The View from Chawton

[Lisa Kasmer, currently on sabbatical, is a Visiting Fellow at Chawton House Library, U.K.]

I am writing as your foreign correspondent from Chawton, U.K., where I'm completing research for my book project on British women writing history in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.  The collection at Chawton House Library focuses on early editions, many of which are rare, of women's writing from 1600-1830.  At the library, I'm carrying out a survey of historical fiction by women in the nineteenth century, a genre that was exceptionally popular.  My reading here so far has brought some insights and real surprises--this is what I love most about this kind of research:  Who knew that Ann Yearsley, a Romantic poet, wrote a historical play, which is really quite radical both politically and generically?

In addition to its collection, Chawton House offers an unusual "textual experience."  The building in which the collection is housed is part of an estate that was once owned by Charles Knight, Jane Austen's brother.  In actually working in this historical home, I am often viscerally reminded of moments in an eighteenth- or nineteenth-century novel.  Each weekday, I come up the path of the estate's spacious grounds with shire horses grazing.  I then walk up the massive main staircase and through narrow passageways to the main reading room, a stately drawing room with bookshelves holding some of the main collection.  Throughout my day, I may remember descriptions of Clarissa's troubling imprisonment; Lizzy Bennet's breathtaking visit to Pemberley; or Jane Eyre's secret rambles through Thornfield Hall.