Online Conference. Quills and Characters: approaches to women’s letters, 1660-1860 1-2 September, 2023 Letters were at the heart of eighteenth-century literary culture. The first novels were written in letters, capitalising on their ability to show us a character’s inner thoughts. [...]
Buttermere Lake a Shower by JMW Turner This post will be the last celebrating the Share a Bench with Jane campaign, supported by our wonderful friends at NAFCH. We are honoured to have these benches dotted around [...]
Unique Presentation Copy of a Jane Austen Novel Heads to Chawton House, home of the author’s brother, following Record-breaking Sale An inscribed copy of a Jane Austen novel has become the most expensive of the author's works ever sold [...]
. Following the success of last year’s pilot Visiting Fellowship scheme, we have now chosen our six Fellows for 2022. Three will join us from mid-July for a month, and three will join us in November. The competition was [...]
September, 2019. Postdoctoral Fellow Kim Simpson writes the second in the Amelia Opie blog series ‘marriage is wise and ought to be a sacred institution; and I bitterly regret the hour when, with the hasty and immature judgment of [...]
As I walked up the long approach to Chawton House, I was immediately struck by its imposing beauty. Beyond its grand stone building, elaborately decorated interiors and lush gardens I had briefly seen on Google before applying to work [...]
Jane Austen went from being a moderately successful anonymous novelist in her own time to a global celebrity in ours. Over the last year, Executive Director Gillian Dow and Postdoctoral Fellow Kim Simpson have been working on an exciting [...]
Our Founding Patron, Dr Sandy Lerner OBE, took the decision late last year to step down from our Board of Trustees, and to cease funding Chawton House Library from 2018 onwards. Dr Lerner’s support through her foundation the Bosack [...]
Happy April Fools Day! April Fools Day is by no means a new invention. The day, in fact, has a long tradition including some truly dedicated pranksters. On this April Fools Day we’d like to draw your attention to some [...]
To celebrate Mother's Day, we've taken a look at some of the early nineteenth-century parenting books on our shelves.While mothers two centuries ago might have lacked such useful tools as baby monitors and tearless shampoo, not to mention antibiotics, they did [...]