Manors and meadows

This December marks 250 years since Jane Austen's birth. To celebrate, Jack Watkins ambles around Chawton, where the writer penned novels that changed fiction forever

- Jack Watkins

Austenland - is there such a place? If so, it's to be found in drawing rooms and parlours, not in sweeping vistas. So it's appropriate that the Hampshire village of Chawton, Jane Austen's home for the last eight years of her life, lacks wild natural drama.

"There is very little description of place or setting within her novels," says Lizzie Dunford, director of Jane Austen's House - the author's former home, now a museum. "The books aren't about that. They are about people, and the way they interact, grow and change." But, she adds, they are also "about having a safe and secure home in which you are respected and valued for who you are. This is what she found for herself in Chawton."

Jane moved into the property, once a farmhouse and then a coaching inn, in 1809 with her mother and sister, Cassandra, and a friend, Martha Lloyd. Having spent her first 25 years in Steventon, another small Hampshire village 15 miles away where her father was rector, she then endured unsettled periods in Bath and Southampton, beset by family cares that hindered her efforts to write.

The green, fertile meadows and gentle inclines of Chawton, serenely undramatic, offered both a balm and a stimulus. Within eight years she was able to write those novels that have so influenced English literature and culture.”

It was in Chawton that she revised for publication Sense and Sensibility and Pride and Prejudice, and wrote Mansfield Park, Emma and Persuasion. But what impact does Jane Austen's House have today?

Never underestimate the power of a visual connection. Some visitors burst into tears on seeing her writing table, report custodians. It is a truly tiny piece of furniture, close to the dining parlour window by which she'd sit, giggling at out-of-breath neighbours scuttling along to catch the coaches that stopped near the front door.