found excellent and please check out Read-warbler linked under Blogs I Follow.

Jane Austen At Home is not a very long book but I agree with Cath it's densely written and so it's not a book to be read in a day or two.  But it's a fascinating read.  Lucy Worsley is a historian and she has done her research on the Austen family and what life was like in Georgian, England and the political events that were happening during Jane's life: The French Revolution and The Napoleanic Wars.  Jane's brothers were officers in the British Navy and so they set sail for distant lands.

Jane Austen in comparison never travelled very far from where she was born in Steventon, Hampshire.  But Jane, her sister Cassandra and their mother Cassandra Leigh lived in quite a number of different homes during their lives particularly after their father passed away.  Jane's brothers helped out financially but they had families of their own to look after.  And so the three Austen women were living in increasingly diminished circumstances.  Not in poverty but money was definitely tight and a cause for worry.  

There is so much of interest in this book, so much I didn't know and I won't go into too much detail.  But I would like to mention Jane Austen's father, George Austen.  He did not have an easy childhood but George Austen worked hard and became a parson.  He also enjoyed reading novels and he bought Jane her first writing desk and as Lucy Worsley tells us:

"It was Mr Austen who took practical action to get his daughter’s work published ... He wrote, on 1 November 1797, to offer First Impressions (Pride and Prejudice) to a publisher named Thomas Cadell, asking him what sum his firm might advance for it, and indeed asking what the price would be for it to be published ... This was generous. Mr Austen was proposing an arrangement where he himself would pay for the printing of his daughter’s novel. If it didn’t sell, he would bear the loss. Just as Mr Austen had written endlessly to admirals on behalf of his naval sons, he also did his best by his younger girl". 

I really enjoyed Jane Austen At Home.  Lucy Worsley writes very well.  And with the new information I now have about Jane Austen and the times in which she lived I am inspired to reread a few of Austen's classics with a new perspective.