Austen Jane - Jane Austens names : riddles, persons, places

Many friends contributed to this project. I am grateful to fellow scholars, especially Julia Douthwaite, Laura Haigwood, Jocelyn Harris, Jayne Lewis, Robert Mack, Roger Moore, Peter Sabor, and Douglas Murray for cheering the work on generally and for supplying information on particulars. Doug Murrays unpublished essay on Box Hill has been extremely useful, as has Roger Moores consideration of General Tilneys abbey. Roger Short supplied an unusual reference. Janine Barchas most kindly sent me copies of her articles prefiguring her important Matters of Fact. I am particularly grateful to Deidre Lynch and Claudia Johnson who read the manuscript in earlier stages and made helpful suggestions. Gratitude goes to Claudia for remarkable insights over the years, and for continuing discussions and engagement with Austens life and works.

Debts extend over time and space. I am grateful to David and Marilyn Butler for friendship over decades, with fond recollections of the house in Woodstock Road, and conversations with Marilyn on Edgeworth, Burney, and Austen. Jane Hurst of the Curtis Museum in Alton, Hampshire, most generously supplied her detailed knowledge of Alton and of the Austens life in the Chawton region, making the past present. The late Henry Rice, descendant of Edward Austen, and his wife Anne have supplied me with deep and wide-ranging knowledge of Austens family and their connections and environment. I am grateful to Sandy Lerner and to all at the Chawton Library for its resources and for the excellent conference in July 2013. My thanks to staff at the British Library, the Bodleian Library, the Ashmolean Museum, and the National Portrait Gallery, London. Thanks are also due to Sara Weber of Special Collections at the Hesburgh Libraries, University of Notre Dame.

Emphatically grateful expressions are owed to Kurt Milberger, efficient assistant extraordinary, who patiently acquainted himself with the entire manuscript in various phases and brought new zeal to the hunt for the artworks.

This is my opportunity to say thank you to Alan Thomas, editorial director at the University of Chicago Press, for believing in the book. I am also grateful to Randolph Petilos for patient work with the manuscript and for answering numerous inquiries.

All who teach will know how sincerely I mean it when I offer heartfelt thanks to my students in the class Jane Austen and Her World. Their eyes bring fresh enlightenment, and their new insights persuade me that Austen is inexhaustible.