Dear diary

More than two centuries ago, Jane Austen’s older brother Edward Knight decided to get his Kent mansion painted. As anyone who’s endured home renovations can attest, sometimes the easiest way to survive the temporary upheaval is to move out. And so Edward, along with many of his eleven children and a coterie of trusted servants, decamped for his Hampshire mansion, Chawton House.

That summer of 1813, Edward’s oldest child, twenty-year-old Fanny, was journaling daily, a habit she had cultivated faithfully since she was a little girl, and one that she would maintain into old age. This year, however, we can all follow along: In honor of Jane Austen’s 250th birthday, Chawton House, now an Austen-themed tourist attraction, is posting a diary entry to social media (here and here) every day from April 18 to September 16.

Alas, Fanny was not a particularly eloquent or insightful diarist. Judging from the entries posted so far, her style was concise and her subject matter banal: the weather, the arrival of visitors, the comings and goings of family members. On the April 29 entry (“Wet day. Wrote to Mrs Anne. Edward came home from Winchester”), Chawton House wryly commented, “Not every day can be an adventure!” Frankly, however, that annotation would describe most of Fanny’s days.

Still, the daily entries give a sense of the world inhabited by a privileged woman of Austen’s time. Compared with the servants who cooked, who cleaned, and who cared for the many Knight children, Fanny led a leisured life, but it wasn’t an empty one. She managed the household, supervised her siblings’ education (May 5: “A musick master came to teach the chil[dre]n”) and bore responsibility for maintaining social bonds: attending church, entertaining visitors, and answering a never-ending stream of letters.

But it’s hard not to wish that Fanny’s habit of journaling had rubbed off on her famous aunt. If only Jane Austen had kept a diary! Imagine the biographical riches! Alas, no such document has ever turned up—and so we must make do with what we’ve got.