Nearly 1000 visitors came to our inaugural Christmas Fayre A wonderful day was had by all at our first ever Christmas Fayre! Despite the dreary weather, almost 1000 visitors crossed the threshold of Chawton House, eager to engage in [...]
On Halloween we hosted a sold out tour of our Gothic exhibition 'The Art of Freezing the Blood' Chawton staff were hard at work on All Hallows' Eve decorating the house to create an atmosphere that would 'Freeze the [...]
Francesca Kavanagh, PhD Candidate and Teaching Associate, English and Theatre Studies, University of Melbourne. In August this year, with the generous support of the British Association for Romantic Studies’ inaugural Chawton House Travel Bursary, I spent two weeks in [...]
In the summer of 2015, Professor Peter Sabor from McGill University, Canada, came to Chawton House as a Visiting Fellow for a month. He spent most of his time in the vaults researching the Knight book collection, many of [...]
Thank you to our wonderful North American supporters... The North American Friends of Chawton House (NAFCH) held a reception at the 2018 Jane Austen Society of North America (JASNA) AGM in Kansas in order to help raise funds for Chawton [...]
After four years as Executive Director, Dr Gillian Dow has been awarded a 12-month Leverhulme Research Fellowship, which she will take up in early 2019. After this fellowship, Gillian will be returning to her position as Associate Professor in the [...]
Following the success of the ‘Stinking Fish of Southampton’ festival in 2017, speakers at Chawton House discussed life in the Georgian Spa Resort of Southampton. Perception of Jane Austen’s time spent in Southampton is often relegated to a brief [...]
For the last two weeks I have been lucky enough to do an internship at Chawton House, working both with the librarian Darren on the upcoming new exhibition on women’s rights, and helping out with the daily running of [...]
One of our library volunteers, Judith Hepper, writes about one of our rare books she discovers in the reading room ... Climb up the high ladder to a top shelf in the Lower Reading Room and you will find [...]
In the basement, there are a number of boxes containing objects found during the restoration of the house. Records of their exact date and where they were found are not always available. Some of them are heraldic and I [...]