Search results for ""Author Helen Amy""

Jane and Cassandra Austen were the closest of sisters from early childhood. Cassandra was the most important person in Jane’s life; Jane looked up to and adored her older sister, who was devoted to her in return. As well as sharing the same education, interests, friends and Christian faith, the inseparable sisters supported each other through various emotional crises and family troubles. Most importantly, Cassandra, who was privy to Jane’s imaginary world, supported and encouraged her in her writing. The Austen Girls explores the lives of the Austen sisters and traces their relationship throughout Jane’s life and literary career, until Jane’s premature death at the age of forty-one. It also looks at Cassandra’s life after the loss of her sister. ‘I Jane Austen of the Parish of Chawton do … give and bequeath to my dearest Sister Cassandra Elizabeth every thing of which I may die possessed, or which may be hereafter due to me… I appoint my said dear Sister the Executrix of this my last Will & Testament.’ Jane Austen, 27 April 1817. The bequest included the manuscripts of Jane’s unpublished and unfinished novels.

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Everyday Life in Victorian London explores the daily lives of adults and children, aristocracy and middle classes, working poor and the ‘submerged tenth’ underclass. It shows the different faces of London, with its many extremes and contrasts – by day and by night; busy and peaceful; ugly and beautiful; safe and dangerous. It looks at the River Thames and its importance; the City, West and East Ends; at work, leisure, health, hospitals, education, food, clothes, housing, shops and markets, transport and infrastructure, public services, crime, the police and prisons, immigrant communities, and important events such as the Great Exhibition of 1851 and Queen Victoria’s golden and diamond jubilees. Daily life in the capital will be explored at three levels – above ground (views from hot air balloons), at ground level, and below ground (the sewage system, the underground railway and cemeteries). A central theme is the rapid growth in population throughout the century due to immigration from the countryside and abroad, and the resulting expansion into ‘The Monster City’. The final chapter describes London at the end of the century with improved transport, a newly embanked Thames, a sewage system, housing for the poor, public buildings, hospitals and prisons – a transformed capital of a great empire and the embryo of the London we know today.

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How was Elizabeth Bennett expected to respond to Mr Darcy’s gauche advances? How was a mother meant to present her daughter to society for the first time? It is a truth universally acknowledged that a single man, even these days (if reasonably educated), recognises the beginning of that quotation! A strict code of conduct governed courtship and marriage in Regency England during the period in which Jane Austen’s novels were set, broadly 1796 to 1816. Young, genteel women had to learn and adhere to these rules. What was a girl to do? How should a mother direct her eligible (or not so eligible) daughter? Many turned to the etiquette manuals made available by a burgeoning publishing industry. Published to coincide with the bicentenary of the death of Jane Austen, The Jane Austen Marriage Manual draws from this pool of early ‘how-to’ popular literature, read by Jane and her contemporaries (and actually referred to in her novels), as well as Jane’s own experiences. It traces the many stages of courtship and its potential pitfalls, from a girl’s first entry into society through to her wedding day and beyond.

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The society in which Jane Austen lived and set her novels was a patriarchal one. Men ran the country nationally and locally, and had professional or business careers. Women were relegated to the subservient roles of wife, mother and housekeeper.What was it like to be a man in late Georgian and Regency England? How did Jane Austen, who lived in a predominantly male household, portray her male characters? How much inspiration did she draw from real men?This book explores the lives of the men in Jane's life, her relationship with them, how typical they were of men of their time and the impact they had on her life and writing. It also shows, through an in-depth look at the male characters in the novels, how men and women related to each other in society and how men maintained their dominant position.

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Jane Austen is one of England’s greatest and best-loved novelists, whose works are still widely read and enjoyed nearly two hundred years after her death. Memories of Jane were increasingly recorded as her reputation and fame grew in the nineteenth century. This is the life of Jane in the words of the people who knew her; it provides a fascinating insight into her life as a member of a close, loving family and her works as a novelist. The Jane Austen Files brings these memories, in the form of family diaries and memoirs by her nearest and dearest relatives, as well as all of Jane’s own letters, together in one volume. This book also opens a window on to the England in which Jane Austen lived, and lovingly set her novels.

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Many poor and vulnerable people lived on the streets of Victorian cities. They were the victims of rapid industrialisation, a government policy of non-intervention regarding social issues and the harsh Poor Law Amendment of 1834. As the population of nineteenth century England was predominantly young, a large number of this group were children. The street children of Victorian London were a very visible, alarming and embarrassing presence in the capital of the world's richest and most advanced industrial nation. Against the backdrop of London's transformation into a grand imperial capital, and drawing on the writing of social investigative journalists, this book tells the story of the often grim and relentless lives of these children and their battle to survive in a brutal environment. It describes how they were helped by charities, philanthropists and church missions until the government was compelled to take action to rescue them and deal with the problem they posed.

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Jane Austen wrote about the English gentry class in the late Georgian and Regency periods (1796–1816). Her novels follow her heroines’ quests for true love and fulfilment in English society during a period of great upheaval. But how accurate were Jane Austen’s depictions of life in England? Was marriage really the only ambition for women at that time? Were all men as dominant and powerful as Sir Thomas Bertram in Mansfield Park? Was London really as corrupt and immoral a place as that book suggested? What was it like to live in a society governed by strict codes of etiquette and conduct? Helen Amy draws on Austen’s life and works, traces her travels around the country and features places of significance to her whilst also examining English society’s apparent obsessions with fashion, entertainments, courtship and manners. Jane Austen’s England features chapters on London, Bath, Cheltenham, Winchester, Steventon, Chawton, Portsmouth, Southampton, Lyme Regis, Brighton and Worthing together with the grand country houses, such as Godmersham House, The Vyne and Stoneleigh Abbey, which inspired Austen’s fictional houses. Helen Amy opens a window onto this fascinating period of history, examining the places and culture of the times, with over 130 superb period illustrations and colour photographs.

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