Becoming Jane Austen at Chawton

Friday, March 27, 2009
Chawton, Hampshire

Rolling emerald meadows alive with trundling sheep. Masses of daffodils ablaze in the cool March sunshine. Thatched roofed cottages slumbering along hushed country roads. Serene churchyards filled with mossy gravestones whispering secrets about famous congregations. ...

The only images missing in this Hampshire idyll were swift phaetons drawn by sturdy horses, elegant ladies in elaborate bonnets and empire-line waists and gentlemen sporting ivory canes holding doors open for them.

Yes, this was the world of Jane Austen into which I ventured today together with my colleague Prof. Karen Karbeiner who took her students on a field trip in search of the author of Pride and Prejudice which they are reading for her course. Over the crowded streets of London we went by coach on a temperamental morning that was by turn cloudy, drizzly and sunny. Because we hadn't met for a long while (we have classes on different days this semester), we chatted nineteen to the dozen and caught up on all our individual projects since the semester began in January.

Since it took us a whole hour to get out of London and arrive in the Surrey town of Guildford, it took us another hour to finally arrive in Alton, Hampshire, where the many homes in which Jane Austen lived during her short life are scattered. To read the biography of Austen is to delve into the plots of all of her novels for she drew liberally from her own experiences when creating the characters and incidents that keep us spell bound and entirely charmed by her work. As the coach entered the little village, we saw the first thatched roof cottages that are characteristic of this area and my heart skipped a beat.

Once we tumbled out of the coach and made our way in a sudden drizzle to the 'Jane Austen Cottage'--the little home she shared with her mother and sister Cassandra after her father's death--we knew we had an exciting day ahead. As fans of Jane Austen, we have all read her novels and seen numerous TV and film versions of them. For almost all of us, the BBC version of Pride and Prejudice with Jennifer Erle and Colin Firth as Mr. Darcy is probably the favorite.

To enter Austen's modest cottage is to enter into her Regency world of class divisions and gender inequality--for poor Jane's mother and her children were left at the mercy of the male members of their family as they were forbidden from inheriting property under English Law of the time. We understood why Mrs. Bennet was so obsessed with getting her brood of five well-married to rich men and why this embarrased the senstive Elizabeth. It might so have pained Jane to know that she was beholden to her brother all her life as she never married herself. This came home to us in the lectures we received from the personnel who run the properties which were once associated with Austen's life and owned by her brother Edward Austen who, upon being adopted by their relatives, the Knights, changed his name to Edward Knight. It was Edward who permitted his mother and sisters to live in the cottage he inherited (by a sheer stroke of luck, akin to winning a modern-day lottery) rent-free for the rest of their lives.

The Cottage is notable for the little table (really tiny) and the chair in the parlor that are placed strategically by a window overlooking the street where, it is reported, Jane sat every morning and wrote. This home was incredibly fertile to her imagination for she wrote three of her novels in it. I understand this phenomenon, in a way, because ever since I came to live in this Holborn flat, I have been incredibly productive, churning out these blog entries night after night and doing other forms of academic writing as well. I really do believe that 'place' or 'space' if you like, has a good deal to do with creativity.

At any rate, our tour of the house took us to the upstairs rooms--all so cramped they often seemed like rooms in a doll's house. We saw the poignant letter that her beloved sister Cassandra wrote to their niece to inform her of her aunt's passing. We saw locks of Jane's hair as well as of her father upon whom she doted, many intricate brooches containing locks of hair of her loved ones skillfully plaited and set into the brooch frames--I have not seen this sort of 'jewelry' anywhere else and I found it remarkable indeed--both the sentiment behind the keeping of these trinkets as well as the craftsmanship required to fashion them. We saw the elegant silver teapot that belonged to Cassandra (I loved its unusual shape), the set of Wedgwood china purchased for the house by her brother (imprinted later with the family crest), a silk shawl Jane owned, the patchwork quilt on which she worked with her mother and sister for the bed, a bracelet she owned as well as two exquisite topaz crosses that her sailor brother Charles brought back for his sisters. The family closeness between parents and children and between the siblings was so strongly articulated by these museum pieces that they left me deeply moved. Unfortunately, Jane's bedroom was closed to the public and is scheduled to open up soon for the new tourist season.

As I roamed through these rooms in a world that seemed so far removed from my own present-day reality, I tried to put myself in Jane's shoes and imagine the tenor of her daily life. Outside, in the quiet lane leading to her brother's grand Chawton House, a lone car occasionally left the sounds of its passing wheels but it would have been on foot that Jane would often have strolled to see Edward and his family.

Right across Jane's cottage is one of the most beautiful 'tea rooms' to which I have been in England. Called Cassandra's Cup it was filled with porcelain tea cups that hung from hooks in the exposed beams of the ceiling (most of them gifted to the shop by passing patrons, I was told). As someone who has collected porcelain cups and saucers for almost twenty years and has a collection today that numbers in the hundreds, I was delighted by this space and took many pictures. The eatery had reserved one section only for our NYU group which overlooked the red brick facade and the dancing daffodils in the garden of Jane's Cottage. We sat there eating steaming bowls of soul and bread, toasted sandwiches, jacket potatoes and marmalade bread and butter pudding with vanilla ice-cream (which I was eating for the first time and really enjoyed) and tried to imagine the atmosphere of Alton when Jane lived there. Indeed little can have changed since the time Jane wrote about long summer walks in the sprawling countryside for so tucked-away is Alton that it seems hidden from the rest of Hampshire.

As the sun played hide and seek behind the clouds, we strolled along companionably to the Church of St. Nicholas--the sort of stone country church that we see in British films every time they want to shoot a wedding scene. It had all the ingredients of a film set--lovely flint stone walls, a wooden gate with peaked V-roof opening up to the path that leads to the church door, moss covered gravestones a-plenty and the kind of ambiance that immediately puts you into a past century. Aside from the interior of the church that had a fabulous timber ceiling and some great wood work, superb stained glass windows and hand embroidered needlepoint kneelers, we walked to the back towards the sanctuary where we saw the gravestones of Jane's mother and her sister who died within 18 years of each other. We realized how short were the lives of most people in that day and age and how much we take for granted the ease with which we live well into our 80s today.

From the church, it was only a short hop towards Chawton House whose beautiful flint stone exterior rose up to greet us like an old friend. I had learned at Lavenham about the scraping away of the stucco and plaster to expose these flint 'bones' of grand medieval baronial homes--and Chawton was no exception. But I was more enchanted by the sheer beauty of the landscape that surrounded us--the brilliant green expanses of meadow in which placid sheep roamed freely, the 'haha' or encircling ditch preventing them from venturing too close to the house but keeping them near enough as to appear appealing when viewed from the windows. In this typically "English Style" landscape, I was repeatedly reminded of the vision and handiwork of Lancelot 'Capability' Brown who made this gardening aesthetic fashionable in England. Later, as I roamed through the tiers and terraces of the garden landscaped in the style of Edwin Lutyens and Gertrude Jekyll with their abundance of English perennials in herbaceous borders--lavender was profuse as were roses and rosemary--I tried to imagine how splendid the place would be in the summer and how much I would love to linger in it. I am looking forward indeed to my week-long tour of England's most famous country homes, estates and gardens that I will be taking with my friend Delyse from Connecticut who joins me here in mid-May.

A scholar named Sally greeted us in the interior of the home and took us on a tour of Edward's unexpected goldmine--Chawton House. To enter Chawton House was to enter the more genteel world of glamorous dances, shopping sprees in Bath and seaside holidays in Lyme Regis. As Jane would have been a guest in her brother's grand mansion, she would probably not have ventured into the private parts of the home--the kitchen, for instance, where the multitude of servants would have served the family's every need with clockwork precision. She would have had audience with her brother and his family in one of the beautiful ground floor rooms with their lavish wood panelling, floor-length drapes, comfortable cushions and impressive mantelpieces. Sally gave us a short lecture on the history of Chawton House that has stood on its expansive lawns from the time of the Domesday Book in the Norman era, long long before it fell, quite by luck, into the possession of the Austen family.

I loved the broad sweeping wooden staircases that presented opportunity to function as a gallery for the display of oil portraits of all the Knights who have owned the house, each bringing their particular stamp to the interiors, none more forbidding than a Mrs. Knight who actually had the church bells of Saint Nicholas ring to announce her entry and exit from the home! We saw the covered Long Gallery in which the ladies took their exercise on rainy days and the opulent dinging room with its carved wooden mantelpiece and table at which Jane Austen most certainly would have sat and consumed meals that would have been presented by a bevy of wait staff. In a tiny alcove that I found particularly evocative of her talent and temperament was a chair in which, it is rumored, she often sat and wrote, and as I took my seat in it, I could imagine her benign presence looking indulgently over my shoulder.

In the huge kitchen, we saw a 200 year old farm house table, so well used that the iron framework in its skeleton is exposed today. Gleaming cooper pots and pans and an antique Flavel stove top (the Aga of a previous generation) greeted us warmly as we took our seats and listened with rapt attention to Sally's wonderful commentary. The best part of Chawton House is that it is not a museum and every single room may be used by visitors today, every chair and sofa might be sat on and every accessory touched and examined. How bemused Jane would have been to know what a literary celebrity she has become and that the homes, even distantly associated with her persona, have become places of pilgrimage for her adoring fans.

It was the library, however, that was the piece de resistance of our trip for it took us into the heart of Chawton and is today a working library in which scholars actually examine the leather-bound first editions of women's writing from 1300 till 1830 that were collected by an American named Sandy Lerner. When she got to know about Chawton House through the Jane Austen Society of North America, she bequeathed her entire invaluable collection to the house. Placed on the shelves of the library today, they are not only a time capsule of the kind of writing to which Jane Austen would have had access and by which she might have been inspired, but they allow the present-day scholar to delve deeply into the hidden recesses of knowledge by personally handling novels that the Victorians might have touched. In a superbly controlled micro-climate that regulates UV rays, room temperature and humidity levels, the books are held in veneration for the coming generations. Both Karen and I thought that we ought to create a project that will bring us to this library to do some research really soon!

The walk that followed in the garden is one I know I will not easily forget. It is superbly maintained and when we reached the potager and vegetable garden behind its high brick walls--how I love these garden 'rooms' created by the addition of walls and wrought-iron gates on these meandering estates, I was reminded of my own garden at home in Southport which will slowly be returning to life now that Spring is around the corner in New England. Later, Karen and I strolled in the 'wilderness'--the deliberately planted area of the estate in which trees and flowering shrubs formed an alle that allowed the residents of such grand homes to pretend as if they were walking in the wilds of Nature--all of which was still very carefully controlled.

Indeed to tour Chawton House today is to glean lessons not only on the life of Jame Austen or the roles played by such baronial manors in country life (I was repeatedly reminded of Audrey Forbes-Hamilton in To The Manor Born) but to understand the workings of an English garden, the role it played in the daily lives of people, the privilege and responsibilities of land owners as they lorded it over their estates and servants (nobless oblige)and the manner in which gardening and landscaping techniques are passed from one generation to the next as such charming aspects of English culture are preserved.

Having visited the Jane Austen Center in Bath when I first arrived here in September and having walked through the many locations in which she walked in that grand Georgian city (the Royal Theater, the Assembly Rooms, the Royal Crescent, etc.) I feel fully steeped in the world of Austen. What's more, just a couple of weeks ago, I had traveled to Winchester where I had seen the last house in which she lived for just six weeks before she died and her grave stone and memorial in Winchester Cathedral in which she lies buried. Every single one of these tours have allowed me to follow Jane Austen through the most significant phases of her life and to gain insights into the world she inhabited with all its ups and downs, all its triumphs and disasters, all its color and flavor.

When I got back home and before I fell asleep, I kept thinking of the world into which I had strayed today, the opportunity I was provided to lose myself in an era that is most appealing to me and in which I had always thought I would feel very much at-home (provided, I know, I had the comfort of upper class position and prestige) and the lessons I learned about the private life of one of English Literature's most revered writers.

I hugged to myself the knowledge that in less than 24 hours Llew will be here with me and that together we will share the two coming weeks. That happy thought put me to bed after I had eaten a pizza dinner and made the disappointing disovery that my DVD player is no longer working. Ah, it will be good to have a man around tomorrow to take a look at this and, hopefully, set it right.