The Worlds of Jane Austen by Helena Kelly

The Worlds of Jane Austen: The Influences & Inspiration Behind The Novels by Helena Kelly (Quarto, 2025)

When this blog first started, well over a decade ago, blogs were hot stuff, and within a year or so of regularly sharing my ill-informed and (back then) sometimes quite reactionary opinions¹ about and around the books I was reading, I started getting sent lots of free books to read.

This was, really, the boom times for English indie fiction, with small presses suddenly having titles appearing in the longlists and shortlists of major literary prizes. Keen for attention – and aware of that adage about “the only thing worse than being talked about” – I’d regularly receive jiffy bags² packed with gorgeous fucking literature, or (occasionally) dry, underwhelming books with slick graphic design.

This continued for a few years, with my blog getting nominated for Sabotage Awards³ and then, from 2015 for a few years, I had a stint as the resident book reviewer for the literary magazine Open Pen⁴.

As time went on, my blunt willingness to dismiss and insult the books I didn’t enjoy, or to offer direct criticism of things I thought were mediocre, gave me a clear USP: the only “literary lifestyle blogger” who doesn’t think that “books” are an inherent good thing and that all of them deserve love and praise.

This does mean, though, that – as book marketing budgets shrank and the willingness to court opinions that weren’t bluntly gushing became less fashionable – the free books slowly dried up. And also I moved to Toronto, and a lot of the small publishers didn’t have the budget for international postage. 

Now, back in London, I get books again.

The vast majority I’m offered are self-published books, some of which, sure, are fine to good, but others are borderline unreadable.

Occasionally, though, I do get books from good, newer, indie presses. And then when I read them I realise what it is I love about literature and books more generally. The last book I posted about, Every Time We Say Goodbye, was a free copy (and that was fucking brilliant) and this one, The Worlds of Jane Austen: The Influences & Inspiration Behind The Novels by Helena Kelly, was one, too. And I thoroughly enjoyed this, too.

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The Worlds of Jane Austen: The Influences & Inspiration Behind The Novels by Helena Kelly is published by Octavo, who specialise in beautifully presented hardback books. You could call them coffee table books (for a small coffee table) or toilet books (for a big toilet), but both of these terms would be dismissive and unkind.

These – they also published the very enjoyable book Forgotten Churchs I read a few months ago – are well written, beautifully presented books that are physically attractive items that work well being flicked through mid-coffee or toilet, but also have a lot to offer to a reader approaching them as “real” books.

This one was, truly, a deeply enjoyable read.

To summarise, The Worlds of Jane Austen is a 200 page biography of Jane Austen, focusing on personal and sociocultural contexts, incorporating lots of illustrations, historic images, diagrams, texts and portraiture.

Each chapter focuses on a loose element of Austen’s relatively short life, or at least the wider currents of her time – there are sections on City life, countryside life, on spa towns, on seaside resorts, on the ways that aristocratic estates were managed and run, on enclosure acts, on popular culture, travelling libraries, on increasing transportation infrastructure, on the Empire and trade, on slavery, on war, on food, on relationships, on governance, on literacy and then, of course, on the long and ever-increasing legacy of Jane Austen.

For someone who’s super interested in and knowledgable on Jane Austen, maybe this book is only really retreading information and details that are explored elsewhere in more depth, and maybe the sidebar biographies of friends, rivals, family members and other significant people would offer nothing new to someone who’d read the same source texts as Helena Kelly. Certainly, in this regard, the bibliography at the book’s end isn’t huge. It’s not tiny – this isn’t literary biography by way of Wikipedia and nothing else – but as someone who is not coming to this book having read a plethora of books about Jane Austen’s life, for me it was very informative and, in its digressive elements, very engaging!

I loved the swings from sentences about places Austen visited, or ideas she wrote about (in fiction or personal correspondence) that then segues into a few paragraphs on a similar, more general theme…

This is popular history of the turn of the 19th century masquerading as a biography of Jane Austen, perhaps… Or it’s offering something more complex than that, it’s offering a far more in-depth description of a time and a period that’s been out of living memory for almost a century and a half.

For me, it has absolutely lit a fire under me to go back and re-read the Austens that I read in the midst of tens of other books as an undergraduate, and read the ones that I never made it to. I’ve got copies of them somewhere, of course, though where, I have no idea…

If the book is meant to be engaging, informative and entertaining as literary biography, as accessible history, as something that makes you want to tear your bookshelves apart looking for the paperback copy of Persuasion you’re sure is there somewhere, then it absolutely succeeds on all fronts.

I stayed up way past my bedtime, somehow, reading the charming, engaging final piece about the contemporary way in which Austen fills multiple sociocultural roles.

The whole thing has a conversational energy to it that manages to never become patronising nor unimformative.

For a book to touch on so many topics – industry, agriculture, class, immigration, medical history, infrastructure, road systems, international trade, libraries, estate management, legacy-buiding, the modern TV industry, setting up of museums, y’know – and still manage to hold a reader’s attention, I think is a sign of something high quality. 

Normally when someone sends me a book to review, my low self-esteem leads me to presume it must be bad, otherwise they’d be getting someone better than me to comment on it. And, yes, maybe sometimes that is the case (lol), but sometimes I get a free, new, book to read that does exactly what it’s trying to do.

Maybe, yes, little to offer to someone looking for an academic study, but to anyone with a general interest in literary/European history who likes beautiful books that are well put-together, then it’s a win-fucking-win.

Thank you, Quarto books!

More info via this link. 

1. It was the early 2010s and austerity was HOT. ↩︎
2. Is that the right word? Insulated envelopes is what I mean ↩︎
3. A literary award scheme that seems to be on indefinite hiatus ↩︎
4. Also on an indefinite hiatus, it seems, though one that I’ve heard is due to come to a close soon! ↩︎