Tom Keymer - Jane Austen: Writing, Society, Politics

Quotations from Jane Austens writings are taken from the following editions, all of which (except Deirdre Le Fayes edition of the letters) appear in the Oxford Worlds Classics series. References to the novels are supplied parenthetically in the text by volume and chapter number; letters are cited by date. For other sources quoted below, see the References section at the end of the volume.

There are two big draws for visitors to Chawton, the Hampshire village where Jane Austen lived and wrote during the years when, if we count the immediately posthumous works, her six major novels were first published. By far the grander of the two is Chawton House, an Elizabethan manor where the unmarried, impecunious Austen was a welcome though fairly low-status guest: not quite hapless Miss Bates when she visits the Highbury elite in Emma, but in terms of social hierarchy its not an irrelevant comparison. Chawton House was owned by Austens brother Edward Knight, a wealthy manwealthier than loaded, landed Mr Darcy in Pride and Prejudicewho had been adopted as an heir by rich cousins and mainly lived at Godmersham, Kent, on an even more desirable estate. The manor is now a charitable trust first established in the 1990s by Sandy Lerner, a serial entrepreneurCisco Systems, Urban Decay Cosmeticsand Austen devotee or Janeite (a term popularized by Kiplings 1924 story about cultish novel-readers during the First World War). Media personalities and bestselling authors sometimes show up, and celebrity actors with Austen roles in their back catalogues.

Then theres the beautiful if far more modest housea very snug little cottage, as Mrs Dashwood puts it with resignation in Sense and Sensibility