“My mission is context, ” says American businesswoman Sandy Lerner sitting in the grounds of Chawton House, the beautiful Elizabethan manor house in Hampshire that once belonged to Jane Austen’s brother. Next week, following ten years of restoration, Chawton House opens as a Library and Centre for the Study of Early English Women’s Writing from 1600- 1830, thanks to the philanthropy and passion of one woman for the work of Jane Austen. There’s nothing else like it in the country. Lerner’s magnificent collection of 9,000 rare volumes and manuscripts, lovingly built up over the last twenty years, will be available for study in rooms where the Austen family once lived and played. One of the gems is a recently re-discovered play in manuscript written by Austen when she was about twenty, probably intended as family entertainment.
“It’s the context and the routine of women’s lives which produced these wonderful, magical novels. We have the books but not the environment that produced them and we know astonishingly little about that environment,” explains Lerner. ” If these were books about farming or medicine then context wouldn’t be so relevant but they are about the interplay of people in a domestic context and getting along with people in the same small space with not a lot of privacy.”
Lerner, 48, admits that some of her aspirations for restoring the “gentleness” of an eighteenth century landscape were spoiled by the twenty first century necessity for arrival by car up the long gravel path. “Of course, this isn’t a complete time capsule. I would have loved to have given scholars a place to come and read and write where they could live as people lived at the time, with candles and chamber pots. Knowing just a few of these things can change our understanding of the literature quite profoundly.” The oak beamed house does boast some fine period furniture and handsome contemporary oil paintings, but the two invigilated reading rooms, as well as the more informal reading rooms for reference material, will not only have state of the art temperature control but internet access too.
Lerner cites key examples from Austen’s books where she considers that unless you understand the way women lived then you will miss the point. “The big dramatic moment in Pride and Prejudice is when Lady Catherine drives up insisting Elizabeth must not marry Mr Darcy. What you don’t know is what it cost her to travel with post horses at a charge of six pence a mile. It’s the equivalent today of renting a private Lear jet.”
Brought up on a cattle ranch in California, Lerner made her fortune co-founding first a computer company, Cisco Systems, in 1984 and then, in 1995, Urban Decay, a “grunge” make-up company. She now breeds shire horses at home in Virginia and is deeply involved in numerous animal welfare and environmental organisations. At Chawton there are already two shire horses, intended to give carriage rides around the estate, and dozens of sheep graze in the fields on either side of the drive. There are plans for other rare breeds to be brought back and to recreate an eighteenth century home farm in the grounds.
In 1992 Lerner discovered that Chawton House and its 275 year estate were for sale, in receivership, after a bid to put together a leisure centre with two golf courses had failed. She immediately decided to buy and her vision for the study centre has not faltered since. It was good timing as she and her husband, Leonard Bosack had begun to sell their Cisco stock as soon as the company went public releasing millions of dollars to fund ventures they cared about it. Although Jane herself never lived in Chawton House she often visited and knew it well. She lived with her widowed mother and sister in a nearby cottage (now the Jane Austen Museum) given her by her brother Edward Austen Knight when he inherited the estate from the heirless Knight family. By 1988, when Richard Knight came into the property, it urgently needed millions spending on it. Lerner swiftly established a charitable foundation and has devoted nearly ten million pounds to date restoring the house, gardens and parkland. She has received no UK funding, despite various applications to grant-giving bodies. The Walled Garden, designed by Edward Austen Knight on the advice of his sisters Jane and Cassandra, is currently being recreated and, as well as flowers, will provide organically grown fruit, vegetables and herbs some of which will be used in contemporary recipes to be prepared in the kitchens. The church where Jane’s mother and sister are buried sits half way up the drive.
Lerner remembers clearly discovering Jane Austen in 1982. “I was doing a graduate programme in mathematics at Stanford. It was debilitating and there was a television film of Pride and Prejudice over six weeks. My life came to a complete stop. I read everything Jane Austen had written and I cried when I came to the end because there wasn’t anything else to read. Some people chainsmoke, some take to strong drink. I got all whacked out on Jane Austen. It was a way to decompress and recreate all of my energy and enthusiasm by going backward and forward two centuries.” Totally hooked, Lerner went on to found a branch of the Jane Austen Society of North America and then realised how much more there was to know; that Austen did not write in a vacuum but was part of a tradition. She started meeting feminist academics, including Professor Isobel Grundy, now a Chawton Trustee, who told her there were perhaps two to three thousand “ladies who wrote” and ten to fifteen thousand works to be collected. But the survival rate is low as many books were discarded from libraries, considered of no importance, and others, traditionally put into circulating libraries, have fallen apart. A woman clearly fired by the chase, Lerner was not discouraged and started scouting around. She says she and her team still try and find one book every six months “if we’re lucky.”
Although the Austen manuscript – a twenty minute pastiche of Samuel Richardson’s novel Sir Charles Grandison – is a treasured part of the collection – those involved in administering the study centre are at pains to point out that they are neither a shrine to Jane Austen nor in competition to the Jane Austen museum.
“One of the most interesting aspects of this collection is that it is not just literature- poetry and novels – but also contains much contextual material from the period such as cookery books, seventeenth century guides to midwifery, conduct manuals from the eighteenth century with advice to women on how to behave,” explains librarian
Helen Scott. Among her prize possessions, now in the purpose-built environmentally controlled store rooms, is a leather bound London Almanack of 1807, a mere 2 two inches by one and a half, from which can be discovered the correct rates to pay a Hackney Coachman.
“The term literature in literary studies is a much more capacious word these days. Ephemera is a hot topic in cultural history and literary criticism generally,” adds Dr Jennie Batchelor, Chawton’s first Fellow in Women’s Writing, seconded from Southampton University. The Library is funding a three year post-doctoral fellowship and has established strong links with Southampton University. The opening three day conference from July 16-18, which will be attended by more than 200 eminent scholars from all over the world, is jointly sponsored by the Library and the University and Dr Batchelor, whose own specialty is eighteenth century dress and fashion, has designed a new MA unit to start next year which is related to the collection at Chawton. “Many people who are not scholars of the period are often surprised by how many women writers there were then. Maria Edgeworth and Frances Burney are just two of the better known.” But it is too early to say if any of the material will herald a rediscovery of a hitherto unknown writer. There is one handwritten anonymous novel, bound in leather, waiting to be read. “Tantalising,” says Dr Batchelor. “But meanwhile anything we can bring to the texture of the literary landscape is absolutely vital.”
Jane Alderson, Chawton’s Chief Executive, who has a background in Civil Engineering (Cambridge) as well as finance, is at pains to point out that anyone can visit the library, by appointment, without professing to a particular scholarly interest in one author. “We don’t want to be an exclusive academic community nor a museum piece. Because we want to attract people from across the board to come here, we’ve initiated lectures and seminars by contemporary writers, such as Ruth Rendell, so that people understand that contemporary women writers owe a debt to those who went before. We’re a living library.” There are also plans for a Regency Ball and dinner in the autumn when the Jane Austen dancers will perform.”
Meanwhile Sandy Lerner, who estimates she has probably read Persuasion seventy times, says that now the Library is up and running she will bow out: “I just hope they still let me read the books.”
for further information email info@chawton.net or www.chawton.org