Book review: Jane Austen at Home, by Lucy Worsley

Two hundred years after her death, Jane Austen still fascinates. Mary Leland surveys a new biography of the famous writer that reveals the financial struggles of the Austen family at the edges of Georgian gentility

“This fragmentary eggcup was among the archaeological finds from the site of Steventon Rectory, Hampshire. It’s not impossible that Jane Austen once used it to eat a boiled egg.”

IT’S not impossible either that one of Lucy Worsley’s editors at Hodder and Stoughton might have had the sense to delete this ridiculous caption to an image of what are indeed bits of an eggcup. Its inclusion in this otherwise frequently impressive biography suggests the difficulty of Worsley’s objective: how to revive a topic already plundered almost to extinction during the 200 years since the death of Jane Austen.