A room with a view

Jane Austen spent the last days of her life in rented lodgings in Winchester, Hampshire. Adam Rattray describes the remarkable recent discoveries made about the house in which she died

- Adam Rattray

ON May 24, 1817, Jane Austen left Chawton, Hampshire, in the company of her sister Cassandra, her brother Henry and her nephew William. A cottage in the village—now Jane Austen's House museum (COUNTRY LIFE, August 28, 2013)—had been her home since 1809. Their destination was No 8, College Street, Winchester, a lodging house, from where Jane would seek medical treatment from a well-known physician, Giles King Lyford. He was surgeon-in-ordinary at the nearby county hospital and his treatment had already alleviated the suffering of her illness. Consequently, she explained in a letter to her friend Anne Sharp on May 22, 1817, 'Instead of going to Town to put myself in the hands of some Physician... I am going to Winchester instead, for some weeks to see what Mr Lyford can do further towards re-establishing me in tolerable health.'

The task of securing lodgings in Winchester had fallen to Jane's old friend Elizabeth Heathcote, née Bigg, who lived in the cathedral close near her sister, Alethea. Both sisters had long overcome the disappointment of Jane's rejection of their brother, Harris Bigg-Wither, even if their one-night engagement in December 1802 must have caused a few moments of awkwardness. As friends who wrote openly to each other, they would also have been aware of Jane and Cassandra's limited means when finding them lodgings and, in his posthumous biography of his aunt, James Edward Austen-Leigh gratefully records that Mrs Heathcote and Alethea 'did all that they could to promote the comfort of the sisters, during that sad sojourn in Winchester, both by their society, and by supplying those little conveniences in which a lodging-house was likely to be deficient'.