Recreating Jane Austen’s sense and sensibility

The genteel, industrious and sometimes painful country lifestyle observed and recorded by Jane Austen in her novels has come a little closer to being recreated in the 21^st-century.

The kitchen of her cottage in a Hampshire village in southern England, where many rooms are already open to the public, is to be restored, and her brother’s mansion at the other end of the village is embarking on two ventures: one in the house, one in the garden.

Chawton, near the ancient Hampshire city of Winchester, was Jane Austen’s home from 1809 until her death at the age of 41 in 1817. She and her mother and sister, who were both called Cassandra, were housed in an elegant but homely, three-storey house on the main road. It had once been an inn with an unruly reputation. Their benefactor was her brother Edward, who had been adopted as heir by the childless local landowner, and inherited, among other properties, a fine Elizabethan manor — Chawton House.

Edward lived at Chawton after the death of his wife and brought his mother and sisters to the village thereby, unwittingly, starting a small cottage industry dedicated to the novelist.

So it is that tourists can have lunch at Cassandra’s Cup or book for bed and breakfast at Darcy House. In doing so, they walk the quiet country roads that Austen knew, travelling on foot or in the donkey cart which is now restored at the cottage that was her home.

Every year 300,000 visitors make the pilgrimage to the cottage, but from this year the village will play host to other visitors: scholars and book-lovers coming to consult a remarkable library now established in Chawton House.

American businesswoman Sandy Lerner rescued Chawton House and its 111-hectare estate in 1993, and and brought to it her library of rare books. An English scholar herself, and a fan of Austen, she has collected works written, mostly by women, between 1600 and 1830 and it is these books, many of them first editions, that will be housed in the library at Chawton. The books include novels, often anonymous, household and etiquette manuals and diaries.

In opening her library to all, after ten years of planning and restoration, Lerner has also brought back to Chawton House the sort of literary discussions that would have taken place there in Edward’s time, as his knowledgeable sister devoured the fashionable books of the day. Readers will be able to sit in the windows where Austen sat and looked at the Arcadian landscape with rolling meadows.

Walkers will be encouraged to skirt the estate and enjoy the panorama. The discovery of Edward’s original garden designs has led to the replanting of some areas in the late 18^th-century style, using only species that would have been known then.

Many visitors to the village stop at St Nicholas Church, by the manor house, and see memorials to Edward’s adoptive family, the Knights — one of Austen’s best-loved heroes, in Emma, is called Knightley — and the tombs of her mother and sister. Austen herself is buried in Winchester Cathedral. Visitors will also head for the Austen ladies’ cottage, where the trustee is Tom Carpenter. His grandfather bought the property especially with a view to opening it to the public.

"In Jane Austen’s time there were comings and going all the time between the cottage and manor house," says Carpenter. Among the artefacts he shows are the table at which Austen wrote, a scrap of her handwriting, using every millimetre of space, and the patchwork quilt she designed and sewed.

‘We don’t have many of her things because she didn’t have many things,’ explains Carpenter. For a respectable woman of modest means life was simple and confined. Austen even wrote secretly, and a favourite story in Chawton is that she deliberately let an ill-fitting door squeak on its hinges, to warn her that she was about to be caught in the act of writing.

Plans to open a shop of souvenirs inspired by Austen memorabilia in one of the cottage’s outbuildings, and to restore the kitchen, will please visitors to Chawton who cannot get enough of their favourite writer. On the staff at Chawton House, Susie Grandfield smiles affectionately at the memory of two devoted Austen fans from Australia who reverently stroked a chair in the belief that their favourite novelist had sat there, although, in reality, it was a recent arrival.

— Guardian

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