In these however she lightens her erudition with simpering innuendo and sadly indulges some of that characteristic here. They have also generated an enormous and largely enthusiastic genre of critical appraisal and literary and biographical scholarship as well as a number of other novels such as PD James’s Death Comes to Pemberly (2011) and Jo Baker’s Longbourn (2013) - both imaginatively affiliated to Pride and Prejudice.Īs Chief Curator of the Historic Royal Palaces, Lucy Worsley is a popular historian and writer well known for her television programmes on aspects of British history. These, along with the novella Lady Susan, have moved beyond the page into cinema and television and other areas of popular culture. She left about £70 in cash and, among other manuscripts and draughts, six completed novels Pride and Prejudice, Sense and Sensibility, Emma, Mansfield Park, Persuasion, and Northanger Abbey. She was buried in Winchester Cathedral, having moved to that city in order to be close to a doctor thought, wrongly, to be able to identify and cure a lingering illness which to this day resists accurate diagnosis. Coming from cautious publishers through the help of Austen’s brother Henry, every penny of that money was badly needed.īorn as the seventh child in the family of the Rev George Austen and his wife Cassandra at Steventon Rectory in 1775, Jane Austen died unmarried in 1817. Her extensive research, extending even to printing methods of the period, evokes a retrospective sympathy for a woman whose genius was obscured by domestic and social circumstances and who, despite her posthumous fame, earned only a total of £650 from her books during her lifetime. But if there is one standard defining measurement of any new study on Austen’s life and work - does it send the reader back to the novels? - Worsley passes that test.

Lucy worsley austen