Situated in the vast assembly rooms, there was poetry in the setting of Lucy Worsley’s talk. You could almost imagine yourself attending one of the many balls from Jane Austen’s novels as you climbed the stairs into the ballroom and waited for our host to take the stage. Setting itself was vital to Worsley’s talk, as she took us on a guided tour sprinkled with funny anecdotes and tales of heartbreak of the many houses of Jane Austen. Using Jane’s homes as the focus for her talk, and the accompanying book Jane Austen at Home, was a stroke of genius from Worsley, as she walks us through the rooms of her childhood, adolescence, and untimely demise at 41. Jane comes alive, there was beauty in imagining where she slept and ate and wrote. Jane became accessible, as we squint to imagine her sitting down at her rickety writing table in Chawton Village to write Emma or Mansfield Park. Worsley established that Jane was at heart an introverted woman, and thus using her houses allowed a peek into the heart and brain of this private woman, who preferred, above all else, her own company.
Much like our host, who captivatingly dances across the stage in a bright red dress and zebra print shoes, welcoming us with a regency curtsey, Austen is brought to life as a woman of wit and charm, not the mere bored spinster she is so often assigned to. Worsley establishes Jane as the heroine in the novel of her life, she goes to balls, she accepts, and later rejects, proposals, she pokes fun at the husbands of friends and neighbours, and even has a love affair or two along the way. Whilst I have to ascertain that the debate regarding the virginal status of Jane felt somewhat misplaced, and probably would not have been conducted if Jane had been “John Austen,” many things about Jane’s life and the struggles she faced would have been different should she have been a man, and thus it is perhaps too late to be viewing her in a gender blind manner, as she was ultimately both a heroine and a victim of her gender.
Ultimately, Worsley paints an honest picture. Jane’s struggles and houses are far different from that of Pemberley, and she ultimately lived a life as the “poor relation.” Worsley prompts us to read Jane’s work with a new lens: behind the love affairs, there is political ammunition. Jane is appalled that women must consider anything other than love in marriage. As Worsley concludes by remarking that Jane was breaking down doors for Georgian women, changing the world for them, and us, in her “sneaky way,” I am left not only wanting to re-read all of Jane’s work, but read it with a new lens, the lens of a woman who was politically motivated, who strived and struggled, who changed both her immediate and wider world.
Illustration by Katya Roberts (@katyaillustrates)
