A photograph of Tom Carpenter, the trustee of Chawton Cottage; he is carrying a portrait of Jane Austen’s brother, Edward
Friends,
Last night I came across in the latest issue of Times Literary Supplement (for January 25, 2019), an informative piquant review by Devoney Looser of a autobiographical book, Jane & Me. Its author, Caroline Jane Knight, a fifth great-niece (with now a little help from Devoney & the TLS), is launching this book maybe to provide herself with a raison d’être (a not “very promising heroine-in-training” says Devoney), a basis for her living independently someday. I think the information here and acid insights make it required reading for the Janeite, and discovered it’s behind the kind of magazine paywall where you must buy a whole subscription for a year, before you can read it. It is almost impossible to share a TLS article online as if you subscribe to the online version, you can only do it through an app on an ipad or some such device. So I here provide a summary, contextualized further by what I have drawn from Deborah Yaffe’s Among the Janeites.
Why is the review valuable in its own right too: we learn a good deal about the history of Chawton House Library this century from the point of view of the family who owned it — Jane Austen’s collateral descendants. Caroline is a poor transmitter: Looser points to where Caroline has not even begun to do the research necessary on her own life, but there is enough here to make do, and if you know something from your work, or can add further research like Devoney, you can have some insight into Austen’s family and what she was up against as she tried to write honest entertainments.
In brief, Devoney tells the story of a downwardly mobile family who let the house fall into desuetude and the present Richard Knight leased it to Sandy Lerner whose great luck on the Net had brought her huge amounts of money, some of which she expended by renovating, it’s not too much to call it rescuing Chawton House into a building one could spend time in comfortably enough so that it could function as a library. While she set about building, she started a board of informed people who would know how to turn it into a study center for 18th century women’s writing. Austen’s peers & contemporaries.
Richard Knight and Sandy Lerner walking on the grounds together during some occasion
Let me first bring in Yaffe’s account who also sheds light on Richard Knight who was at the conference as a key note speaker and we can here gather a few truths about him. He had “inherited a crushing estate-tax bill and a `16th century house in need of a million British pounds’ worth of emergency repairs.” A developer’s plan to turn the place into a golf course and expensive hotel had collapsed by 1992. Enter Sandy Lerner. She had made oodles of money off an Internet business, is another fan of Austen, one common today who does not like the idea of Austen as “an unhappy repressed spinster,” something of a recluse, not able to see the money and fame she wanted. When Dale Spender’s book, Mothers of the Novel, presented a whole female population writing away (as Austen did), a female literary tradition, she found a vocation, collecting their books. After she heard a speech by Nigel Nicolson, where he offended her (talking of a woman who thought Jane Austen didn’t like Bath as “a silly, superstitious cow,” described himself as heading a group who intended to open a Jane Austen center in Bath even though Edward Austen Knight’s Chawton House was on the market (too expensive? out of the way for tourists?), she decided to “get even.” When she had the money two years later, she bought Chawton House. She wanted to make it “a residential study center where scholars consulting er rare-book collection could live under 19th century conditions.” This super-rich woman loved the sense these people would gain “a visceral sense of the historical moment,” wake up to “frost on the windows, grates without fires, nothing but cold water to wash in.”
She paid six million for 125 year lease on the house and its 275 acre grounds; another $225,000 for the stable block. She discovered it to be badly damaged, inhabited by tenants she found distasteful, “ugly,” rotting. Crazy rumors abounded in the village she was going to turn the place into a lesbian commune, a Euro-Disney style theme park, her husband testing missile systems in the grounds. She thought of herself as this great philanthropist. Culture clashes: the Chawton estate sold its hunting rights for money; she was an animal rights activist. Disputes over her desire to remove a swimming pool said to be a badger habitat protected under UK law. I saw the Ayrshire Farm here in Northern Virginia that she bought during the protracted lawsuits and negotiations over Chawton: an 800-acre spread in northern Virginia, where “she planned to raise heritage breeds under humane, organic conditions, to prove socially responsible farming was economically viable.” She started a cosmetics company whose aesthetic was that of the Addams Family (TV show). Chawton House was finally built using a sensible plan for restoration; a cemetery was discovered, a secret cupboard with 17th century telescope. Eventually Lerner’s 7000 rare books came to reside in a house you could hold conferences, one-day festivals and host scholars in. It had cost $10 million and yearly operating costs were $1 million a year.
Lerner’s Ayrshire Farmhouse today — it’s rented out for events, and hosts lunches and evening parties and lectures, has a shop ….Lerner is unusual for a fan because she dislikes sequels and does not seek out Austen movies; it’s Austen’s texts she loves — yet she too wants to write a P&P sequel. I sat through one of her incoherent lectures so know first-hand half-nutty theory that every concrete detail in an Austen novel is crucial information leading to interpretation of that novel. I’ll leave the reader to read the details of her way of research, her travels in imitation of 18th century people: it took her 26 years to complete. How she has marketed the book by a website, and how Chawton was at the time of the book thriving (though her Farm lost money). Yaffe pictures Lerner at a signing of her book, and attracted many people, as much for her Internet fame as any Austen connection. Yaffe has Lerner against distancing herself from “our distastefully Twittering, be-Friending world, for the e-mail boxes overflowing with pornographic spam.” But she will buy relics at grossly over-inflated prices (“a turquoise ring” Austen wore) and give them to friends. She launched Chawton House by a fabulously expensive ball, to which Elizabeth Garvie and David Rintoul (dressed as aging Mr and Mrs Darcy) came. A “prominent chef” made 18th century foods (“nettle and potato soup, pickle ox tongue, sweetmeats”). She was in costume: “a low-cut, pale-blue ball gown. She even went horseback riding with Rintoul. A real thrill for a fan.
Chawton House Reading Room — there are two rooms, one open to the public, the other locked and filled with rare 18th century books
Devoney doesn’t say this nor Yaffe but I will: Chawton House never quite made it as sheerly a study center for women’s writing as originally envisioned; instead it became a sort of Jane Austen tourist site where festivals and conferences dwelling on Austen for fans were necessary, sometimes becoming a semi-popular community center like the Bronte Haworth house seems to be turning into. That’s not so bad, far worse was the people working for and at the place never acquired enough funding to do without Lerner; and over a fit of pique and probably long-standing resentments, some two years ago now Lerner pulled all her money out. It turns out 80% of funds came from her, and no way has been found to locate a substitute so the place can carry on its serious functions in the same way. Some new compromise will have to be found. Nearby is Chawton Cottage, now a small research center (for those select people who get to see its library), but more a tourist site; also nearby is the Austen family church where (among others) Austen’s sister, Cassandra and their mother, are buried. The house now (Looser says) “stands to revert back to Richard Knight’s family,” of whom Caroline is a member. All of us who know something of the house, who have experienced its scholarly meetings, its library, walked on its grounds, heard a concert at the church, mourn the fact that its fine director, Dr Gillian Dow has gone, to return full time as a scholar and lecturer to the University of Southampton.
This is the larger context for the story of Caroline and her older relatives from the turn of the century to now. Like other of these aristocrats who cannot afford to life the extravagant life of leisure they once did, Caroline (says Devoney) presents herself a slightly downtrodden: she and her parents lived in the basement of Chawton house while the rich tenants occupy the plum apartments above. One of the houses I was shown in the Lake District/Nothern Borders of England is owned by an aristocrat’s wife’s family; and the husband himself works to hold onto it by throwing it open to the public for various functions. He is clearly a well-educated man who lived a privileged elite life; nonetheless, he gave one of the talks. He told us he and his family living in the basement quarters below; their paying tenants above stairs.
The various Knights during Caroline’s life didn’t have many servants (oh dear poor things) and spent their time in less than admirable ways (watching TV say, horse racing — which costs). None of them were readers, and (as opposed to Devoney) I would say none of them ever produced anything near a masterpiece or important book, except maybe JEAL — if you are willing to consider how central his Memoir of his Aunt has been and how it has cast its spell over ways of reading Austen and understanding her ever after. A few have been minor literary people, and Joan Austen-Leigh and others been influential valued members of the British Jane Austen Society and they “grace” the JASNA every once in a while with their presence. Several have written sequels. Looser goes over a few of these, giving the impression that a couple which JASNA has promoted are better than they are.
Various financial troubles and also legal ones (including one male relative running over a local person with his car and “found not guilty of manslaughter” although he fled the scene) are covered by Devoney. When it comes to explaining the financial problems, Caroline says they are all a mystery. She omits any clarifying description of what the estate was like and which Knights lived here in WW2. Devoney supplies this: she tells of one recent Edward Knight’s time in India — his father had had been a royal favorite and a public-spirited magistrate, who loved to shoot birds. In 1951 thirty cottages in which tenants lived were auctioned off, and some went to occupants. They were in such bad shape apparently (again that is my deduction from what Looser gently implies) that one lucky man who could afford to buy the cottage said he got it for the price of a TV. Devoney implies this was dirt cheap. Not so: for many British people in 1951 the price of TV was out of their range; in the 1950s most Brits rented their TV
Chawton House recently from the outside
Death duties, genuinely high taxes each time the house changed hands is what did them in. (We no longer have even that in the US and the Republicans are salivating to change the death tax laws once again — these are important tools to prevent the growth of inequality.) I thought interesting that Chawton House was sold to one Richard Sharples, a conservative politician (1916-73) who served as governor of Bermuda and was assassinated (in Devoney’s words) “by black power militants.” Of course this bad-mouths these people, and when they were hung for the murder, there were days of rioting. I remember how horribly the white treated black and native people on Bermuda — so cruel that there are famous rebellions (Governor Eyre) wth terrifying reprisals by the British and colonial gov’ts. In the 20th century Sharples’ widow’s only recourse was to sell the property, furniture, books, portraits in 1977. There have over the century been a number of such sales to pay off death duties and some of the objects prized in museums, libraries came out of just such Sotheby auctions. Looser tells us in an aside there is a ditigal project trying to reconstruct the Knight Library as it was in 1935 (“Reading with Austen,” readingwithausten.com)
As to Caroline, she has apparently read very little of Austen’s fiction — that must very little indeed since Austen left only 6 novels which can easily be reprinted in one volume. She has appeared on TV, and is now she’s trying what a book can do. It’s not a memoir worthy of Jane Austen, says Devoney: the lack of elemental research even about her own life; Caroline’s account of herself features James Covey’s self-help book, The Habits of Highly Effective People, as the one that has gotten her through life. Wouldn’t you know it was seeing the 1995 P&P film by Andrew Davies that “kindled” Caroline’s interest in Jane Austen. I watched a documentary with Andrew Davies aired on BBC recently about just how much he changed the book to be about men; how much “correction” of it he made. Caroline still dreams of moving back to Chawton with the present male Richard Knight as ambassador (of what it’s not clear). I’ve been to JASNAs where Richard Knight gave a talk about his family in the mid-morning Sunday breakfast slot of the JASNAs. Here is Arnie Perlstein’s reaction to one.
Devoney ends her review with suggesting how much this history might remind us of Persuasion and the Elliot family and quotes Darcy in P&P: “I cannot comprehend the neglect of a family library in such days as these.” Devoney does justice at her opening to a few of the immediate Austens who showed some literary ability and genuine interest and integrity towards their aunt: James, her brother was a minor but good poet; his three children include JEAL; Anne Austen Lefroy who tried to finish Sanditon and wrote a brief touching novel, Mary Hamilton; Caroline Austen wrote her Reminiscences; Catherine Hubback several novels, a travel book of letters, and a continuation of Austen’s The Watsons as The Younger Sister. Her son, grand-nephew, and granddaughter all wrote books to add to our knowledge of the family; Edward Knight’s grandson produced the first substantial edition of Austen’s letters. There the inspiration coming through and about the aunt seems to have ended.
***********************
From Anthony Trollope’s Can You Forgive Her?, Jeffrey Palliser tells Alice, a visitor to this aristocratic family at their country mansion who wonders what there is to do all day, about what he as an example of his relatives’ lives does with his time:
“Do you shoot?”
“Shoot! What; with a gun?”
“Yes. I was staying in a house last week with a lady who shot a good deal.”
“No; I don’t shoot.”
“Do you ride?”
“No; I wish I did. I have never ridden because I’ve no one to ride with me.”
“Do you drive?”
“No; I don’t drive either.”
“Then what do you do?”
“I sit at home, and—”
“Mend your stockings?”
“No; I don’t do that, because it’s disagreeable; but I do work a good deal. Sometimes I have amused myself by reading.”
“Ah; they never do that here. I have heard that there is a library, but the clue to it has been lost, and nobody now knows the way …
None of this loss and mismanagement or lack of literary interest or ability as part of a family history is unexpected. In her discreet last chapter of her fine biography of Jane Austen, Claire Tomalin records the earliest phases of this decline, together with or amid the real attempts of Catherine Hubback’s part of the family and other descendants of Frank to publish respectable books about Jane Austen. I imagine the valuable library gathered since Chawton House Library became a functioning study center (a large room in the present Chawton house) will remain intact but nowadays (as some of us know) libraries filled with books are not valued by booksellers or even libraries or universities in the way they once were. I know people who found they could not even give away a particularly superb personal library, and others driven to sell theirs for very little in comparison say for what they would have gotten in 1980 or so and that would not have covered how much it cost them over a lifetime.
Ellen
Reveries Under the Sign of Austen, Two 
Diana Birchall:
“Ellen, thank you very much for taking the trouble to make such an enlightening summation of the TLS article which lies so frustratingly behind a paywall. I was particularly intrigued since I was curious how Devoney Looser would handle this subject; it’s almost forbidden to say negative things in the Janeite book community, and I would have felt uneasy myself reviewing such a book as this. Devoney is essentially a celebrator not a tearer-apart, but you can’t write sugary compliments in the TLS, so I couldn’t imagine how she’d get out of this unenviable spot! Admirably, she does seem to have dealt with the subject fair handedly, so kudos to her.
Arnie, indeed I do remember every word of your description of Richard Knight’s talk, and the way the Janeite sugariness I mentioned above, greeted your description. Utter silence. I don’t remember anyone else even commenting on the shocking story, or mention of it anywhere else. It seemed that everybody pretty much acted as if it didn’t happen, or as if they couldn’t believe they heard what they heard. Unfortunately I got ill at that conference and left early, so never heard that talk!
Well, enough. I don’t want to get involved in this subject, and the only opinion I will state is that it is too bad of the TLS to make their articles hidden. Other periodicals that use pay walls often allow a one article payment, something reasonable, not a year’s expensive subscription!
So thanks again, Ellen.
Diana’
Dear Diana,
Thank you for having the courage to speak. My “hits” went way up last night but hardly a “like” did I get. I also went over what has been happening recently at Chawton House Library, its history. Devoney was not sugary to Caroline Jane Knight but she did over-praise those novels and post-texts by Austen relatives who have been prominent in the Janeite communities (as you put it). Very like her recent book, her review has good research into areas not often brought out. Sharples ran over someone while driving his car and fled; recently the 97 year old Prince Philip was involved in a similar car accident, and he was speeding. These aristocrats who live in the basements of their estates so they can carry on going to elite schools and belonging to elite clubs are by no means downtrodden. The man giving the talk was owning his house and its treasures in another way. But Caroline clearly lacks the gifts to pull this off
I rarely (only once) have stayed for the Sunday mid-morning talk: from my experience it is usually a relative type (someone with a name connected to the Austens) whose interest is in telling practical details they know as a relative or connection — of course often all sugared up.
TLS is not the only one doing this nor the only one offering a huge archive in an app. So it’s hard to read. That is what History Today is doing too. Only the Guardian carries on not charging at all (I am a volunteer subscriber :), and the LRB makes its archives easy to access and to share. The NYTimes gives you ten articles (or hits) for free each month. The Nation remains very inexpensive, and the Progressive Populist is not yet mostly online.
Hi Ellen. I have met Caroline and would just like to say that she is a bright, amusing lady, full of energy and drive, She is a very successful business woman and has run companies and set up her own company in Australia. Whatever the literary merits or non merits of her biography,Jane &Me, telling the story of her connection to her illustrious ancestor, her book has a very important purpose. First it brings the Austen family up to date with the 21st century and secondly, probably more importantly, a part of the cost of the book goes to Caroline’s foundation started in 2014 ,the, ” Jane Austen Literacy Foundation.” The foundation has very quickly grown and is already doing some wonderful work, providing much needed literacy resources, by way of e – readers to disadvantaged children in Ghana. The foundation also provides voluntary literacy mentors helping disadvantaged children with their writing skills.Caroline has started something which will enable children from disadvantaged parts of society to have a voice. Jane Austen, a single lower middle class woman who certainly would not ordinarily have had a voice in the society she lived in, through shear force of genius was able to have a voice that the world is very much listening to today. Jane Austen would have been proud of her ancestor enabling the disadvantaged to have their own voice.
Ghana? Why Ghana? Is a “literacy mentor” a teacher? how does this teacher reach the children? How many of such people are there? do they speak the languages of the children reached? I used to read proposals for FPSE (Fund for Post Secondary Education) and I would ask how is this done, is it feasible? Do you live in Australia too?
It would appear that the book lacks any solid research. No concrete information about finances, legal questions. She is sketchy on the relatives she tells of, including herself. I don’t know what you mean by “brings the Austen family up-to-date?”
E.M.
I’ve had a very interesting off-blog reply which I can’t reprint but it has opened before me that what is happening is the gap opened up by Lerner is now being filled, and here we have an opportunist, a self-promoter who calls herself the “fifth great-niece.” I counted only three who mattered: Anna Lefroy, Fanny Austen Knight and Catherine Hubback. Is JEAL’s daughter, Mary Austen, or one of Anna Lefroy’s daughters a fourth? Or is the number not thought out?
She’s respected because she’s a relative and once lived in the house. Real aristocracy! see that. Real Downton Abbey heroine. She doesn’t even have to pretend she’s read Austen’s works.
Well who knew? not me. I’m not part of any of the “in” crowds. Devoney is careful lest she offend someone who counts, but it irritates me to hear pablum praised as “fine novels.”
As to Prince Philip, I’m told “he didn’t look when he pulled out from a minor road onto a highway and the oncoming car couldn’t stop in time.” I’d don’t pay more close attention to the royals than me — the two incidents seemed analogous, not cautious on the road and then indifferent to the damage caused, trying to save their reputation and avoid any trouble for themselves
A friend who knows how to reach the archives (they are set up in a very awkward way, partly to stop anyone who subscribes from sharing) has sent along the text for those interested:
Pride and precariousness
The travails of Jane Austen’s ‘fifth-great niece’
DEVONEY LOOSER
From the outset, Jane Austen’s family – her siblings, nieces and nephews – shared, albeit selectively, details of the novelist’s life and career with her public. Austen’s brother Henry published the first brief biography of her in 1818, just a few months after she died, in a preface to Northanger Abbey and Persuasion. Fifty years later, her nephew James Edward Austen-Leigh published the first full-length biography, A Memoir of Jane Austen (1870). These were formative accounts. Still, it is a myth that Austen was an obscure figure between 1818 and 1870 or that family members had a lock on shaping her early posthumous reputation. They didn’t.
Austen had seven siblings. Four had children. They begat thirty-three nieces and nephews, who, in turn, produced 101 descendants. The devoted Janeite Joan Corder handwrote an Austen family tree, “Akin to Jane” (1953), tracking down 330 known descendants. She couldn’t find a publisher. Ronald Dunning, a fourth-great grandson of an Austen brother, has shared Corder’s findings online. He identified 1,300 collateral descendants, in a database of 19,000 ancestors (janeaustensfamily.co.uk/).
If you’re not one of the family, you might rightly ask, “Why should I care?” Here is one reason: although the role of collateral descendants in shaping Austen’s celebrity has been overstated in some ways, it has been oddly neglected in others. We have not yet come to terms with the sheer number of Austen-family descendants who turned to authorship and who cultivated commercial interests to extend their aunt’s fame. It is a fascinating, and virtually unnoticed, literary historical phenomenon. Austen didn’t just create her own extraordinary global brand. She unwittingly established a family business in literature that has flourished for six generations.
Famously, Austen didn’t publish under her own name. Sense and Sensibility (1811), her first novel, is signed “By a Lady”, with subsequent novels described as “By the author of” her previous titles. Yet after her death, dozens of collateral descendants used the Austen name to promote their writings. Henry’s second wife published religious works as Mrs Henry Austen in the early 1830s. Jane Anna Elizabeth Austen Lefroy published a short story, “Mary Hamilton” (1834), using the byline “a niece of the late Miss Austen”. She produced a dozen stories and pamphlets for children. So did four of her six daughters, as Peter Sabor has noted. Catherine Hubback published novels in the 1850s, advertising herself as the famous novelist’s niece. Hubback’s granddaughter, Edith Hubback Brown, published books about, and inspired by, Jane Austen, as a great-great niece. Her daughter, Helen Brown, published Jane Austen: A play (1939) as a great-great-great niece.
The list could go on and on. Edward, Lord Brabourne, a great-nephew, introduced and edited the first collection of Austen’s letters in 1884, and published a prodigious number of children’s fairy tales, as considered by Claudia L. Johnson in Jane Austen’s Cults and Cultures. His daughter, Eva Knatchbull-Hugessen, followed suit. Lois Austen-Leigh, a great-great niece, published mystery novels in the 1930s. The late Joan Mason-Hurley – a Canadian great-great-great niece who published as Joan Austen-Leigh and co-founded the Jane Austen Society of North America in 1979 – wrote award-winning plays and fine works of fiction, both Austen-inspired and not. While dozens of collateral descendants published, others became publishers. Cholmeley Austen-Leigh, another great-nephew, was made a partner with Spottiswoode and Co., a firm that also printed or published Austen-related works. Cholmeley’s son, R. A. Austen-Leigh, became Spottiswoode’s director, as well as an author, with one book about Jane Austen.
Two centuries on, the family tradition continues. Caroline Jane Knight is the latest to turn author-publisher. Jane & Me: My Austen heritage is a memoir published by the Greyfriar Group – an Australian marketing consultancy firm she founded. It offers a new angle on the family’s favourite subject. As a “fifth great-niece” of Austen, Knight says, she “spent most of my adult life trying to forget . . . all reminders of my heritage, my ancestors and Chawton House”. The book’s front cover signals its happy ending, however, with Knight’s photograph sitting next to Jane Austen’s famously brushed-up Victorian portrait, suggesting a certain carefully contrived resemblance. The back cover advertises that 15 per cent of the book’s profits will go the Jane Austen Literacy Foundation, a charity that Knight co-founded to “harness the global passion for Jane Austen to improve literacy rates”, especially in “developing, low-income and war-torn countries”.
Also on the cover is a photograph of Knight’s grand childhood home: Chawton House. She grew up on the remnants of an estate that had been inherited, in the late eighteenth century, by Jane’s fortunate brother Edward. Adopted by the wealthy, childless Knights, Edward took their surname and properties. It was Edward who provided Jane, his sister Cassandra and his mother with a home at Chawton Cottage, which – in its guise as the Jane Austen House Museum – is now visited by tens of thousands of tourists each year. The great house down the road had a different fate. Knight’s early life coincided with “the demise of the Knight family’s ancestral estate”, typical of “the demise of many English country manors”. So while this is not a by-the-book poor little rich girl’s story, it has some of the same narrative features. The young Caroline learns that her family tree’s “convolutions” are “as confusing as the layout of the house”. More Cinderella-like than to the manor born, she lives with her parents and brother in the basement, while the house’s plum apartments are inhabited by paying tenants with separate entrances. Other aunts, uncles and cousins languish in the building’s farther reaches. Her girlhood involves helping her grandmother run the estate’s struggling seasonal weekend tearoom.
The book’s straightforwardly told stories of downward mobility are often captivating, interspersed with stories from Austen’s fiction and ancestor-Knights. Townspeople thought little Caroline enjoyed a girlhood of great privilege, but her home was filled with black bats, spiders, dust and ghost stories. There were no gardeners, cooks, or servants, and no holidays. Her grandmother – a war widow who remarried a cousin and who was herself an Austen descendant – killed and plucked her own chickens. Caroline’s riding and piano lessons were cancelled in order to economize and send her brother to a school for the learning-disabled.
Like many an Austen heroine, Knight discovers that her financial situation is precarious. Eventually, when her grandfather – the reclusive, profession-less Edward Knight, known as “Bapops” – dies, the family has to vacate Chawton. It will be passed down to Richard Knight, Bapops’s eldest son. Jane & Me doesn’t mention it, but Richard had grown up elsewhere, thanks to Bapops’s and his mother’s post-war divorce. (Bapops’s wife also remarried.) It is a strange omission in what purports to be a warts-and-all account.
Bapops rarely leaves the property, spends his days in the library watching television, especially horse racing, and treats books as “merely decorative wallpaper”. When he passes his granddaughter in the hallway without speaking to her, she is not entirely sure that he knows who she is. During her childhood, “We had never had a conversation”. Her grandmother, meanwhile, reads Mills & Boon romances borrowed from the public library.
Knight also records the oddities of being recognized as an Austen family descendant. Visiting Janeite tourists regularly rap at Chawton House’s large door, despite its menacing “Private” sign. In the tearoom, visitors grab her by the hand and gush about beloved Jane when they learn of the family connection. Knight finds the Jane Austen Society’s meeting, held each year on the front lawn, to be boring. She discovers that her parents had nearly named her “Jane Austen Knight” but decided against it, fearing that she would have been teased at school. She makes a friend named Bronte, who is descended from Lord Nelson. It may all sound heroine-in-training promising, but Knight grows up without reading much of Austen’s fiction – or much of anything.
There is something sweet and sad about Knight’s descriptions of her teenage years in Chawton House, spent singing along to cassette tapes of Blondie. You can’t help but be on her side when she accidentally puts a piece of the Wedgwood china – off which Austen herself may have eaten – into the microwave. (She acts fast when sparks fly from the plate’s gold leaf, and the precious object survives.) By this time, however, most of the family’s valuables have been sold off, and Knight is vague about this dispersal. Doing some research would have helped. For instance, Knight mentions the tapestry-less Tapestry Gallery but can’t tell if her father’s quip that the objects were sold to pay his school fees is serious or a joke. In fact, the Tapestry Gallery had long held the famed Lewknor Tapestry (1564). It was sold at auction in 1958 to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. If Bapops received an amount that covered mere school fees, then he made a very bad bargain.
Records show the selling off (of both land and possessions) had begun far earlier than that. Caroline’s grandfather, Edward Knight, had inherited Chawton on the sudden death of his father, Lieutenant Colonel Lionel Charles Edward Knight – a royally connected shooting enthusiast and public-spirited magistrate – in 1932. A portion of the estate had to go in order to pay his death duties, said to amount to a fifth of its total value. That sale raised the equivalent of half a million pounds. In 1934, Edward married his first wife, the daughter of a local doctor. In 1935, he sent many of the library’s valuable titles off to Sotheby’s for auction. (An innovative digital project is now under way attempting to reconstruct virtually the Knights’ sold-off library, called Reading with Austen, readingwithausten.com.)
The Knights had other legal and financial troubles which are entirely left out of Jane & Me. Edward’s solicitor uncle, George Brook Knight, who lived at Chawton House, was tried for manslaughter in 1936. He was driving a car at night when he struck and killed a farmer walking his bike on the side of the road. He also injured the man’s wife, who had been walking just ahead of him, with their three-month-old baby in a pram. The impact knocked her and the pram over and threw the baby beyond a wall, into some nettles, and clear of the accident. The collision left a circular dent on the hood of the car, along with remnants of blood and brains. George didn’t stop, but was later arrested, after a broadcast appeal to the public for information. He was found not guilty of manslaughter, merely ordered to pay a fine and court costs. One can only imagine how the incident must have changed the Knights’ relationship with the village.
Edward served during the Second World War, both at home and abroad in India. (Caroline Knight reports that her grandparents met in India, but that is all.) His divorce was granted in 1946, and he married his cousin the same year. Again, it passes unmentioned in Jane & Me, but in 1951, thirty cottages, gardens and an inn – all belonging to the Chawton estate – were auctioned off. Some of the cottages went to their occupants, with one of them claiming that he paid as much for his property as he had for his television. Then, in 1954, the bulk of the rest of the estate – some 2,000 acres, not including the house itself – was sold to a private buyer for an undisclosed sum. It became the property of Sir Richard Sharples (1916–73), a Conservative politician who served as Governor of Bermuda and was assassinated there by black power militants. The case resulted in Britain’s last executions, by hanging, and prompted days of colonial rioting. Sharples’s widow sold off the Chawton property in 1977, in order to pay death duties.
Caroline Knight must surely have been aware of some of this. She claims now that she cannot tell which of her ancestors was most responsible for having lost, or perhaps mismanaged, Chawton, an estate that had been in the Knight family for four centuries. She concludes it was no one person’s fault, which is probably true. But her repeated declaration that events and people are mysteries is frustrating. A memoir worthy of Jane Austen wouldn’t skirt around the less than pretty economic and marital specifics.
When Bapops died in 1987, and Uncle Richard inherited, the new owner of Chawton was described in the press as a Gloucestershire farmer. According to one newspaper, he had discovered that the fifty-room manor house now boasted sagging floors and leaking ceilings. Jane & Me notes that fittings such as door handles had been stolen. All sources agree that after a few failed negotiations, Richard Knight arranged to lease the property to the American tech mogul Sandy Lerner. She renovated and reopened it as a study centre for women’s writing, and rebranded it as Chawton House Library.
Despite these dramatic events, the last third of Jane & Me falters. The connecting threads of Knight’s early adulthood are hard to follow. She does not, at first, go to university, but returns later in life, studies marketing, and, after many false starts, embarks on a successful career in business, inspired by Jane Austen to seek financial independence. This section of the book reads like a job applicant trying to explain away the gaps in her cv.
Incredibly – or perhaps incredibly predictably – it is seeing the BBC’s Pride and Prejudice adaptation of 1995 that rekindles Knight’s interest in her ancestor. She met Simon Langton, the production’s director, and uncovers a personal connection to John Wiltshire, the Australian Austen scholar, who encouraged her to write a memoir. She was shocked to find out that Jane Austen had gained a robust global following.
In the end, Knight overcame the family shame of losing Chawton, regained the confidence to tell others about her Austen connection, and established the Literacy Foundation. I might have proved more sympathetic as a reader had she not felt it necessary to mention Stephen Covey’s self-help stand-by The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People three times over. (“Jane was resilient. She looked after her body, mind, heart and soul, and was ‘sharpening what she saw’ long before Stephen Covey coined the phrase.”) The book ends with a fantasy about moving back into Chawton House, where Knight would serve as an ambassador for the property and the famous author alike. It is a vision she entertains at the suggestion of, and with the potential offer of funding from, an unnamed benefactor. Yet this vision, too, has “faded away”. A new one appears to have taken its place. Knight recently reported on social media that her book is “now under development for a television series”.
Meanwhile, the old estate is again facing a transition. At the time of writing, Chawton House (having dropped the “Library” from its name, although the collection of books remains in residence) is hiring a new executive director and facing a funding crisis. Lerner has withdrawn her patronage. Chawton must once more find a way to stabilize its long-term future.
What are the terms of “long term”, though? In 1992, Richard Knight leased Chawton House to Lerner for £1.25 million, for a period of 125 years. The house stands to revert back to Caroline Knight’s family – or rather, to Uncle Richard’s family – around 2117. The situation recalls the kind of financial intricacies familiar to Persuasion’s debt-ridden Sir Walter Elliot and his heirs at Kellynch Hall. Readers may be tempted to smirk at the irony of Austen family life in the twenty-first century coming to imitate nineteenth-century fictional art. Were it Sir Walter, we are told, he “would never condescend to sell”. But, in this case, we might also echo Mr Darcy in Pride and Prejudice: “I cannot comprehend the neglect of a family library in such days as these”.
E.M.
I hadn’t realize they are dropping the word “library.” A very bad sign change.
[…] Caroline Jane Knight, 11 am 4th great granddaughter of Edward, 5th great niece of JA. She is probably the present heir to the house, and seems (since Sandy Lerner pulled out) to be shaping what the house will become — much more popular in orientation. She told us of how she grew up in the house, its rituals; she stressed that her family didn’t feel rich, and many branches of the Knights lived in the house at one time, each with its own living quarters, rather like a rabbit warren. Since the opening of this house to the public after the Jane Austen Society became involved and Sandy Lerner endowed it so richly for many years (herself paying for the hugely expensive restoration), the house is becoming a local community and British public community space as well as place for AGMs, Austenian and other 18th century wome. She presented herself in a very lively appealing way, was very upbeat. There was little about Austen’s books. In the talk she made it clear she knows she lived a privileged life. The house as described by her sounded like some castle where there’s a court and everyone in lives in little crowded corners. It is true that these mansions were at times turned into the equivalent of hotels or apartment houses. She looked very strongly made, and I wondered if she rides? (is a horsewoman). See my blog on Devoney Looser’s review of her book, Jane and Me</em>. […]