Jane and His Lordship's Legacy

Editor’s Afterword

There are many who make it their lifework to study Jane Austen and her novels, and to them I owe a considerable debt. There are others, however, who are content to simply enjoy her words and live for a while in the world she created; and to many of these devoted readers, the town of Chawton — and the cottage in which Austen lived the final eight years of her life — have become a shrine to a lost time and place. They will probably object to my portrait of the village as hostile to the Austens’ arrival in 1809, but there is a good deal of evidence to suggest that the four women who took up residence in Widow Seward’s cottage were not immediately beloved. The claims of the Hinton family, and their relations the Baverstocks and Dusautoys, against Edward Austen are well documented, and resulted in a lawsuit in 1814 demanding the reversion of the Chawton estates to the direct heirs of the Knights of Chawton. Edward was forced to settle the claim with a payment of fifteen thousand pounds to Jack Hinton, which he raised by the sale of timber from the Chawton woods. In that same year, Edward also prosecuted one of the Baigent boys for assault; but history does not tell us whether it was Toby or in what manner he attacked the Squire.

Ann Prowting submitted to fate and married Benjamin Clement of the Royal Navy. After the end of the Napoleonic wars turned him on shore, the young couple took up residence in Chawton and remained there until their deaths. Catherine Prowting never married.

Edward Austen and his children took the surname of Knight in 1812, when his patroness Catherine Knight died. He stayed briefly in the Great House in 1813 and again in 1814, but remained until his death a resident of Kent. The Middleton family gave up the lease of the Chawton estate in 1812, and in the years before Edward’s eldest son, Edward (1794–1879), moved into the Great House in 1826, the place was at the disposal of Jane’s naval brothers, Frank and Charles. Frank’s fourth son, Herbert, was born there in 1815.

For those who wish to know more of Jane Austen’s neighborhood in Hampshire, I must recommend Rupert Willoughby’s slim volume, Chawton: Jane Austen’s Village, The Old Rectory, Sherborne St. John, 1998; Jane Austen and Alton, by Jane Hurst, copyright Jane Hurst, 2001; Nigel Nicolson’s The World of Jane Austen, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, London, 1991; Jane Austen, A Family Record, by W. Austen-Leigh, R. A. Austen-Leigh, and Deirdre Le Faye, The British Library, 1989; and Jane Austen’s Let- ters, edited by Deirdre Le Faye, Oxford University Press, 1995. Chawton Great House was sold in 1993 to Ms. Sandy Lerner, an American, who has completely refurbished the house and grounds as a Center for the Study of Early English Women’s Writing — a use Jane Austen might have approved, although she would certainly have lamented its inevitable passage from family hands. Chawton Cottage is in the care of the Jane Austen Memorial Trust, and can be toured most days of the year.

Stephanie Barron

Golden, Colorado

January 2004