Marlene Wagman-Geller

Dec 16, 2024 by Marlene Wagman-Geller

  

“It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man

in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife.”

–Jane Austen

 

Jane Austen’s House (opened in 1949)

  Chawton, United Kingdom

 

Jane Austen’s nephew observed of his aunt, “Of events her life was singularly barren, few changes and no great crisis ever broke the smooth current of its course.” Although Jane may have had a seemingly placid existence–she never left England–she nevertheless had her share of sunshine, of storm. 

                

In the blink-and-you-miss-it hamlet of Steventon, in Hampshire, Jane was born in 1775. Her father, the Reverend George Austen and his wife, Cassandra, had six sons and two daughters. The full house was further crowded as the rectory doubled as a boys’ boarding school. In 1779, Thomas Knight, a wealthy relative, along with his wife, Catherine, taken by the twelve-year-old Edward Austen, became his adoptive parents. Another absent sibling from the parsonage was the second-born disabled George who boarded with a foster family. Cassandra and Jane studied at Oxford, Southampton, where they almost succumbed to typhus. School ended for Jane at age eleven, as her parents could not afford the tuition of the Abbey School in Reading. 

                 

Cassandra and Jane embarked on their Holy Grail: landing suitable husbands. Enamored with matrimony, Jane penned imaginary wedding entries in the parish register. A contemporary described her as “a husband hunting butterfly.” At a 1796 ball, Jane met Thomas Lefroy, and in a letter wrote, “I am almost afraid to tell you how my Irish friend and I behaved. Imagine to yourself…everything most shocking.” His parents disapproved of the girl devoid of a dowry. Thomas married an heiress and became Chief Justice of Ireland. He named his daughter Jane.

                

At age twenty-six, Jane Austen stayed at Manydown Park, a 1,500-acre home of Hampshire heir, Harris Bigg-Wither. He popped The Question; initially, Jane agreed; twenty-four hours later, her heart trumped expediency. Some potential reasons for not grasping the marital life preserver: Bigg-Wither had a stutter; she did not want to take on his surname; Jane preferred a progeny of pen and paper. Thomas Fowle, Cassandra’s fiancé, a minister and former student of her father, died from yellow fever. 

                

A wrecking ball to Jane’s soul occurred when George, at age seventy, announced his retirement that entailed leaving Steventon. Along with his wife and daughters, the Reverend relocated to Bath. After his death, his family drifted to various addresses, living off the charity of the Austen brothers. The years without a room of her own proved artistically fallow. Serendipity stepped in when Edward, heir to his adoptive parents’ fortune, offered his mother and sisters the use of Chawton Cottage located near his Elizabethan manor in Hampshire. A delighted Jane wrote, “Our Chawton home when complete, will all other houses beat.” Through another brother’s intercession, a London publisher bought Jane’s novels Sense and Sensibility and Pride and Prejudice. By 1816, John Murray, Lord Byron’s publisher, took her on as a client. Although her books did not mention her name-authorship was “By a Lady,” her identity leaked. Proof positive of her success was the Prince Regent (the future George IV) kept all her novels in each of his residences. When he “requested” she dedicate Emma to him, she complied under pressure, as she disliked the profligate royal. 

                 

Wrapped in the cocoon of her home and her literary success, illness intruded. Some theories are Jane suffered from Addison’s Disease or Hodgkin’s Lymphoma. Cassandra took her sister to Winchester for medical treatment. With her head in her sister’s lap, at age forty-one, Jane passed away. Cassandra lamented, “She was the sun…the gilder of every pleasure, the soother of every sorrow…and it as if I had lost a part of myself.”

                

Jane Austen died in 1817, and her family arranged her interment in Winchester Cathedral. Posthumously, the self-educated girl from a rural parsonage achieved immortality. Sir Walter Scott praised her mastery, Winston Churchill brought her novel on a White House visit, Charles Darwin’s wife read from the author’s works at his sickbed. Helen Fielding, in Bridget Jones’s Diary, christened her character Mark Darcy. The novelist’s face stared back from the £10 along with a quotation from Pride and Prejudice, “I declare after all there is no enjoyment like reading!”

                

Jane Austen’s House Museum: The Mecca for Janeites is Chawton Cottage where Jane lived for the last eight years of her life, a residence she shared with her mother, sister, and friend, Martha Lloyd. The literary landmark is a seventeenth century red brick structure originally built for a farm bailiff. A plaque on an exterior wall explains the site is where the novelist “sent all her works out into the world;” it is the birthplace of Mansfield Park, Emma, Persuasion, and where she revised Pride and Prejudice, Sense and Sensibility, and Northanger Abbey. London lawyer T. Edward Carpenter purchased the property in 1948 and donated it in memory of his son who died in World War II.

     

Only two known portraits of Jane Austen, both drawn by her sister, exist. One, owned by the Austen family, portrays Jane from behind, sitting outdoors, dressed in a blue bonnet and gown. The other, also by Cassandra, circa 1810, has a frontal view of the author sitting on a chair, arms folded. Upon Cassandra’s passing in 1845, her youngest brother, Charles, inherited the majority of her possessions. In the 1920s, two of his granddaughters, Jane and Emma Florence Austen, pressed for money, sold the painting to Austen collector, Frederick Lovering. Following his death, Sotheby’s auctioned off his Austen memorabilia, including the painting of the author, that currently resides in the National Portrait Gallery in London.

             

In the drawing room is a piano, a replica of the Austens’ original, of which Jane had written, “Yes, yes we will have a Pianoforte, as good a one as can be got for 30 guineas.” Music books bearing her signature rest on the instrument. Visitors can hear recordings of pianoforte pieces that once echoed throughout the house.

    

An emotional laden spot is the dining room where the author penned the pages that transformed her from a single woman–a cause of shame in eighteenth century England–into the Regency chronicler who explored the eternal dance between the sexes. What sets pulses racing is a mahogany, twelve-sided walnut table, barely wide enough to hold an inkwell, a quill, and a few sheafs of paper, on whose scuffed surface a quill conferred immortality on Emma Woodhouse and Mr. Knightly, Elizabeth Bennett and Mr. Darcy. Museum director Lizzie Dunford explains, “People will cry in front of it because it is so significant.” The dark-green wallpaper with a leaf pattern is based on an original scrap unearthed in 2017.

       

On the second floor is the bedroom shared by Jane and Cassandra. Above the fireplace is a framed lace collar that belonged to the author. A tented bed with curtains is a replica of the original. A larger bedroom belonged to Jane’s mother and has glass cases displaying objects such as original editions and a book of psalms. A third bedroom exhibits white-faced mannequins dressed in Georgian, high-waisted dresses.

     

The museum is the repository of sixteen Austen letters as well as a signed extract from Prime Minister Winston Churchill’s memoir in which he describes how Pride and Prejudice brought solace during a period of illness in the middle of World War II.

     

Jewelry lends autobiographical insights into its owners, and Jane’s conjures her spirit. Two topaz crosses were presents from Charles who his sisters referred to as, “our own particular brother.” A blue bead bracelet with a gold clasp was reserved for on special occasions. A gold ring with an oval turquoise stone was her most precious jewel. In 2012, an Austen descendant put the ring up for auction at Sotheby’s; the winning bid of $230,000 came from American Idol alumni, Kelly Clarkson. Britain declared the ring a national treasure and placed a ban on its export. The museum raised the money for its purchase.

        

The museum has a display that represents more than the writer’s possessions. When Jane passed away in Winchester, in keeping with a ritual of the times, Cassandra cut off several locks of her sister’s hair to give to her family as mementoes of their lost loved one. Cassandra set one lock in her pearl ring; her niece, Fanny, used hers in a brooch. The strands of hair in the museum, encased in a brass locket with a ribbon crest, were originally the possession of Harriet Palmer, Charles Austen’s second wife. Charles’ granddaughters sold the heirloom. A Mrs. Alberta Burke, an American, ended up with the chestnut-colored strands, and donated them to the museum. In stark juxtaposition to the Regency mementoes is a 1990s Clueless doll replete with accessories, (including a feather pen), in the original box. The inclusion is a nod to the film director Amy Heckerling based on Jane’s 1815 classic, Emma.

                  

Popularization of Pride and Prejudice reignited because of Colin Firth’s portrayal as Mr. Darcy in the 1996 film version when he emerged from a lake, his shirt clinging to his muscled torso. Giddy after viewing the Regency-era garment, museum visitor Queen Camilla lamented, “But he’s not in it, that’s a bit sad.” Cheeky Camilla is not alone in her reverence for the Jane Austen House’s crown jewels.

 

The Window of Her World: In 1811, Jane wrote to her absent sister, Cassandra, about Chawton Cottage’s gardens, “The Shrubbery Border will soon be very gay with Pinks & Sweet Williams, in addition to the Columbines already in bloom.”

 

 

 

 

 

 

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