Chief Executive, Trustees and Patrons

Board of Trustees

Chair – Louise Ansdell

Richard Knight

Richard Knight is the freeholder of Chawton House and Estate. He is the great, great, great grandson of Jane Austen’s brother Edward. They both inherited Chawton—-Edward in 1794 and Richard 200 years later in a rather dilapidated state. In the early 1990’s he sold a long leasehold to the Bosack Kruger Foundation with whom he worked to restore the house and grounds and establish a library and research centre devoted to  Early English Women’s Writing. Richard recently retired from a lifelong career as a farmer in Gloucestershire which has given him more time to consider the lives and times of his family including “Aunt Jane”.

Simon Knight

Simon Knight is a Chartered Surveyor who specialises in estate management and was a partner of Smiths Gore for 30 years and Senior Partner from 1996-2014. He is currently a Director of Savills in their rural division. He became a Trustee of Chawton House in October 2017. He is also a Trustee of a number of family trusts and  charities – Chairman of Governors of St Mary’s School – Calne, Vice-Chairman of Sussex Heritage Trust, Trustee of the Weald and Downland Museum and a Trustee  of Impact Initiatives. He is a Deputy Lieutenant of West Sussex and served as High Sheriff of the county in 2009/10. He lives near Petworth in West Sussex

Anne McMeehan Roberts

Anne McMeehan Roberts is a Trustee at Chawton House, Paines Plough (touring “new theatre to all four corners of the UK and around the world”), as well as Chair of Portsmouth High School’s governing body.  (She was previously a pupil there leaving in 1972 to study European Languages, Politics and Economics at Loughborough University.) Most of her career has been spent working in the City, latterly running a specialist communications firm, of which she was a founding director. Prior to this her appointments included Director of Communications of the investment funds industry’s trade association and director of Framlington Group and Managing Director of its unit trust subsidiary.  She won the Network Award for Business Woman of the Year in Finance in 1992.

Professor Ros Ballaster

Ros Ballaster is Professor of Eighteenth-Century Studies in the Faculty of English, Oxford University and Professorial Fellow of English at Mansfield College, Oxford. She first visited Chawton House Library in 2003 and has been an enthusiastic visitor to exhibitions and conferences since, seeing many of her graduate and postdoctoral students benefit from opportunities to visit and study here. She has published widely in the field of eighteenth-century literature and has particular research interests in women’s writing, women’s studies, feminist theory, and oriental fiction. She is the editor of  Jane Austen’s Sense and Sensibility for Penguin Classics (1991) and The History of British Women’s Writing, 1690 – 1750: Volume Four (History of British Women’s Writing (2010) . Her major monographs are: Seductive Forms: Women’s Amatory Fiction 1684-1740  (1992); Fabulous Orients: Fictions of the East in England 1662-1785 (2005); Fictions of Presence: Theatre and Novel in Eighteenth-Century Britain (2020). She is a member of the Steering Committee of the Anne Lister Society, and the Advisory Board of the Elizabeth Montagu Correspondence Online project (https://emco.swansea.ac.uk/home/), and also a Trustee of Mansfield College, University of Oxford.

Sue Saville

Patrons

Founding Patron, Dr Sandy Lerner OBE

Dame Mary Fagan, DCVO JP

Professor Isobel Grundy

Mr Nigel Humphreys

Professor Cora Kaplan

Mrs Gilly Drummond OBE DL

Mrs June Parkinson

Professor Michèle Roberts

Mr Alan Titchmarsh, MBE VMH DL

Ms Claire Tomalin, FRSL

Professor Janet Todd

Joanna Trollope, OBE

Professor Richard Ovenden

Joanna Barker

Karen O’Brien