Unveiled at last

No selfie sticks were anywhere in sight.

On an overcast afternoon last week, Winchester Cathedral unveiled a life-size bronze statue of Jane Austen in its Inner Close, bringing an end to seven years of hilariously overblown controversy.

The cathedral filmed the event, and several people in the audience raised their cellphones to record it. But predictions that installing an Austen statue would turn the tranquil site into a “Disneyland-on-Itchen” overrun by hordes of selfie-seeking American tourists were not borne out. (Yet! It’s still early days!)

The controversy—a 2018 proposal shot down amid local opposition, a 2023 revision engineered to answer critics, last year's burst of ineffectual but entertaining protest—went mostly unmentioned during the hour-long 250^th birthday service that preceded the unveiling (see the video here and the order of service here). Delivering a short appreciation of Austen, University of Southampton professor Michael Wheeler referred obliquely to “the many challenges that the cathedral has faced in bringing the project to fruition,” but that was about it.

In his remarks, Wheeler praised Austen as “supreme novelist, wise moralist, and Hampshire woman”; stressed her Anglican faith and her disdain for the vanities of this world; and opined that “she would be surprised and amused to hear that, in a building where the bones of Saxon kings and bishops lie, and which contains memorials to some other remarkable women, . . . it’s her grave, Jane’s grave, that is the most frequently visited.”

The service also included musical settings of excerpts from Austen’s prayers; a reading delivered by the chair of the board of trustees of Jane Austen’s House; the laying of flowers on Austen's grave; and a performance of several scenes from Pride and Prejudice, featuring three actors who appeared in the BBC’s iconic 1995 adaptation. (No, not that actor. You wish.)

As a certified pedantic Janeite killjoy, I must grumble that the Pride and Prejudice scenes on offer were Andrew Davies’ (admittedly very faithful) versions from that 1995 adaptation, rather than Jane Austen’s originals. In a setting as glorious as Winchester Cathedral, however, even a pedantic Janeite can’t kill all the joy. 

But what of the statue itself? Wheeler claimed that Martin Jennings’ design, which shows Austen standing with her hand on the famous Chawton Cottage writing table, “perfectly captures the poise and grace of our beloved Jane Austen.” Personally, I’ve never been a huge fan, and to my mind, closeups of the completed piece (here, for example) suggest that it doesn’t greatly resemble any of the (hotly contested) images of Austen, even the Cassandra sketch that seems to have been Jennings’ main source.

Still, it’s hard to draw firm conclusions without seeing the piece in situ. Anyone up for a trip to Disneyland-on-Itchen next summer?