"Worsley offers us much that Austen''s admirers wish to know...with humor and poignancy and common sense, just as Austen would have wished." -Amy Bloom, New York Times Book Review
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
