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Chawton House Library contains over 9,000 volumes. The bulk of the Collection is devoted to early English women's writing from the period 1600-1830. It is particularly strong in fiction by women from around 1740, an area which continues to attract considerable and growing international scholarly interest. Some of the books in the Collection are very rare, even unique copies. The work of more well familiar figures such as Jane Austen, Frances Burney, Sarah Fielding, Eliza Haywood, Lady Caroline Lamb, Mary Lamb, Charlotte Lennox, Hannah More, Ann Radcliffe, Mary Shelley, Mary Martha Sherwood, Frances Sheridan, Charlotte Smith, and Mary Wollstonecraft are well represented, as well as that of many more obscure writers such as Laetitia Matilda Hawkins, Susannah Maria Cooper, and Elizabeth Byron. Over 400 works in the Collection are anonymous, offering the tempting challenge of determining unknown identities and authorship. In addition to English women's writing, the collection has strong holdings of the work of Irish and Anglo-Irish writers, including Lady Sydney Owenson Morgan and Maria Edgeworth. The rest of the collection is comprised of key works by male authors in the period such as Samuel Richardson and Henry Fielding as well as some critical and reference material. The Library also holds a small collection of manuscripts by male and female authors including Jane Austen and Mary Tighe.
The Collection reveals the intricate and richly-woven texture of the literary marketplace in this period. The generic diversity of women's writing is reflected in the collection's holdings of poetry (by writers such as Anne Finch, Felicia Hemans, Lady Mary Montagu, Elizabeth Rowe and Mary Tighe), drama (by the likes of Frances Brooke, Hannah Cowley, Elizabeth Inchbald), published letters (including those of Hester Thrale and Elizabeth Carter), cookery books, as well as memoirs and autobiographical writing by Charlotte Charke, Mary Robinson and Germaine de Stael. Women also, of course, played a vital part in debates upon female education in this period and the collection contains educational works and advice manuals by figures such as Anna Laetitia Barbauld, Sarah Trimmer and Priscilla Wakefield.
This generic diversity is mirrored by the collection's thematic breadth. Readers interested in any of the following topics would find their interests well served by the Collection: eighteenth-century pre- or proto-feminism, poetry, education, romance fiction, sensibility and the sentimental novel, Gothic fiction, autobiography and the memoir, radicalism, conservatism and the 1790s, or Minerva Press writers.
Some of the rarer novels in the Collection are now available electronically through Chawton House Library's Novels Online Project. In addition we hope to develop our online resources by producing biographies of many of the writers whose works are contained within the collection. If you are interested in contributing to either of these exciting projects, please contact Helen Scott (Librarian).
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