Chawton

And then when the father retired, uh, died in 1805, um, they moved to Southampton for a little while to live with an, with a sailor brother.

And then finally they got to this little house, this cottage in Chawton, which, um, was part of the estate of her brother Edward.

And, um, and it's at that point that she took out her manuscripts, started to revise them, and away she went with her career, um, with Sense and Sensibility, Pride and Prejudice, and Mansfield Park.

John Mullan, um, what reputation did Jane Austen have at the time of Emma's publication?

Mm-hmm.

And, you know, go visit Winchester and, and Chawton for Jane Austen, go up to, uh, the, to Yorkshire and to the Brontë Parsonage, you know, go to Canterbury, uh, uh, go to the Lake District and see Wordsworth and, and that, that realm over there, you know-

Mm-hmm

... spend some time in London.

I think we'll be able to.

I do-

You mentioned Chawton.

One thing I, I would be remiss if I didn't mention is while we were in Bath, we got to sit...

Our guest is Sarah Emslie, a scholar, author, and Austen devotee from Halifax, Nova Scotia, up north, who has published her debut novel, The Austens, alongside her landmark academic work, Jane Austen's Philosophy of the Virtues.

If you have ever wondered what Jane was really thinking about during those quiet years at Chawton and whom she might have been writing letters to, Across the North Atlantic, this is the episode for you.

Sarah, welcome.

Thank

the hangar with its wooded slopes rising from the back of his garden and that noble chalk promontory of nore hill planted with the beeches which he called the most lovely of all forest trees how familiar they seem to us Still the swifts wheel to and fro round the low church tower, and the crickets chirp in the long grass, and the white owl is heard at night, just as when he used to linger under the old walls and watch their manners with infinite care and love.

One of the rocky hollow lanes which lead towards Alton will take us back into the road and bring us to Chawton, a village about a mile from that town.

The fine Elizabethan manor house at the foot of the green knoll, and the grey church peeping out of the trees close by, have been for centuries the home and burial place of the knights.

On the south side of the chancel, a black and white marble monument records the memory of that gallant cavalier, Sir Richard Knight, who risked life and fortune in the royal cause, and was invested with the Order of the Royal Oak by Charles II after the Restoration.

but it is as the place where jane austen in george eliot's opinion the greatest artist that has ever written composed her novels that chawton is memorable the cottage where she lived is still standing a few hundred yards from the great house which was the home of the brother and nieces to whom she was so fondly attached She and her sister, Cassandra, settled there in 1809, and remained there until May 1817, when they moved to the corner house of College Street, Winchester, where three months afterwards she died.

During the eight years spent in this quiet home, Jane Austen attained the height of her powers, and wrote her most famous novels, those works which she herself cost her so little, and which, in Tennyson's words, have given her a place in English literature next to Shakespeare.

Sense and Sensibility, her first novel, was published two years after the move to Chawton.

Persuasion, the last and most finished of the immortal series, was only written in 1816, a year before her death.