Jane Austen Revisited

And so onto part two of our little expedition out yesterday. I’m not sure what I was expecting wandering around the house as we did, but to my disappointment I came away from there with no great sense of Jane Austen herself. The house itself is nice enough, and it’s obvious that great effort has been undertaken by many Jane Austen enthusiasts to preserve and present various artifacts in a sympathetic manner, but for some reason, perhaps because I’m no great Austen fan myself, or perhaps because it was too orderly for my tastes it just didn’t speak to me as a lot of our older buildings do, I got no impression of it having once been a home, with a heart and life buzzing around in it’s tiny rooms. Most odd, particularly as I believe Jane wrote five of her six novels there.

To try and capture that sense of life, Ian and I took a wander around the village, chocolate box pretty and filled with a hotch potch of beautifully thatched house such as 'Clinkers'



which according to the sign above the heavily timbered front door dates back to around 1550,



then we carried on down the road, past the school and houses guarded by majestic cedar trees tilting precariously towards stone clad walls



and on up to the long drive along which Jane must have wandered to Chawton House itself;



passing an old rickerty wooden caravan along the way,



which is perhaps drawn by one of the many gentle shire horses we saw grazing in the fields beyond,



To the right of the caravan in the drive, just out of view in my photos sits the church of St Nicholas,



which was sadly all locked up, but tucked behind it I discovered the graves of the two Cassandra's - Jane Austen's mother and elder sister, who outlived Jane by a number of years, and to whom a lot of the recollections of Jane's life at Chawton and elsewhere are owed,



Jane herself is buried in Winchester Cathedral, a trip I'll perhaps make another day.

On the way home from Chawton we took a detour down many of Hampshire's leafy lanes. All around us wonderous signs of spring seemed to be emerging, wild primroses more beautiful to me than any flower hot housed for purchase, cascading down leaf strewn banks along the wayside,



and a family of three wild deer who looked at us as we looked at them quite unphased until I startled them away by raising my camera to take a photo, upon which they promptly scurried away into the woods beyond,



as elusive perhaps as Jane Austen herself.