Few are the places with genuine Jane Austen connections. Austen’s birthplace, Steventon Rectory, was razed in the nineteenth century; though some of her temporary homes in Bath survive, her long-term residence in Southampton is gone, replaced by a pub. Jane Austen’s House Museum, aka Chawton cottage, is a treasure, of course, and Austen’s grave in Winchester Cathedral is worth a pilgrimage, but many of the sites that Janeite tourists visit are movie locations where Austen herself probably never set foot.
So it’s exciting to learn that the newly restored Reading Abbey Gateway will open to the public later this week (see accounts here and here). As Janeites will recall, the Gateway once housed the Reading Ladies’ Boarding School, where the ten-year-old Austen and her older sister, Cassandra, were pupils in 1785-6, the final year of their brief formal education.
Although news accounts imply that visitors will see the very classroom where Austen studied, I doubt this is actually the case. Instead, it seems that in September, the local museum plans to move an already existing Victorian classroom exhibit into the Gateway. Since, as we Janeites are so often called on to point out, Austen was a Regency writer, not a Victorian one, it’s not clear how much relevance this exhibit will have to her own schooldays.
But when it comes to genuine Austen sites, we beggars can’t be choosers. Any readers who get a chance to visit Reading, please let us know what you think of the restored Abbey Gateway!