What secrets does Jane Austen's house hold?

Hi, Rihanna Dillon here, the host of Ask Penguin. I'm just dropping in to let you know that we've put together a short bonus episode from our visit to Jane Austen's house in October. So, as well as recording an episode with the fabulous Jill Hornby and Andrew Hunter Murray, which is available to listen now, we also recorded a Home with Lizzie Donford directly. So without further ado, we hope you enjoy listening to this very special bonus episode as much as we enjoy.

I'm now here with Lizzie Dunford, director at Jane Austen's house, who's going to be taking me on a tour of the property. Hi Lizzie! Hello. Thank you so much for this. I am so excited. Um, tell us first of all what your job entails. It sounds like the the dream job.

It's a really fabulous job. It's both a privilege and a responsibility. So as director I lead the amazing that are so dedicated to making sure that this house continues And also at the very heart of everything we're doing is being a place for people who love Austin, who love those works, for who her words and her characters and the words are absolutely embedded with him. They speak to themselves. That is deep.

Which means that this house has so many layers of significance. You know, it's where all the novels came from, but it's also where people. Um it's a really hard question for a Jane Austen fan, but what is your favourite Austin novel? My favourite Oscar is usually the one I read last. I think they are just with such brilliance. You know, you go through sense and sensibility is a debut novel.

I mean when you think about that it's a debut novel and you get through, you forget, we're so used to it, it's such a part of our canon, it's such a part of our understanding of English literature. But that was once. Austin was in this waiting for the release of her debut novel in eighteen eleven and it seems impossible

Think of that these days and you go back in that and it's extraordinary through the bright and sparkling joy of pride and prejudice. Mansfield Park, which is so rich and really everything that Austin's doing and all her other novels, it's uncomfortable. Ah gorgeous. Yeah, I will be.

Persuasion is my favourite. That holds a masterpiece. That holds the place of my heart, I think. So tell us about the role of the house then in You keep saying this is where all of the novels come from. So I am slightly biased, obviously, but we are fairly certain, you know, it's fairly clear that this house. She moved in here in July eighteen oh nine. The house was already about two three hundred years old. We've got

Gorgeous creaky floorboards that we'll be able to hear as we're moving around. They're fabulous. And it was a place of refuge to some extent. There were really strong parallels. and sense and sensibility, structurally as well as emotively as well. She came here after a period of And she had at that point the first drafts of Ellen and Marianne, which had become Sense Sensibility. Abbey as was. They came with her, they'd been things she'd worked on in her early twenties.

And she lives in this incredible all female household with her mother, her sister in law And the household is set up in a way that seems to be a little bit more than a little bit of a And more than that, she seems to be anticipating that this will be a plan. before she moves. So she writes this amazing letter. The publisher wouldn't publish. Because she's crossed that she can't get it.

So there is then this sense that this is And it's something we really need to remember with Austin because she has become so iconic and she's become so. synonymous with an age, with literature, with romance, all these different things. It's very easy to forget that she was one A living, breathing, creative, ambitious, deeply thinking person who worked so hard on her novels, who from And this comes within this house. She's here from July eighteen oh nine to May eighteen.

And within that period, all of those novels. So where did she write? Well, shw as far as we're aware. She wrote in this room. So this is the dining room of the house. It's very cool. And it's also you then see a lot of similarities. The Brontes, their writing in their dining room. So you see this consistent pattern with female writers. Almost until you get to Virginia Rolf, but she breaks the rules in so many. Bye, guys.

Where women are writing from within the domestic, and Austin is no exception. And this is her tiny. I can't believe she I mean, just looking at this is giving me neck ache. Like just imagining her hunched over this. So the bottom mm So it might have been slightly taller. But also what's fascinating is the way she Now she used to write in these small

Don't play with those and fold them. It's the problem. But what she'd do is she'd take a large sheet of paper and fold it and write in booklets. All the surviving pieces of Austin manuscript and there's very, very few, very, very few. Uh the Watsons Susan. And there's Sanderton, and a few, and they're all written in the same way in these booklets. Okay. And so when you know that she's writing. the paper this size.

and how she used the paper and how she drafted was really considered and and really clever. But this is also I love the juxtaposition between this table, between this window in the dining room and the wall. So yes, tell us about this wallpaper which is I mean, this could be it feels so modern, is this? This is the wallpaper that was in it.

This is the wallpaper that was in here. So we spend a lot of time talking about our wallpapers. This is a relatively recent discovery. So the house has been open as a museum since 1949. And we only found out In 2017. We've got other stuff that we've known about since the 40s in the drawing room and upstairs, but this was a relatively recent discovery. and putting these wallpapers up has really transformed as you say it feels modern it feels vibrant it's so green So green.

Just describe it for Oliver. So it is multiple layers after layers of leaves that are about the size of an old 50 pence piece. It's slightly embossed, it's slightly flocked, and it's a really It's not quite an acid green, it's between an acid green and a meadow green, somewhere in the middle. And it's actually based on a plant called a dead nettles, so it's almost

You know the colour of stinging nettles when they first come out in the spring, that freshness. Yeah. It's a brick prickly as well. Especially first time you see it. But this is what And it's another one of those Again those perceptions of Austin when you see in the adaptation Oh her novels all take place in dining rooms, they all take place in drawing rooms, they all take place in ballrooms, they are in this as Charlotte Bronte said, I wouldn't want to be with her character.

Pride and Prejudice. The novel plot line takes place. It's in footpaths, it's in hedgerows, it's on field edges. And this is what she's writing these spaces against. Lizzie Bennett's walk to Netherfield. Anne Elliot when she's walking along and poetry in the autumn is against this wall. As she twists her ankle. No, it's all of this. It's actually helps give us a different understanding.

So she's writing from in the drawing room with the china, with all of the performance of a domestic woman's ninety. But against this wilderness We've got teapots. We've got these, are not Austin's teapots. One of the fabulousnesses about And the house had changed a lot. So after her sister Cassandra's death it was divided into three smaller workers. And it stayed up until that, right up until the house opened as a museum. So that meant it had to be effectively required.

Which for a storyteller's house is actually quite beautiful. It means you've got, you know, this place where someone wrote all these stories and we are still having to tell stories through our objects, through our collections. And the dining room table, we have a beautiful installation here at the moment called the Regency Wardrobe, but we also And that's because that was Jane's job in that. Making breakfast as well. And it was also she would also buy the wine.

Best job ever. The wine, the tea and the More complicated than going to your local majestic. It would have been a little bit but they ordered tea from Twinings in London and So she was involved in the household, but it was very much in a way that she was Indebted to To those women of her household, to her sister, to her sister. enjoyed and also to the lost women.

Extraordinary I mean there aren't many houses that can claim six novels that are 200 years after written that still continue to be global bestsellers written in eight years. There aren't many houses that can claim that. That's a very good point. So when you're walking around the house, do you because obviously you've been here for a while, so how do you feel still walking around the house? And also, how do you hope that your visitors?

feel. I think I still get goosebumps. You know, i this is A place where I came as a visitor before I worked here, and it is this place that's both. It's a site of pilgrimage. It's a place of creation. It's a place of performance. It was a place of performance for Austin. She read aloud her own novels here when they were first. Published, you probably read them aloud as in their process of being drafted. So it has this immense significance. So I feel I feel pride again. Okay.

And just a real sense. I say responsibility as though it's heavy. It's not. It means so much. And I want visitors to go away. Feeling so much mostly that noise. I'm just gonna put the light so the noise that you heard just made is because we've walked into our art of writing exhibition space. Oh my goodness I'm so I'm trying so hard not to swear right now. Well, you know, I'm sure Jane Austen wasn't always polite when she stabbed her finger with a needle. So um

This is this is my pride and joy. This is our pride and joy. We worked for this for a long time. In the flesh. It is incredible. So this display case was designed to be a very good thing. We're so lucky here that we have The pride and prejudice that you're actually looking at. is one that Austin specifically names in one of the most famous And it's one of our great treasures in the house. She wrote a letter from here. January eighteen thirty one. Two Cassandra. And that's her copy of book.

And then she also says they had one sent to her. A third. And this is That is that book. So there is oh so I actually am crying obviously. This is so incredible. So there's like you can see some faded writing on the other side. Is this a message? No, so it's an inscription. So the first line says Edward North. Oh, that's so lovely. So then it's an inherited copy passed out. They're really beautiful. This is what we want people to come with. So emotional.

It is emotional. This isn't just a pretty place that you wander through. It is a pretty place that you wander through. These things, these books, they mean so much. And I find these particularly fascinating. Because they ca they're things now. They're things behind glass. They're almost like butterflies pin. They're they're objects.

They're tangible, but they're also they contain something that is so vast, you know. Do you think this book that was received, that was opened in January 1813, everything that's come from it, these characters now, they I mean, it's extraordinary. They live within us, they live within creatives, they have inspired so much. So these, and it's not very big. It's little so physically holds just the most vast internal

But it does matter. This is what I want. I want people to this is what I want Mr. Skyware. I want them to I want them to feel like it's high.

I want them to feel that they could go away and write now. I think that's the one of the really important things. And we try and get this through. Austin did live a life of compared to the vast majority of us. She didn't have to work. Although I know that those of us that are work is also our joy. So I feel slightly sorry. And she did work. She did have a career. She was a published novelist. But she didn't have to go.

Yeah. She went shopping through choice, not necessary to put the food on the table. But despite that, she only had two years Is that true? True that we know that she's the they're always the same, her eyes need to go the wrong way around. I mean she can smell most things but she always gets that wrong. That's hilarious. Uh she had bad eyesight, you know, she lived in this housing insecurity.

And I think that's something we want to get, you know, she was a woman of genius, but with that physical and emotional space, she was able So much. I'm gonna show you. कर दो कर दो कर दो Just in case. Okay. Like so many of us now that read Austin in a way to teach us to write. She was also reading. Few of the novels and text of So excited. really exciting this one at the top is the most exciting of them. So this is at Our own copy. So there are little annotations. Are those her annotations?

Annotation. I know. This is incredible. So this is elegant extracts. So this is one of the novels that they're all So the the section is the Scott No, no, a lie, another lie. She's very she's very pro Mary Granny Scott. She loved the Stuart, she was very pro the Stuart dancing. So this is her

Yeah. And I think that's something that's we again there are a few different things we often lose about Austin within the focus on her as a romance writer. And she's she's doing so many more things, but she also one of her teenage writings, which is less well known than it should be, is a history of English. By a partial and ignorant historian. Yes. It's gorgeous, illustrated by her sister Cassandra, and it goes from Henry IV to the execution of Charles I.

It's really opinionated. Very pretty. It's gorgeous. She's very pro-Stuart. She hates Elizabeth I. It's written with so. wit. I actually think having read it again recently, I think it's one of the finest things that she writes. It's gorgeous. It is, but she's engaging with her history. Yes. And I think there are so many things that Oskin can teach her.

But she read history, but she also questioned it. She announced it And I think at a time when we are living through so much history and a period that is informed and shaped by historical events, if we learn anything from Who was she having those conversations with then? Because presumably she wasn't these weren't just coming out of nowhere. Who was sort of helping introducing her to some of these ideas? Who else was she reading that was informing that?

She was one of eight siblings. She had six brothers and her sister Cassandra. Her father and her mother were really intelligent people. Her father was winning prizes. Her mother was described by her uncle who was.

Yeah, and then she's got all these brothers. Her brothers Henry and James. They're writing a periodical in Oxford. So there's a real sense of thought going through this household. They are reading all sorts of different things. Her father had 500 books.

Library at Steventon. We don't quite know what they all were. She was definitely reading Fanny Burney's, she was reading Mariah Edgeworth, she was reading a lot of female authors as well as yeah, this goldsmith's history, these other things, and there's stuff that we just don't know quite what she read. You know, we can see these influences coming through, but she doesn't talk about it. But brilliantly the history of England is as much. I love that.

That's fabulous. She read a lot of Shakespeare. Yeah. A lot of poetry. Cooper. A bit later on, she was reading Byron as well. So she's she's also centered very much within the romantic. as well and that poetry. She's also loves a bit of gothic and Nordang Rabbi, so

So we we we we talked about this earlier on the podcast, but North Hangarabi and the Gothic. So is this I mean it's quite an unusual sort of subgenre for her to explore within Um was it because it was the thing to do at the time or did she have a real She does read a lot of it. She does read a lot of it as a teenager, but it was also, it was everywhere. So it was kind of the pulp. What was selling?

I think as well I think she is using it and I am not But she's used to using it as a satire, and gothic at the time. Really quite. No traumatic things that were happening that women's real experience. To mock, to shine a mirror in a kind of quite interesting way that it's not it's very subtle. I'm not a gothic expert, but I much as I love I do love North. Yeah. Catherine is Catherine.

And also just because I've just spotted it, obviously it comes up in persuasion as well. Yes. Slavery and we're talking um about abolition. Yeah, we've got Cooper open at the task. It is something that is definitely there and it is something that you don't have To read there will be people that will say but it's there. We see particular examples actually in Emma, so the very obvious is in Mansfield Park, which I'll come back to, but in Emma you see quite a few names that are linked to

There's a few references as well. It's not an easy comparison to make to hear now Jane Fair. But it's there, it's within there. I don't think we would today compare being governess with Ian Slave, but it's there within it. Mansfield Park is then also really richly intertextual. It's made pretty clear that the plantation That Mansfield Park is is part of the income for Mansfield Park. They're based in Antigua, and as with so many of Austin's novels, they always start.

And there is problems. There's problems. Are. When he returns, Fanny Price, our heroine, asks him a question about And that there's so much There's so much, it's true, it's truly post structural and derity, and it's what is happening off the page. So it is that. You think it was because she any more sort of explicit I don't know, met with I mean it was a very much a live topic at the time, and we know that certainly later on her brothers were very.

Movement. There's a lot of research. A brilliant scholar called Devanie Lusser has done a lot of work in this to look at pulling those out and seeing what. It was absolutely, you know, the slave trade and the end of the abolition and the treatment of enslaved people was the live of the day in a way that looking back from two hundred years we we miss

So there's so often with Austin there is a subcontext that we don't see. And it is interesting that of all her novels, Mansfield Park was the one that didn't necessarily receive a review in her life. Publisher John Murray commissioned Walter Scott to write a review of Emma. She was Christian. You didn't mention Mansfield Park.

Um so it is there, but it's is something that she she did read uh Cooper was her favourite poet. She we know she read Thomas Clarkson. So these are things that she is definitely reading. She is aware. She was a woman who was deeply aware of what was There's a lot in there. There's a lot she's talking a lot about what we would now call colonialism as well, sense and sensibility, the phrase about Nabobs and Colonel Brandon coming back. She sends off in her one of her juvenile Kitty or the Bower.

So she's aware it's there. It's not explicit.

But it's that. It's in the sun. So all of these displays that we've been talking about are here because we are celebrating the two hundred and fiftieth anniversary of Jane's birth. Um what else can people expect if they come and visit the house? What else are you doing around here for that anniversary? We're moving towards the end of the year we have had a series of Jane's big birthday. I mean if anyone deserves a big birthday party it's Jane Austen, but the first

Products basically and ways to connect with us and take it home. But there's still a lot more to come. And of course there is a bubble. So watch this space. There will still be a lot more coming from Build this place as a sense of home, a sense of community. That's really important part of what we do, a space to inspire and create. That's perfect. Lizzie, thank you so much for talking to us. Thank you.

Thank you so much for listening. And if you haven't listened to the full episode that we recorded at Jane Austen's house, please do scroll back a little bit and you'll find it. The podcast is gonna be taking a short break over the holidays, but we'll be back very soon. Until then, wishing you a very happy festive period, however you celebrate.