From prize-winning historical novelist Louise Allen, this book presents nine walks through both the London Jane Austen knew and the London of her novels! Follow in Jane's footsteps to her publisher's doorstep and the Prince Regent's vanished palace, see where she stayed when she was correcting proofs of Sense and Sensibility and accompany her on a shopping expedition – and afterwards to the theatre. In modern London the walker can still visit the church where Lydia Bennett married Wickham, stroll with Elinor Dashwood in Kensington Palace Gardens or imagine they follow Jane's naval officer brothers as they stride down Whitehall to the Admiralty. From well-known landmarks to hidden corners, these walks reveal a lost London that can still come alive in vivid detail for the curious visitor, who will discover eighteenth-century chop houses, elegant squares, sinister prisons, bustling city streets and exclusive gentlemen's clubs amongst innumerable other Austen-esque delights.
Jane Austen in Bath: Walking Tours of the Writer’s City is a beautifully illustrated book organized into four walking tours around the city of Bath–where she set both Northanger Abbey and Persuasion–two novels that mirrored her own experience: that of an impressionable, optimistic young girl hoping to meet the man she would marry and later, that of a mature woman disappointed in love. It was in Bath that many of Austen’s own romantic adventures and misadventures occurred, and this book artfully weaves together the story of Austen’s life there with those of her beloved characters. This guidebook describes the places frequented by Austen and her characters. Readers can stroll along the shady, tree-lined walk where Anne Elliot met Captain Wentworth after he returned from seven years at sea, and visit the galleries that hosted the glittering balls where the impressionable young Catherine Moreland made her debut. Bath is an exquisite, perfectly preserved Georgian town located in the stunning countryside just an hour and a half from London. It was a spa town in Austen’s day and still is. The streets, crescents, gardens, and buildings look almost exactly the same as they did then. Many of the places that she frequented are still there–visitors can still buy the traditional Sally Lunn rolls at the same bakery/caf? that Austen frequented; enter the famous Pump Rooms and Assembly Rooms where she drank the waters, gossiped, and danced; stroll the unique Georgian crescents and pleasure gardens where she enjoyed fireworks and lavish public breakfasts; and see the homes Austen and her family lived in, some of which are now open to the public. Jane Austen in Bath is the perfect companion to discovering the vibrant and fashionable social scene of Bath during both Austen’s time and today.
A New Statesman Book of the Year London. A city apart. Inimitable. Or so it once seemed. Spiralling from the outer limits of the Overground to the pinnacle of the Shard, Iain Sinclair encounters a metropolis stretched beyond recognition. The vestiges of secret tunnels, the ghosts of saints and lost poets lie buried by developments, the cycling revolution and Brexit. An electrifying final odyssey, The Last London is an unforgettable vision of the Big Smoke before it disappears into the air of memory.
From prize-winning historical novelist Louise Allen, this book presents nine walks through both the London Jane Austen knew and the London of her novels! Follow in Jane's footsteps to her publisher's doorstep and the Prince Regent's vanished palace, see where she stayed when she was correcting proofs of Sense and Sensibility and accompany her on a shopping expedition – and afterwards to the theatre. In modern London the walker can still visit the church where Lydia Bennett married Wickham, stroll with Elinor Dashwood in Kensington Palace Gardens or imagine they follow Jane's naval officer brothers as they stride down Whitehall to the Admiralty. From well-known landmarks to hidden corners, these walks reveal a lost London that can still come alive in vivid detail for the curious visitor, who will discover eighteenth-century chop houses, elegant squares, sinister prisons, bustling city streets and exclusive gentlemen's clubs amongst innumerable other Austen-esque delights.
Walk in Jane Austen's footsteps with this unique travel guide - the first book to explore England in relation to its most beloved Regency author. Rambling across the rolling fields of Hampshire, along the bustling streets of London and around the golden crescents of Bath, Jane Austen's England is the perfect companion for any Janeite planning a pilgrimage. Functionally arranged by region, each chapter tracks down the most iconic scenes from both the big and little screen, as well as the key destinations where Jane lived, danced and wrote.
Jane Was Here is a whimsical, illustrated guide to Jane Austen's England - from the settings in her novels and the scenes in the wildly popular television and film adaptations, to her homes and other important locations throughout her own life. Discover the stately homes of Basildon Park and Ham House and the lush landscapes of Stourhead and Stanage Edge. Tread in Jane's footsteps as you explore her school in the old gatehouse of the ruined Reading Abbey; her perfectly-preserved home in her Chawton cottage, where she spent the last eight years of her life; or her final resting place in Winchester Cathedral. Whether you want to take this book as your well-thumbed guide on a real Austenian pilgrimage of your own, or experience the journey from the comfort of your own living room, Jane Was Here will take you - with a tone as wry as Jane's itself - on an enchanting adventure through the ups and downs of the world of Jane Austen.
London: An Illustrated Literary Companion, compiled by Rosemary Gray, captures the varying moods of the great city over recent centuries, through diary entries, with quotations, poems, essays and extracts from great works written in its honour. It is beautifully illustrated with drawings and engravings from distinguished artists, including Gustave Doré, George Cruikshank, James McNeill Whistler and Hugh Thomson, and contains contemporary prints and photographs. Designed to appeal to the booklover, the Macmillan Collector's Library is a series of beautiful gift editions of much loved classic titles. Macmillan Collector's Library are books to love and treasure.
This exhilarating collection of essays is the product of a lifetime's engagement with Jane Austen's writing. They are modest, searching, wonderfully perceptive essays from which all lovers of Jane Austen, the most knowledgeable as well as those who have just discovered her, will have much to learn. They are essays that send us back to the novels with a renewed understanding of Jane Austen's extraordinary achievement. Prof. Richard Cronin, University of Glasgow This volume presents an exhilarating and insightful collection of essays on Jane Austen – distilling the author’s deep understanding and appreciation of Austen’s works across a lifetime. The volume is both intra- and inter-textual in focus, ranging from perceptive analysis of individual scenes to the exploration of motifs across Austen’s fiction. Full of astute connections, these lively discussions hinge on the study of human behaviour – from family relationships to sickness and hypochondria – highlighting Austen’s artful literary techniques and her powers of human observation. Jane Austen: Reflections of a Reader by (the late) Nora Bartlett is a brilliant contribution to the field of Jane Austen studies, both in its accessible style (which preserves the oral register of the original lectures), and in its foregrounding of the reader in a warm, compelling and incisive conversation about Austen’s works. As such, it will appeal widely to all lovers of Jane Austen, whether first-time readers, students or scholars.
One of The Globe and Mail's Best Books of 2020 "A thoroughly authentic, smart and consoling account of one writer’s commitment to another." --The New York Times Book Review (editors' choice) "An absolutely fascinating book: I will never read Austen the same way again." —Helen Macdonald, author of H is for Hawk An astonishingly nuanced reading of Jane Austen that yields a rare understanding of how to live "About seven years ago, not too long before our daughter was born, and a year before my father died, Jane Austen became my only author." In the turbulent period around the birth of her first child and the death of her father, Rachel Cohen turned to Jane Austen to make sense of her new reality. For Cohen, simultaneously grief-stricken and buoyed by the birth of her daughter, reading Austen became her refuge and her ballast. She was able to reckon with difficult questions about mourning, memorializing, living in a household, paying attention to the world, reading, writing, and imagining through Austen’s novels. Austen Years is a deeply felt and sensitive examination of a writer’s relationship to reading, and to her own family, winding together memoir, criticism, and biographical and historical material about Austen herself. And like the sequence of Austen’s novels, the scope of Austen Years widens successively, with each chapter following one of Austen's novels. We begin with Cohen in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where she raises her small children and contemplates her father’s last letter, a moment paired with the grief of Sense and Sensibility and the social bonds of Pride and Prejudice. Later, moving with her family to Chicago, Cohen grapples with her growing children, teaching, and her father’s legacy, all refracted through the denser, more complex Mansfield Park and Emma. With unusual depth and fresh insight into Austen’s life and literature, and guided by Austen’s mournful and hopeful final novel, Persuasion, Rachel Cohen’s Austen Years is a rare memoir of mourning and transcendence, a love letter to a literary master, and a powerful consideration of the odd process that merges our interior experiences with the world at large.
