WE become aware of country houses in the novels of Jane Austen in different ways. Her descriptions are sparse; there are no Trollopian musings on the colour of old stone or strangely elaborated Dickensian interiors, but the houses spring into the reader’s imagination. They are the vital surroundings around and within which the action takes place and, at the same time, symbols of longing and loss, of status, settled responsibility and order.
Although seeking a single model for a fictional creation is a risky enterprise, familiar surroundings do provide points of reference and the domestic settings of Austen’s own life point to possible sources of inspiration. They include the handsome rectory at Steventon, Hampshire, where she grew up in a lively, clerical family with a well-connected mother. On her father’s retirement, the rectory passed to her clergyman brother James and, after some unsettled years, Chawton Cottage, in the Hampshire village of Chawton, became Austen’s home (with her mother and sister Cassandra), from 1809 until she died in 1817.
The cottage was part of the estate of Chawton House, inherited by her younger brother Edward from distant cousin Thomas Knight —the main house, a memorable gabled, late-16th-century building, extended in the mid 17th century. Other local country seats, such as The Vyne, Hackwood Park, Hurstbourne Park and Kempshott Park would have been known through social interactions. Their owners were mostly titled ‘nobility’, but only the gentry Chutes at
