{"id":179,"date":"2019-06-15T17:00:31","date_gmt":"2019-06-15T17:00:31","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.open.ac.uk\/blogs\/literarytourist\/?p=179"},"modified":"2018-07-02T15:43:43","modified_gmt":"2018-07-02T15:43:43","slug":"at-chawton-cottage-on-a-summers-day","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.open.ac.uk\/blogs\/literarytourist\/?p=179","title":{"rendered":"At Chawton Cottage on a summer\u2019s day"},"content":{"rendered":"

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Photograph by Peter Smith \u00a9 Jane Austen\u2019s House Museum.<\/p>\n

I love going to Chawton. It\u2019s deepest, most idyllic Hampshire, all red-brick cottages, slightly wonky tile roofs, and enormous swaying candled horse chestnuts. It\u2019s everything that Jane Austen is supposed to be but wasn\u2019t really. It\u2019s worth remembering that Chawton Cottage was smack on a curve in the main road from Southampton to London, which is one reason why Austen\u2019s brother bricked up two windows when he offered the estate cottage to Mrs Austen and her two daughters; it ensured privacy from travelling gawpers. It\u2019s worth remembering, too, that for most of her life, Jane Austen was writing in and about wartime England. Still, I\u2019m not immune to a country idyll, especially one that ends in the Cassandra\u2019s Cup tea-room, where I fetch up along with a roomful of women bringing their mothers as I have done, to chat a little about Austen while drinking tea from proper bone china.<\/p>\n

Like all the sites I\u2019ve visited in the course of this blog, Chawton Cottage is an invention and a fantasy, with chips of the real buried at its heart to assure its imaginative power. The piece of writing by far the most important to the invention of Chawton Cottage as the centre-piece of \u2018Austen-land\u2019 was not by Austen but by a woman called Constance Hill, a book entitled Jane Austen, Her Homes and Her Friends <\/em>(1902). Rivalling myself for the title of most dedicated literary stalker, Hill describes a tour taken in the company of her sister with the object of visiting all the locations they can find that are associated with Austen. In documenting this hunt, Hill\u2019s book not only locates and records places associated with Austen; it also models a way of visiting and enjoying these locations for future tourists. This involves drawing together personal experiences of place by gathering up such descriptions as can be gleaned from Austen\u2019s letters, biographical information, details from the novels themselves, and supplementing them with information poached from other literary contemporaries.<\/p>\n

One typical chapter of the book opens with an account of Hill\u2019s drive to Austen\u2019s birthplace at Steventon. Enlivened with information about Austen\u2019s parents\u2019 move to the village, derived from the Memoir of Jane Austen <\/em>(1869) written by the author\u2019s cousin James Austen-Leigh, the chapter tells how Hill \u00a0identified the site of the old parsonage through quizzing the locals, checked what the locals said against the testimony of Lord Brabourne\u2019s edition of Austen\u2019s Letters<\/em> (1884), sketched the site, pictured the now vanished house with the help of \u2018two old pencil views\u2019, noticed the stumps of elms described in Austen\u2019s letters, remembered the description of the shrubbery of Cleveland in Sense and Sensibility<\/em> and wondered whether this was the original, and engaged in fanciful reanimation of \u2018two girlish forms\u2026 Jane Austen and her sister Cassandra.\u2019 The following chapter uses information about Mary Russell Mitford\u2019s roughly contemporaneous life just down the road recollected in Our Village<\/em> (1824), adds details drawn from Gilbert White\u2019s diaries at neighbouring Selbourne, and quotes from Anna Lefroy\u2019s manuscript memoir to give more substance to an account of Jane Austen\u2019s daily life. To peep \u2018in through the window of the parsonage\u2019, Hill plunders both the description of Uppercross in Persuasion<\/em> and Austen\u2019s favourite poet William Cowper\u2019s description of his room at Olney in the 1780s in his poem, The Task<\/em>. On reaching Chawton Cottage, Hill engages in similar imaginings to reanimate it as Austen\u2019s home despite its contemporary (and, as she sees it, unfortunate) function as a working-man\u2019s club.<\/p>\n

Hill\u2019s efforts to imagine Chawton Cottage at the heart of what she called \u2018Austen-land\u2019 culminated in a campaign to place a commemorative marker on the building. In 1917, she and her sister were key players in the funding and design of a plaque on Chawton Cottage to mark the centenary of Austen\u2019s death. The plaque, and the ceremony surrounding it, sealed Austen\u2019s importance in guaranteeing the continuities of English life in the face of historical change. The speeches given at the unveiling ceremony present the cottage as a site of continuity, as a place of refuge and source of consolation in wartime, and as the classic literary ground of England. In the words of one speaker recorded in a scrapbook held in the Chawton archives:<\/p>\n

It is perhaps a remarkable thing that, in these days of war, we can turn aside, even for a day, from the sterner demands of the moment to come together to pay this homage to the genius of Jane Austen, and may we not take from this thought a new hope of the civilisation that we are fighting together to save?<\/p>\n

Turning aside from sterner demands, I take my mother\u2019s arm, and we slip away into the tea-room to pay homage to genius.<\/p>\n

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        Photograph by Peter Smith \u00a9 Jane Austen\u2019s House Museum. I love going to Chawton. It\u2019s deepest, most idyllic Hampshire, all red-brick cottages, slightly wonky tile roofs, and enormous swaying candled horse chestnuts. It\u2019s everything that Jane … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[160,18,152,159,28,155,10,153,33,34,35,32,31,30,156,29,158,162,161,157,154,79,78],"class_list":["post-179","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-anna-lefroy","tag-chawton-cottage","tag-constance-hill","tag-gilbert-white","tag-history-of-reading","tag-james-austen-leigh","tag-jane-austen","tag-jane-austen-her-homes-and-her-friends","tag-literary-landmark","tag-literary-landscape","tag-literary-museums","tag-literary-pilgrimage","tag-literary-tourism","tag-literary-tourist","tag-lord-brabourne","tag-love-of-literature","tag-mary-russell-mitford","tag-nicola-watson-exhibiting-literature-austen-exhibited-in-kafkas-gabel-uberlegungen-zum-ausstellen-von-literatur-ed-katerina-kroucheva-and-barbara-schaff","tag-persuasion","tag-sense-and-sensibility","tag-steventon","tag-the-task","tag-william-cowper"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.open.ac.uk\/blogs\/literarytourist\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/179","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.open.ac.uk\/blogs\/literarytourist\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.open.ac.uk\/blogs\/literarytourist\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.open.ac.uk\/blogs\/literarytourist\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.open.ac.uk\/blogs\/literarytourist\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=179"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.open.ac.uk\/blogs\/literarytourist\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/179\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":183,"href":"https:\/\/www.open.ac.uk\/blogs\/literarytourist\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/179\/revisions\/183"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.open.ac.uk\/blogs\/literarytourist\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=179"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.open.ac.uk\/blogs\/literarytourist\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=179"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.open.ac.uk\/blogs\/literarytourist\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=179"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}