The Background

Chawton’s recorded history begins in the Doomsday Survey of 1086. A royal manor house flourished here in the thirteenth century, when the owner, John St John, served as deputy to Edward I in Scotland. The descendants of John Knight, who built the present Chawton House at the time of the Armada (1588), added to it and modifed the landscape in ways that reflect changes in politics, religion and taste. One of those descendants was Elizabeth Knight, whose progresses were marked by the ringing of church bells and whose two husbands both had to adopt her surname (shades of Burney’s Cecilia!).

Later in the eighteenth century Jane Austen’s brother Edward (who had been adopted by the Knights) succeeded, and in 1809 was able to move his mother and sisters to a cottage in the village, now ‘Jane Austen’s House’ and visited by tens of thousands each year.

Although the Knight family vacated the house in 1987, they remain very actively involved in the project: Richard Knight is a Trustee and a member of the Executive Committee; his daughter Cassandra is retained as a consultant landscape architect; and his son Adam worked on the project as a restoration architect for three years. Chawton House Library builds on over four hundred years of tradition.

Interest in women’s writing is now global, and represents by far the most significant aspect of the current revaluation of the English literary canon. (Everyone reads Jane Austen, but who were her literary ‘sisters’ and ‘mothers’?) More broadly, the study of women in past generations is reshaping our understanding of cultural history. Chawton House will again become a living component of the local community, and will arrange seminars on garden archaeology and landscape history, social events reflecting the history of the house, and visits to sites in Hampshire and its borders associated with women writers ranging from Jane Austen to Flora Thompson, and from Mary Russell Mitford to Elizabeth Gaskell. Providing a focus for international research in women’s writing, Chawton House Library investigates the history of which it is itself a part.