Living with a legend

Jane Austen’s House, the museum also known as Chawton cottage, is the most hallowed spot in Austen fandom: the place Jane Austen lived for her mostly happy last eight years, and the place from which, as the plaque outside the door has it, “all her works were sent into the world.”

The plaque at Jane Austen's House

But before the 1940s, when the fledgling Jane Austen Society began raising money to turn the house into a museum, it was also a place where a bunch of working-class people tried to live their lives in peace.

And mostly failed, apparently, thanks to those pesky Janeites.

This news comes to us courtesy of a “Nostalgia” column published earlier this year in the Alton Herald, the newspaper covering Austen’s home village of Chawton. The story reported on a 1926 letter to the paper, published in response to an earlier missive lamenting the dilapidated condition of Austen’s home a century and a half after her birth.

“No one would want to live here if they could get another house,” Edith Hall, a tenant of seven years’ standing, wrote plaintively. “I would gladly change my part of Jane Austen’s house for another modern home if only one was available.”

The problem, it seems, was the parade of uninvited visitors arriving at all hours, picnicking in the garden, and demanding tours of the house where their literary idol once lived. “No matter what we are doing–washing, baking, cooking–we never refuse to show people over,” Hall claimed. In other words, the tenants were trying to live in a regular house, while the tourists acted as if they were visiting a museum.

By 1949, when Chawton cottage finally opened as a museum, this distinction had collapsed entirely: Even as the front room was opened to the public, the museum's website explains, tenants continued to live in most of the house. Presumably, this cohabitation made for some prickly moments until the departure of the last tenant finally allowed the whole space to be given over to Austen commemoration.

All in all, this tale of real estate woe makes clear why, when I arrived in Winchester fourteen years ago, I discovered that the house where Austen died had a card in the window stating bluntly, “This is a private house and not open to the public.”

8 College Street, Winchester (2011)

But nearly a century after Edith Hall’s letter, as we celebrate Austen’s 250th birthday, no one is passing up the chance to honor a beloved writer, preserve her exalted legacy, and separate adoring Janeites from their money.

Winchester College boarding school, the proprietor of the Winchester house, is offering tours this summer, for a small fee. (They sold out well in advance.) And Jane Austen’s House—now with timed tickets, permanent exhibits, a gift shop, and no exasperated tenants trying to live in peace--is (still) the most hallowed spot in Austen fandom.