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Jane Austen is one of the most famous and beloved writers in the canon of English literature, thought by many to be second only to Shakespeare. As Alfred, Lord Tennyson wrote in 1870: ‘Miss Austen understood the smallness of life to perfection. She was a great artist, equal in her small sphere to Shakespeare…’ Her name is a byword for wit, social observation and insight into the lives of women in the early 19th century. She is celebrated as a social observer, a moralist, a comic genius, and as a popular and universal writer. It’s all quite an achievement for the younger daughter of a country Rector who completed her formal education at the age of eleven and was never publicly acknowledged as a writer during her lifetime.
Jane Austen’s House in Chawton, Hampshire, was Jane Austen’s final home. It was within these walls that Jane wrote and revised her six beloved novels. It is the most treasured Austen site in the world. Over the last 70 years many parts of the House have been restored and the interior has been restyled to take it back to the time when the Austens lived here. Today, Jane Austen’s House is a Grade I listed building, an accredited Museum, and one of the most important literary sites in the world. It holds an important collection of objects associated with Jane Austen, including her jewellery, first editions of her books, furniture, textiles and the table at which she wrote her much-loved novels.