For sale: four-bedroom, two-bathroom, 2,400-square-foot house that -- as the long-time residence of Elizabeth Jenkins, Jane Austen’s first modern, non-family biographer and a co-founder of the UK’s Jane Austen Society – has a real, if tangential, Austen connection.
I know what you’re thinking: At last! An Austen-related home that I can afford! Not one of those palatial English country mansions that’s out of the price range of everyone but a Russian oligarch!
Um, sorry. The location-location-location real estate mantra has never been truer: Although Jenkins’ former home, built in the nineteenth century in Regency Gothic style, looks to be a comparatively modest, albeit charming and elegant, residence, it’s plunked right in the middle of Hampstead, one of north London’s most desirable neighborhoods. And therefore it has a price tag to match: £4.25 million (about $5.5 million).
Jenkins (1905-2010) was a respected biographer and novelist, and her 1938 Austen biography is a lucid, tasteful, and restrained account of the author’s life. Her father bought her the house on Hampstead’s Downshire Hill, and beginning in 1939 she lived there for more than fifty years, eventually titling her 2004 memoir The View from Downshire Hill.
Despite the stratospheric heights that Hampstead property values achieved during her lifetime, Jenkins, like so many writers, was never wealthy: one of her obituaries described her as content with “the Victorian kitchen and one-bar electric fires” of her genteelly strapped life.
Those who acquired the house after her reportedly renovated the interior, and given the temperature of the London property market, they will no doubt soon reap their reward. Here’s hoping that the new residents share Jenkins’ passion for history, literature, and, especially, Jane Austen.
2 comments
Sep 6 2018 05:07PM by Maggie Sullivan
What a beautiful, charming home. I feel like that's what Chawton Cottage would look like if renovated for modern tastes...not that I'm suggesting anyone should!
Sep 6 2018 05:32PM by Deborah Yaffe
We can dream! Maybe we should take up a collection among Janeites and buy Jenkins' house as a little London pied a terre for all of us. . .
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