Jane Austen’s House in Chawton
The house is now Jane Austen’s House Museum
Jane Austen spent the last eight years of her life in a rose-smothered red brick house in the tiny hamlet of Chawton, in East Hampshire, now the Jane Austen House Museum. She lived here with her mother, sister and a family friend. She wrote many of her best-selling novels here, using quill and ink, sitting at a little round table by the parlour window. In her day, it was not seemly for a woman to pursue a literary career so she kept her writing secret, signing her work “By a Lady.” The parlour door creaked and Jane refused to have the hinges oiled, so it would give her ample warning to hide her work away in her little folding writing desk which is now one of the treasures of the British Library.
Jane wrote at this little table
Many personal possessions and intimate glimpses of Jane’s life are scattered throughout the house: a lock of her hair; the patchwork quilt she sewed with her mother and sister Cassandra; the treasured topaz cross given to her by her brother; a collection of the sisters’ bonnets and the heartbreaking letter Cassandra wrote to her niece after Jane’s death.
The museum is filled with Jane’s personal items
Bonnets worn by Jane and her sister, Cassandra
Jane’s bedroom
We are reminded how different life was in her day by the weathered timber well from which Jane drew fresh water; and the donkey carriage that she used to drive to the shops in a nearby village; a brick bread oven and copper washtub.
The Austen’s drew water from the well
Jane’s trap was drawn by a donkey
Copper and bread oven
The garden is lovely, featuring plants the family used to dye their gowns giving them a new lease of life. A poignant message inscribed on a slate asks us to remember Lt John Carpenter, killed in action in 1944. His father bought the dilapidated house in his memory and gave it into the care of the Jane Austen Memorial Trust, which restored it and filled it with many of her possessions.
The village of Chawton is picture-postcard perfect with neat thatched cottages and gardens overflowing with roses, hollyhocks and lavender. There is a popular café and a welcoming oak-beamed pub right opposite the house. Ten minutes’ walk takes us to her brother’s grand inherited house, now known as Chawton House Library. It houses a collection of books by early women writers and is open to the public. Next door, in the quiet churchyard at St Nicholas’s Church, Jane’s mother and sister, both named Cassandra, are buried. Jane is buried in Winchester Cathedral and is honoured with a simple tablet in Poets’ Corner, Westminster Abbey.
The graves of Jane’s mother and sister
Some places have a special kind of feeling or presence. Jane Austen’s house at Chawton is one of them.