Chawton Cottage, the home of Jane Austen.

When Elizabeth Craven travelled from London down to Southampton to visit the Isle of Wight, which she loved, she must have passed through Alton in Hampshire, and may even have driven right past the house, Chawton Cottage, where Jane Austen was living from 1809 until 1817.

There was a family connection between them as Jane's sister Cassandra had been engaged to Elizabeth Craven's son's chaplain, who died tragically on a military expedition to the West Indies.

And with the Austens was living Martha Lloyd, who was related to the Craven family. Her mother had been born a Craven.

This red brick house on a corner in the village of Chawton was the property of Austen's wealthy brother Edward who also owned the local manor house. He provided a former bailiff's cottage on the estate for his widowed mother and two sisters, and it was here that Jane lived for the last eight years of her life, while she wrote most of her best novels.

Nowadays the house is preserved as a tribute to Austen and it contains many of her personal possessions.

In this modest sitting-room the family would sit together, sewing or reading, and receive any guests. The sofa was usually occupied by Jane's mother and there were no other easy chairs, only hard upright ones. 

They had a square piano very like this one which Austen loved to play. The grouping of the black keys is not so close as on a modern piano, making it harder to find the notes.

In the adjacent dining-room the table will comfortably seat only four people: Jane, her sister, their mother, and Martha Lloyd. Jane would come down here first thing in the morning and make breakfast, using the copper kettle in the hearth to make tea, setting the table and slicing the loaf of bread. Perhaps they also had some eggs from the chickens that scratched around in the yard.

In the corner near the grandfather clock is this tiny table, which Austen used when writing her novels. It is elegant though not very sturdy, suitable perhaps for letter-writing. Professional status then was only very grudgingly allowed to women in any field, and Austen was modest about her aspirations.

Upstairs there are four bedrooms, one of which Jane shared with her sister Cassandra. They had shared a room and even a bed all their lives. It provided both companionship and warmth, because houses like this would have been chilly in winter and you could not keep fires going all night. 

A portrait of Jane's mother hangs in this bedroom, which was hers.

Among the items preserved in the house are these topaz crosses, owned by Jane and Cassandra, like the one given to Fanny Price by her brother in Mansfield Park, and this turquoise ring that belonged to Jane.

 

This diaphanous muslin shawl made and worn by Jane herself proves that she was very skilled in needlework. It is made from two pieces of very thin, lightweight muslin, embroidered with tiny crosses and a border of squares giving the impression of lace. This is a very ingenious way of making the simplest materials into something that looks elegant. There must be thousands of tiny meticulous stitches here, each done by hand with a very fine needle.

 

The kitchen of the house is dominated by this enormous fireplace.

 

While the Austen family did keep a servant, Jane and her sister would not have been strangers to what went on here. In fact Martha Lloyd even wrote a cookery book, which has been published. It includes a recipe for currant wine which I intend to use, as I have harvested a lot of currants this year. The Austen family probably used their small garden for growing currants and other fruit, as most village dwellers did. It was a sensible thing to do if you lived on a small income.

The house looks best when viewed from the front garden. The doorway in Jane Austen's time was on the other side but it certainly looks in the right place now.

The building is asymmetrical is awkward in some ways.  Its location is not genteel, being right on the edge of the road in the middle of the village, so that the residents were disturbed by the noise of carriages. Anyone passing by on foot could look in at the front windows. To mitigate that defect, Edward had the front window of the sitting-room bricked up and a new one constructed with a view into the garden, but it is not really much further from the road and the bricked-up window looks odd. He could not do anything about the fact that there is a pub, the Greyfriar, just opposite. 

One can't really imagine Jane Austen popping in for a pint. 

Nevertheless, I am sure that Jane and her sister were well aware of how lucky they were to occupy this reasonably spacious home rent-free. She had enough security and tranquility to get all her greatest novels finished and published while living under this roof.