Chawton House

Yeah, fully.

And so then people came together from the Chawton House, which is, I guess, the home of Jane Austen.

That's where she lived for the last eight years of her life.

Mm-hmm.

So this year, for the first time-- Well, it's funny sometimes in life when, of course, the things that are just normal to you, you take for granted, don't you? I don't know if this sounds silly, but it never occurred to me that people would be interested in walking around Chawton with me, which, which just probably sounds really silly because I, I'd never really thought about it.

I've hosted, um, dinners at Chawton House and things like that, and people want to come and have dinner with the family in Chawton.

But when you grow up with things, when you grow up with stories, when you grow up with these family sort of legends, again, you just take them for granted in a way, don't you? Until you're a little bit older and you can sort of appreciate it all.

But it's actually only been, I think, through sort of a decade of me now constantly in the Austen world, researching all the time, reading all of the latest work that's happening, the academic world's doing new things that are being uncovered and everything else, that I've also realized what we hold, the, the knowledge that we have-

Right.

You know, a good example of that would be a story that has very much been told before, but is Sir Richard, who reclines in marble in the church.

So when Oliver Cromwell's men came through England to overthrow the king, they came through Chawton, and they knocked on the door of Chawton House, and they were going on to the big houses, basically demanding that these squires pledge allegiance to Oliver Cromwell and not the king.

And of course, they wouldn't, so their houses were destroyed.

So you do see that way in which the Austen women and Martha Lloyd conducted themselves and spent their days.

And then of course, Chawton House up, you know, the, the top of the village, the big house, that changed very little.

You know, the Austen Knight family lived there for so many years, and so little of that changed.

And then I think when you discover that in, like villages in Hampshire, they're very similar to the way they were 200 years ago in many respects.

It's great to have you here.

I came up with this idea to have you on again because I'm following you on Substack, all these great stories that you're having and archives that you're uncovering with Jane Austen and Chawton House.

You came on December in 2025 to announce that you're doing the archives, and today you're gonna be making another really exciting announcement for our viewers.

I can't wait to share that with them as well.

And yes, and, and the story you're referring to is actually a story that I've only been made aware of quite recently.

Mm-hmm.

So I will come back to that, but I'm actually gonna start by just sharing a couple of ghost stories from Chawton House.

The stories, they do stretch back as far as Jane.