Chawton House had a fine library that was an undoubted attraction to Jane. The house was also the setting for many Austen family gatherings: ‘…we four sweet Brothers and Sisters dine today at the Gt House. Is that not quite natural?’ she wrote to her friend, Anna Lefroy.
The house has recently been restored to its former glory thanks to an American entrepreneur who is a devoted Austen fan. For centuries it was the comfortable country home of the Knight family (it was Thomas and Catherine Knight who adopted Jane’s brother, Edward, and he subsequently changed his name to Knight). Following the First World War, however, it fell into decline due to inheritance taxes and ever-increasing running costs – the fate of many other country estates in England.
By 1987, when Richard Knight inherited the property from his father, it was on the verge of financial and physical collapse. Its long and distinguished history, from mediaeval manor to one of Hampshire’s great country houses, seemed to be drawing to an end. Its associations with Jane Austen looked destined to become mere memories.
Five thousand miles away in California, Sandy Lerner, co-founder of Cisco Systems, Inc., learnt of this misfortune. Sandy had discovered Austen while under unbearable pressure as an undergraduate computer science student at Stanford. She read Persuasion and was instantly hooked (she has since read the book more than seventy times).
After floating Cisco in 1990, Sandy and her former husband, Len Bosack, had turned a large percentage of the proceeds over to a foundation dedicated to scientific research, animal welfare and literary endeavours. She realised that Chawton House could be the perfect home for her collection of books by the long-forgotten early English women writers who were Austen’s literary mothers and sisters. In Sandy’s vision, Chawton House would be the ideal environment for research and study in a manner that would bring to life the social, domestic, economic, cultural and historical context in which the writers lived and worked. In short, a unique opportunity to study the works in an appropriate setting.
From this resolve she acquired a long lease from Richard Knight and began an extensive programme of conservation work. The house reopened in 2003 as Chawton House Library – the world’s first centre for the study of the lives and works of women writing in English before 1830. As well as an original manuscript and early editions of Jane Austen’s work, authors such as Mary Shelley, Mary Wollstonecraft, Frances Burney and Aphra Behn feature in the collection of more than 8,000 books. The library is open by appointment to members of the public and there are visiting fellowships available for more specialised research.
The Jane Austen Short Story Award was initiated by Chawton House Library to encourage contemporary creative writing. The 2009 competition attracted nearly three hundred entries from all over the world. The hope is that two centuries on, a new generation of writers will be inspired by Jane’s work and the Great House she knew so well.
Lindsay Ashford, July 2009
For more information about Chawton House Library, visit the website: www.chawtonhouse.org
Copyright
HARPER
This book was originally published in 2009 in the United Kingdom by Honno.
DANCING WITH MR. DARCY. Copyright © 2010 by Honno.
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Notes
* The Last Man, by The Author of Frankenstein (Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley), Henry Colburn: London, 1826. A copy of this edition is held in the collection at Chawton House Library.
1 The work experience referred to here was arranged by the Characters’ Affiliation for Shadowing and Training (CAST). The origins of CAST are uncertain but it is known to have operated internationally for several thousand years, offering support to millions of hard-working fictional characters.
Flann O’Brien refers to CAST on p25 of his novel, At Swim-Two-Birds (London: Penguin, 1939) He writes,’ Characters should be interchangeable as between one book and another. The entire corpus of existing literature should be regarded as a limbo from which discerning authors could draw their characters as required. The modern novel should be largely a work of reference. Most authors spend their time saying what has been said before – usually said much better. A wealth of references to existing works would acquaint the reader instantly with the nature of each character.’
2 Miss Bennet refers to Charlotte Bronte’s documented antipathy to Jane Austen. An example of this can be found in Bronte’s letter of 12 April, 1850 to W. S. Williams where she writes,‘She [Austen] ruffles herreader by nothing vehement, disturbs him by nothing profound: the Passions are perfectly unknown to her.’ However, an explanation as to why Bronte grudgingly allowed Jane Eyre to continue her CAST placement with Miss Bennet may be found in an earlier letter of 12 January, 1848 to George Lewes in which she writes,‘Miss Austen is only shrewd and observant.’
3 Before anyone contacts the CAST hotline to report Bertha for contravening the Acting Out Of Character Act, it is essential to remember that Bertha is of course Bertha Antoinette of Rhys vs Cosway MasonRochester. It took 27 years of legal dispute between author Jean Rhys and CAST, beforeWide Sargasso Sea could be made public. And of those 27 years, it took Rhys the final nine to gain Bertha Antoinette’s full cooperation. Francis Wyndham refers to this on p10 of her introduction to Wide Sargasso Sea (London: Penguin, 1966): ‘For many years, Jean Rhys has been haunted by the figure of the first Mrs Rochester – the mad wife in Jane Eyre. The present novel – completed at last after much revision and agonised rejection of earlier versions – is her story.’
4 All members of the Characters’ Affiliation live in the ‘continuous present’. This state is explained by Mother on p63 of Luigi Pirandello’s Six Characters in Search of an Author when she says, ‘No, it’s happening now, it’s happening all the time! My torment isn’t over. I am alive and constantly present at every moment of my agony, which keeps coming back, alive and constantly present.’ (Translated by Stephen Mulrine, London: Nick Hern Books, 2003)
Mr Rochester installed a robust fire safety system at Thornfield Hall in order to safeguard the characters from any fire-related injuries, excepting those demanded by the plot.
5 I’m sorry to interrupt again with another footnote but I thought perhaps it was only
fair to give the characters’ side of the Pirandello Uprisings as I did bring up Pirandello in the previous footnote.
This unhappy affair is a very rare instance of insurrection amongst the Characters’Affiliation. Although characters are, of course, used to working with mentally unstable authors and usually deal with them with consummate professionalism, the Pirandello Six, as they came to be known, accused the playwright of characterism. The characters felt that even the very title of the play implied that characters have no lives of their own except those given validation by authors.
The Pirandello Six protested by intentionally making themselves unknowable. This is described by the play’s first director, Dario Niccodemi, in his memoir Tempo Passato (Milan:Treves, 1929, pp 82-3):‘The actors were still somewhat lost. They were unable to form an opinion about what they were saying. And this just cannot be. An actor without an opinion about the work he’s performing in is like a lamp that has gone out.’
Pirandello further angered the characters by insisting that the struggling actors ‘must no longer be actors but the very characters of the play they are performing in’. (ibid. p87)
The Pirandello Six felt that this command threatened the autonomy of fictional civilians.
The result of this stand-off is described by Jennifer Lorch in Six Characters in Search of an Author: Plays in Production (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005, p.31):‘The reaction to the first night of Six Characters in Search of an Author has made of it a theatrical legend: scuffles in the theatre and a hasty exit by Pirandello and his daughter by the stage door thence to be bundled into a taxi by friends.’ Anyway, back to Thornfield Hall…
6 The barriers were erected following the rise of the docu-drama genre on television. Many ‘characters’ from docu-dramas, including Crimewatch ‘re-enactment characters’, wished to be admitted to CAST. When they were refused membership they stormed the headquarters and burst into the main Story Room, hurling about computers, printers and microphones, which accredited CAST members were attempting to use to file back their stories to their authors. Several days of hand-to-hand combat between CAST members and their non-CAST member brothers (sisters and multiple other family relations) followed. Destruction was so widespread and costly that the CAST funding for the modernisation of the aging communication system had to be spent instead on rehousing the headquarters in Portacabins. The impact of all of this on the quality of communication lines between characters and their authors is detailed by A. S. Byatt: ‘It was as if the novel was already written, floating in the air on a network of electrons. I could hear it talking to itself. I sensed that if I would but sit and listen, it would come through, all ready.’
Sarah Waters, Dancing With Mr. Darcy
(Series: # )
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