Constance Hill - Jane Austen: Her Homes and Her Friends

Jane Austen

Her Home & Her Friends

Constance Hill

With Illustrations by Ellen G. Hill

O n a sunny September morning more than a century ago, a horse and buggy bearing two sisters wound its way past green pastures and wooded hills to the narrow streets of a Hampshire village. Constance and Ellen Hill, a pair of passionate admirers of Jane Austen, sat prepared to take the first steps in retracing the life of their idol. This charmingly written and illustrated account of their literary pilgrimage begins in Steventon, Jane Austens birthplace, and extends to Bath, Lyme, Southampton, London, and elsewhere before concluding at the authors burial place in Winchester Cathedral. Along the way, it offers insights into the connections between the authors experiences and those of the characters in her novels.

Constance and Ellen Hill were given access to manuscripts of Austens letters, unpublished family memoirs, and notebooks containing the Minor Works, as well as the loan of family portraits, pictures, and contemporary sketches. Their fascinating glimpse of Austens world, originally published in 1902, abounds in the same enthusiasm that draws Janeites to the author. The more intimate their knowledge of her character becomes, the Preface promises readers, the more must they admire and love her rare spirit.

Jane

Austen

Her Homes & Her Friends

Jane austen

Jane

Austen

Her Homes & Her Friends

Constance Hill

Illustrated by

Ellen G. Hill

Dover Publications, Inc.

Mineola, new york

Bibliographical Note

This Dover edition, first published in 2018, is an unabridged republication of the edition first published by John Lane, The Bodley Head Limited, London, in 1923.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Hill, Constance, 1844?1929, author. | Hill, Ellen G., illustrator.

Title: Jane Austen : her homes and her friends / Constance Hill; illustrated by Ellen G. Hill.

Description: Mineola, New York : Dover Publications, Inc., 2018.

Identifiers: LCCN 2018021342 | ISBN 9780486826769 | ISBN 0486826767

Subjects: LCSH: Austen, Jane, 17751817Homes and haunts. | Austen, Jane, 17751817Friends and associates. | Novelists, EnglishHomes and hauntsEngland. | Novelists, English19th centuryBiography.| EnglandIntellectual life19th century. | Literary landmarkEngland.

Classification: LCC PR4036 .H5 2018 | DDC 823/.7 [BJdc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018021342

Manufactured in the United States by LSC Communications

82676701 2018

www.doverpublications.com

PREFACE TO THIRD EDITION

IN introducing a third edition of this work to the public, it is a satisfaction to reflect that since its first appearance, followed by other works by other authors on the same subject, the love and appreciation of Jane Austens writings have spread wider and wider throughout the English-speaking world.

On the centenary of Miss Austens death, which occurred on July 18th, 1917, an interesting little ceremony took place at Chawton, Hants, where a Tablet had been placed on the walls of Chawton Cottage, her last home, and whence all her works were sent into the world.

The Tablet of solid oak, designed by my sister, Miss E. G. Hill, suggests by its ornamentation subjects connected with the life of the authoress. Thus its framework represents that of a window in 4 Sydney Place, Bath, where the Austen family lived from 1801 till 1804, and the delicate, raised pattern that encircles the bronze plate bearing the inscription is copied from embroidery on a muslin scarf worked by Jane herself.

The inscription runs as follows :

JANE AUSTEN

lived here from 1809 to 1817

and hence all her works

were sent into the world.

Her admirers in this country

and in America have united

to erect this Tablet.

Such art as hers can never grow old.

Happy were those of us who were able to be present at the unveiling of the Tablet! Several members of the Austen family were there, including the present owner of Chawton House, a descendant of Janes brother Edward, who took the name of Knight.

We found the little parlour on the right-hand side of the entrance door gay with country flowers in honour of the day. There in that room were written Mansfield Park, Emma, and Persuasion, so that we, her grateful readers from far and near, were standing on the very spot where Jane sat at her little mahogany desk and brought into being the gentle Fanny Price, the spirited Emma, and the sweet Anne Elliot. The speeches were from the heart, and warm in appreciation of one who had bestowed upon us a perennial joy.

The subscriptions for the Memorial were so numerous and generous that after the expenses of the Tablet were defrayed there remained a goodly sum in our hands with which to benefit the village of Steventon, Miss Austens birthplace. Accordingly an excellent Young Peoples Library, bearing her name, was presented to that place, to which several publishers kindly contributed books.

I should like to close this short Preface with some words of Dr. Johnsons, peculiarly applicable to Jane Austen :

To be able to furnish pleasure that is harmless pleasure, pure and unalloyed, is as great a power as man can possess.

CONSTANCE HILL.

GROVE COTTAGE, FROGNAL, HAMPSTEAD.

March 1923.

PREFACE TO FIRST EDITION

IT has been remarked that in works of genius there is always something intangiblesomething that can be felt but that cannot be clearly defined something that eludes us when we attempt to put it into words. This intangible something this undefinable charmis felt by all Jane Austens admirers. It has exercised a sway of ever-increasing power over the writer and illustrator of these pages; constraining them to follow the author to all the places where she dwelt and inspiring them with a determination to find out all that could be known of her life and its surroundings.

Such a pilgrimage in the footprints of a favourite writer would, alas! in many cases lead to a sad disenchantment, but no such pain awaits those who follow Miss Austens gentle steps. The more intimate their knowledge of her character becomes the more must they admire and love her rare spirit and the more thorough must be their enjoyment in her racy humoura humour which makes everything she touches delightful, but which never degenerates into caricature nor into jestings which are not convenient. Elizabeth Bennet is speaking in the authors own person when she says to Darcy : I hope I never ridicule what is wise or good. Follies and nonsense, whims and inconsistencies do divert me, I own, and I laugh at them whenever I can. We read in a short memoir of Miss Austen written by her brother Henry, Though the frailties, foibles and follies of others could not escape her immediate detection, yet even on their vices did she never trust herself to comment with unkindness.... She always sought in the faults of others something to excuse, to forgive or forget.

Her own family were so much and the rest of the world so little to Jane Austen that it is in the centre of that family that we can best study her character and learn to recognise the influences which affected her as a writer. For she was not amongst those authors who have unveiled in their letters their innermost thoughts and feelings. With all the playful frankness of her manner, writes a niece, her sweet sunny temper and enthusiastic nature, Jane Austen was a woman most reticent as to her own deepest and holiest feelings. And it is, therefore, by seeing her nature reflected, as it were, in those around her, and by finding out gradually the place she held in their midst, that we learn to know her better. We are thus enabled, too, to trace the connection between the authors individual experience and that of the personages in her novelspersonages who are so real to her readers that their characters and actions are debated by admirers and nonadmirers alike as those of beings who have actually walked this earth. Is there any other writer, asks a critic, in whom men and women can take an equal interest and discuss on equal terms? But her charm, as we have said, is too impalpable to be argued about and so, as another critic remarks, the only homage her vassals can pay her in the face of the enemy is to lose their tempers.