Sheep are bleating. But besides that, the only sound echoing across the basin of the gently-sloping valley is the wheels of my carry-on, scraping every singular rock of gravel on the unpaved driveway.
Other than feeling self-conscious that I’m disturbing the pastoral peace of the tiny Hampshire village that surrounds me, I don’t even mind that after six hours of travel (including the last fifteen minutes of walking) my journey is ending with me schlepping my rolling suitcase uphill. I don’t mind because I am in Chawton.
Chawton, England, is where Jane Austen lived with her mother and sister the last eight years of her life, in a house provided by her brother Edward. It’s where Jane was living when she became a published author, beginning with Sense and Sensibility in 1811, and where she either edited or wrote her other five published novels. When I moved to England last September to begin my creative writing master’s degree, the top thing on my UK bucket list was making the pilgrimage to Jane Austen’s House.
My suitcase and I crest the hill and I check into my Airbnb, an en-suite room in the stunning home of my hosts, Alan and Laura. Their home was originally part of the grounds of Chawton House, the estate Jane’s brother Edward inherited from wealthy relatives. Over tea with Alan upon arrival, he mentions that Jane would often wander through the estate’s gardens, which stretched all the way up to what is now my host’s backyard.
After asking for recommendations for dinner, Alan kindly tells me how to get to the Rose & Crown, a pub in Farringdon, a village twenty-minute’s walk away. In one of her letters, Jane references walking to Farringdon, maybe even taking the exact path I trod in the late afternoon sunshine.
The whole landscape seems staged for golden hour, and I make my way up a lane framed with oaks and ivy-choked fir trees. At the top of the hill, there’s a gap in the trees to my right, opening up the sky on a field of fresh, glimmering grass. I think, if I could always be in Hampshire in mid-April, then maybe I too could write some of the most beloved novels in the literary canon.
In the morning, I make my way down to the village proper, joining the trickle of other out-of-towners heading for the rectangular red-brick house that sits on the corner of the intersection of what seems like Chawton's only two roads. It’s a boxy building, and a bricked-over indention—formerly a large window on the house’s street-facing side—gives it the impression of a pirate with an eyepatch. (Later, I learn that the window was covered to give the Austen women more privacy in the drawing room from passersby on the street.)
Stepping into the ticket office housed in an outbuilding, it’s already busy, but comfortably so. Even though I’m taking this trip solo, there’s a hum in the air from being surrounded by other kindred spirits. People for whom Jane Austen means just as much as she means to me. They all care enough to travel to this out-of-the-way hamlet, for the chance of catching some echo of her presence in the place where she lived over two hundred years ago.
I follow the path from the ticket office to the main house, passing the courtyard hemmed in by the back of the house and the verdant, leafy garden that stretches out to the other side, and then I’m through the current main entrance. It’s not the front door that the Austens would have used, since that opens directly onto the street, but I am deposited into the drawing room all the same.
The room is set as it would have been arranged in the early nineteenth century, with allowances made for the steady stream of visitors that the house receives. There’s a piano in the corner with music sheets that Jane handwrote. Her father’s bookcase is along the back wall, even though he never would have lived here. It’s all immaculately restored, but the wallpaper is bothering me.
Featuring a pattern of vines and leaves on a golden background with garnet detailing, the wallpaper’s uniformity, crispness of color, and whimsical pattern feel too modern. However, there’s a fragment, trapped behind protective glass and smudged with two centuries of dust and time, an almost exact match to the recreation that surrounds me. Looking at the two side by side, a design that seems like it should only exist in my era, offers me a reminder that she was a person, not just the name on the covers of my favorite novels or the pencil-sketched face by her sister Cassandra that now hangs in London’s National Portrait Gallery.
On the room’s central informational placard is another touchstone of the real woman that Jane was. On January 27th, 1813, in the very spot that I’m standing, she read aloud from the published copy of Pride and Prejudice for the very first time, to a neighbor, Miss Benn. The novel was published anonymously, only noted as “by the author of Sense and Sensibility.” In that reading, Jane did not tell Miss Benn that she had written it, which seems like a perfect illustration of her personality, a woman who valued a good joke and her privacy.
In the dining room sits the crown jewel of the house’s artifacts, Jane Austen’s writing desk. It’s a twelve-sided table, small enough to move around the room to catch the best morning light, small enough to shuffle papers away if people start getting too nosy.
Upstairs, Jane’s bedroom holds a canopied single bed and an embroidered prayer that she wrote hanging on the wall. The other rooms on the second floor hold portraits and artifacts, like a shawl she made behind a glass case. There are also several interactive exhibits, including a sign asking “Which of [Jane Austen’s] characters do you think you are most like?” There’s the expected Lizzy Bennets, a few Marianne Dashwoods, one “boy crazy and delusional” Kitty Bennet, and a sticky note directly at the front identifying “Mr. Wickham,” which makes me laugh aloud.
Leaving the house, I wander through the garden, butter yellow and punchy pink tulips punctuating the edges of grassy expanses. It only takes me a few minutes to explore the whole space, and even though other visitors are reclining in cloth folding chairs nearby, I land on a secluded-enough bench.
My back is to the high brick wall that borders the property, shielding the house from its eastern neighbor. I settle there for a while, in the shade of a moss-covered elm tree that’s just beginning to leaf out, pulling out a notebook and pen that I brought along for the day, in the hope that inspiration strikes. It does. It’s still early days on the novel I'm working on, but it’s easy writing, even if I’ll scrap it all later.
I scribble a few diary thoughts in my journal too. It feels important to write: “I’m sitting in Jane Austen’s garden.” To remember this moment in some tactile dimension—a moment too sacred to only be memorialized in digital footprints: the photos I’ve taken, texts to friends, and whatever data my phone is capturing along the way.
After tea and cake at Cassandra’s Cup cafe across the road, I set out on the Chawton-Farringdon loop, helpfully laid out in a “Hampshire Walks” book that I’ve snatched from my Airbnb room (and will return). The end of the loop will bring me back along yesterday’s path, but the first section is through new territory. Mostly I encounter sheep, lots of sheep.
It’s the England I thought I wanted. Dreamy sunshine waking my soul up from the short, cold days of winter and pastureland for miles all around. And I’m in on the joke, I know I fit the stereotype of an American woman who’s got this romanticized idea of the UK and a cat named Mr. Darcy. I knew moving here it wouldn’t be all empire-waist dresses (thank God) and Jean-Yves Thibaudet orchestrations. But I let myself breathe in the pastoral ambience anyway, the heady feeling of wishes coming true.
The next day, after the six-hour return journey via bus, train, and London tube to return to Norwich, I’m back to the routine: prepping my workshop submission, running to Tesco, meeting friends in my grubby local pub on the corner, and there’s another cold snap. And no, my year abroad isn’t a Jane Austen novel, nor would I want it to be. It’s real and sometimes it’s hard, but most of the time it’s beautiful. I get the gift of taking a trip to walk in the footsteps of my favorite author—and then I get to step back into my own path.
Further Reading:
