Jane Was Here by Nicole Jacobsen, Devynn Dayton & Lexi K Nilson

My review

3/5 stars

I was drawn to this book for two reasons...

1. Jane Austen. I'm a sucker for anything Austen-related.
2. The cover illustrations looked fun.

I was very pleased to see the illustrations continued throughout the book and were featured heavily. They were genuinely my favourite part of the book.

The content of the book was a real whistlestop tour of places that Austen has ties to. I appreciated the mix of places - some were places that Jane herself had visited or lived in, others were filming locations for some of the modern adaptations of her stories. This mix gave a very well-rounded view of how Jane Austen has impacted Britain's culture as a whole, rather than just focusing on life as it was for her 200 years ago. My bugbear with the content is that it was clearly designed to entice you to visit those places, rather than providing any enhanced level of information about the places. The book could have been so much more than it was in terms of deepening the readers' understanding of Jane's impact on the places mentioned, instead I got the impression that the author's themselves hadn't actually visited all of these places, but rather had Googled a wishlist of places and then illustrated around what they found.

The book featured some really great random inserts that weren't necessarily tied into the guidebook-style theme of the book. I particularly enjoyed the pages about dressing for the Regency era and examples of ballroom conversation - they felt intentional and added a deeper sense of the time to an otherwise surface-level book. However, there were also some insert pages that felt out-of-place and non-sensical given the topic of the book, such as the ones on types of tea and dogs.

Fun and lovely to look at, but not much substance behind the pretty pictures for anyone who is already familiar with Austen and her works.

Book blurb

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.

More...

You can buy the book here now. It was published by Hardie Grant Books.