Jonathan Thomas (00:12)
Welcome to the Angotopia podcast where we explore British history, travel and culture. This week we're diving deep into one of England's most beloved literary figures as we celebrate a major milestone anniversary, Jane Austen 250, which is celebrating 250 years since she was born. I'm your host, Jonathan Thomas. And today I'm joined by Sophie Reynolds, head of collections, interpretation and events at Jane Austen's house in Chawton Hampshire.

Sophie brings a fascinating background to her role, having spent 10 years at the V&A before finding her dream job at the very house where Jane Austen wrote and revised all six of her major novels. As both a writer herself and a lifelong Austen enthusiast who first visited the house as a teenager, Sophie offers a unique perspective on how we interpret and present one of literature's most influential voices. With 2025 marking the 250th anniversary of Jane Austen's birth, there's never been a more relevant time to explore her enduring impact.

not just as a novelist who helped shape the English literary tradition, but as a woman who challenged social conventions and championed female agency long before feminism had a name. We'll discuss how the house in Chawton was crucial to Austen's creative process, how her legacy has been shaped and sometimes sanitized by those who came after her, and why her work continues to resonate with readers across generations of culture. Sophie will share insights from her work preserving and interpreting Austen's stories, the challenges of running an intimate literary house museum,

and how her theater background influences the way she brings historical interpretation to life. Whether you're a devoted Janite or someone who curious about why this 18th century novelist continues to captivate millions worldwide, this conversation promises to reveal new layers to both the woman and the writer who gave us Pride and Prejudice, Emma and so much more. Welcome, Sophie.

Sophie (01:56)
Welcome! That was a very lovely introduction, thank you!

Jonathan Thomas (02:01)
Thank you. was a bit long, but we got there at the

end. So let's dive right at the beginning. You mentioned visiting Jane Austen's house when you were 17, long before you ever dreamed of working there. Can you take us back to that first visit and what drew you to make that pilgrimage as a teenager? What was the experience like?

Sophie (02:21)
Yeah, absolutely. So I first became aware of Jane Austen in 1995, along with so many of my generation, with the BBC adaptation of Pride and Prejudice, which, I mean, was just the most extraordinary phenomenon, not just in the world of Jane Austen, but sort of in TV history. It was a huge deal.

So I watched it, I was 11, give my age away. And I fell in love with it as so many people did, I think. Like it's amazing, even just amongst my colleagues, so many of us met Jane Austen through that adaptation. And it continues obviously to be very beloved and relevant today. So I began reading the novels and I read them sort of as a teenager. And then, yeah, I was about

16-17 and my godmother took me on a little day trip to Chawton And to be honest I don't remember a huge amount about it. It was more the sort of fact of it. I think it was probably before I was really aware of the idea of literary house museums. I certainly wasn't thinking about that as a career. I wanted to be a poet.

which is rather impractical, that was my teenage dream. ⁓ So was always fascinated by writing and writers and I loved Jane Austen. I went on to study English literature at university and then I did an MA in creative writing and then I sort of stumbled into a job at the V &A, which was incredible and completely shaped my life in so many ways. And I was based in the department of theater and performance there. So I had actually studied

English and theatre at university and that I suppose I somehow talked my way into a job. It began as an internship and then it became a job and I was there for 10 years doing all sorts of things. I ran festivals and special events and we did lots of sort of quite crazy things. We had a lot of fun. We were known as the sort of naughty department I think of the V &A. We sort of disrupted things a little bit so I did lots of things like

promenade theatre in the galleries and sort of quite immersive things like that. ⁓ So yeah, and then just about the right time, just as I was sort of starting to feel like I wanted a new challenge and to be honest, working at the V &A, it's the most enormous institution. So I was very drawn to the idea of working somewhere small. So I went from one of the biggest museums in London to probably one of the smallest in the country.

I mean, not quite. There are some very, very small museums out there, but, but Jane Austen's house is pretty small. We have about 16 people, ⁓ staff all together. Most of those are part-time. So, and it's a, very small site. It's a very modest house in a very small, but beautiful, picture-perfect village. Quite rural and...

It's, you know, a lot of our visitors turn up expecting Pemberley and it's not like that at all. It's much more like Barton Cottage in Sense and Sensibility. It's quite modest. ⁓ I mean, obviously by today's standards, it's a beautiful big house, but by the standards of sort of grand manor houses of the 18th century, it's very modest. ⁓ Yeah, but it's also just this extraordinary place. It's the real, it's such an important...

place in the, for so many reasons, in the history of English literature and Jane Austen is just an extraordinary figure for so many people. So it attracts visitors from all around the world which is really extraordinary.

Jonathan Thomas (06:18)
So, clarify something for me. I was curious, what's the relationship between Jane Austen's house and then Chawton House down the street? What's the fam- yeah, because I was very confused when I was trying to find somebody to interview. ⁓

Sophie (06:27)
Great.

Yeah, many people

are confused. the village of Chawton is, 200 years ago, the village of Chawton was owned by the Knight family. They were the local landowners. They actually had vast estates ⁓ in Hampshire. They owned Chawton, they owned land in Steventon, which is the village where Jane Austen was born. They also owned vast estates in Kent. Their house there was called Godmosham and is very large indeed.

they were very wealthy people. They didn't have any children of their own. So obviously the Knight family sort of descends, various different people inherit the title, inherit the land. But when Jane Austen was a child, the Mr. and Mrs. Knight, were sort of at that point, were the owners of all of this land and this wealth. They didn't have any children of their own.

So they were distant relations of the Austen's and on their wedding tour, this was when Jane and all of her brothers and her sister were children, they went around the country, this was quite typical on a wedding tour, they went to visit lots of different relations, it was a kind of version of a honeymoon. They visited the Austen's and Jane Austen's older brother Edward, he wasn't actually the oldest child, he was the third eldest son. He kind of caught their eye.

He was, I can't remember I'm afraid how old he was. He was, I think around 10, 11, something like that. ⁓ He was quite an attractive child. He was bright and playful and fun. And they got on with him and they actually took him with them on the rest of their wedding tour, which feels a bit strange to us now, but was relatively sort of normal at the time. ⁓ And then they took a great interest in him as he grew older.

and effectively what they did was adopt him. They didn't end up having any children of their own, so they took Edward on as their heir and he inherited their estates in Kent and in Hampshire. And Chawton House was part of his inheritance. So he didn't actually live there for very long. He mainly lived in Godmoshroom in Kent, but he owned Chawton House and he owned most of the village, if not the whole village really.

And Jane Austen's house, is not Chawton House, it's down the road from it, it's about half a mile away, something like that, much smaller, in the center of the village, whereas Chawton House is kind of in its park land and a little bit set away from the masses. ⁓ So this is quite a long story. I could write a biography rather than having an hour long chat with you about it, but essentially, ⁓

Jane Austen herself grew up in Steventon along with her brother, six brothers and a sister, which is around 13, 14 miles from Torchon in Hampshire also. It's quite near Basingstoke. Again, a small rural village. Her father was the rector of Steventon. When she was, how old was she? About 25. Her parents decided to leave Steventon and moved to Bath.

her father retired, partly so that his eldest son could take over the living of Steventon, partly because he wanted to retire. They wanted to move to Bath and have a nice retirement. So off they went. The boys obviously could do their own thing. They were all off in the world having careers. Jane and Cassandra, because they weren't married, had to stay with their parents. So they all go to Bath. Then her father dies. They don't have so much money anymore. They move around for around eight years. They're moving different...

places, they're in Bath, they go and live in Southampton, they stay with relatives and friends, it's all quite unsettled. And then eventually, right at the end of 1808, Edward Knight, who has inherited all this wealth, and frankly has had the wealth and the houses the whole time. His wife dies, and suddenly he decides that he can be generous. So he offers them a house either in Hampshire or in Kent, and they choose Hampshire, presumably because that's

going back to their roots, they know people in the area. So they move to Chawton Cottage as it's sometimes known. It's debatable how generous Edward is being there. He obviously is being generous because he's giving them a house. He could have given it a bit earlier, I would say. And also it's, he could have given them something a bit better and a bit bigger, but this is what he gives them. And they move into it. it is, then it becomes this incredibly important.

site for Jane Austen because she's had all this time, all these years of moving around a lot, not being really settled, not having all their things around them. And she hasn't written much in that time at all. She's tried to, she tried to write the Watsons, she abandoned that, but she hasn't really been able to write in the way that she did in her early twenties when she was in Steventon. When she gets to Chawton, she seems to just

find her writing mojo again. She has the space, she has the time, she is in a very supportive household with her mother and her sister and her best friend and they all take on all the sort of household jobs so that Jane has lots of time to write and she very quickly takes out draft novels that she wrote in her 20s. Eleanor and Marianne, which she rewrites, sends to a publisher, helped by her brother Henry who has

connections in that line, gets it published as Sense and Sensibility. She takes out another draft novel that she'd written at Steventon called First Impressions. She rewrites that again. There are ideas that both of these novels were originally written in epistolary form, so in a series of letters between different characters. That's not what they are when they're published, so we think that she does a lot of rewriting and editing. Also brings them up to date because they're of nearly 10 years of

over 10 years have passed. So she brings them up to date, makes them feel relevant, gets them published. Then she starts writing from scratch and she writes Emma, she writes Mansfield Park, she writes Persuasion. And then of course, as we know, she gets ill and she dies and she's 41 at her death. And she has published at that point four novels. She's got two novels which are completed but not published. Northanger Abbey, she seems to have decided not to publish.

Persuasion she basically hasn't had time to publish. After her death, her sister Cassandra inherits her work and she publishes those last two novels posthumously. those are the first novels that published in one set, kind of two books in one set of four volumes. And that's the first time that her name is put on the novels, which feels very significant. She never gets to see that. And another significant thing, and I'm so sorry, I'm aware that I've

totally no longer answering your question. She's buried in Winchester Cathedral and there is no mention of her writing on her tombstone. It's not till the 1870s that a plaque is erected that names her, you know, sort of says, and she was a writer, which obviously today thousands and thousands of people go to Winchester Cathedral every year to see her grave. And it's just extraordinary that the one thing that they are all visiting for isn't anywhere on there.

Jonathan Thomas (13:36)
Hahaha

No.

Sophie (14:06)
but I'm sure this is all stuff we're gonna come to.

Jonathan Thomas (14:08)
Well, thank you for that fascinating overview, because it's so interesting how this one place can become a nexus for everything we kind of know about a person.

And so I actually visited in 2013. It was ⁓ between Christmas and New Year's when we had visited for Christmas and basically had the house to ourselves because it was not tourist season. So you mentioned in our pre-conversation that the house had probably changed a lot since 2013. So how has the house changed in your realm as your role here?

Sophie (14:49)
Yeah, okay, well, I mean, it's always been a very special place to visit. So I don't want to say in any way that anyone visiting, you know, at any point has not had a wonderful experience. It's always been a very special house. And of course the like, the structure of the house is unchanged. ⁓ But if you visit today,

So one of the things that I and Lizzie Dunford, who's the director of the museum, have really been working on over the last five years, I suppose, has been to make the experience of visiting the house as immersive and atmospheric as possible because we were trying to think about what do people want from their visit? And essentially, they want to step back in time. They want to

be in the house where Jane Austen was and to see it as Jane Austen saw it and to experience something of her presence almost. A lot of people, we actually, we talk about this sort of thing a lot and one of the things that we feel very aware of is that for a lot of people, visiting Jane Austen's house is almost like a kind of pilgrimage. People, so many people just love Jane Austen so much and it's an incredibly important.

Those are people come from all over the world. It's on their bucket list. They're just gonna come the one time. They want to have ⁓ a very moving experience. They want to sense something about Jane Austen's presence there. And that's really difficult to do because she hasn't lived there for 200 years. And since her death, the house has been used for various other things. was lived in by other people before it came.

became a museum. And because Jane Austen wasn't really famous on her death, a lot of her own things, they weren't kept, know, they weren't sort of immediately put into a museum. The most sort of obvious comparison is the Bronte Parsonage up in Haworth. I don't know if you've been there. But when the Brontes died or sort of shortly afterwards, they were already famous. So people, you know, saved.

their household belongings and their clothes and their books and know, a lot of things were saved, whereas that wasn't the case for Jane Austen. So we do have some items of furniture that belong to the Austen family. We have some items, some pieces of jewellery that belong to Jane. We have some of her letters and we have some music books which are just extraordinary to see, handwritten music books that Jane Austen wrote out by hand.

So we have an amazing collection and we have, I would say, most of what there is that survives. But there are huge areas where we don't have anything. ⁓ what we do is we have ⁓ downstairs in the house, we have tried to recreate rooms as much as possible, looking like they would have done when the Austen's lived here. And it's only a small house, so it's just a couple of rooms. We've got the drawing room.

the dining room and then there's also a kitchen and there's a room sort of at the back which is called the courtyard gallery and that's a little bit different that's more like a temporary exhibition space. So we have sort of two main downstairs rooms the drawing room and the dining room and one of the main things well there's furniture there are some incredibly important pieces and you'll remember probably because this certainly hasn't changed in the dining room there's a very tiny table with

12 sides, it's really just like a little occasional table. And that is where Jane Austen is believed to have done a lot of her writing. So that's sort of a star object. ⁓ But in terms of the look and feel of the room, something that's quite important is that ⁓ some, I can't take credit for this, this happened before my time, ⁓ in I think around 2012, a conservator discovered fragments of historic

Jonathan Thomas (18:44)
I remember, yeah.

Sophie (19:04)
wallpapers in those rooms and in an upstairs room. And those have been recreated and put on the walls. again, like it's very, very difficult to know for sure, but they've been dated and we believe that those are the papers that would have been on the walls when the Austen's lived here. We then have items of furniture that they had at Steventon Reptory. So we have Reverend Austen's bookcase. We have a piano that is the same date that Jane Austen

Jane Austen's piano. And then some in terms of how so a lot of those things were there when when you visited but the things that are different I think are to do with kind of the sort of more immersive experience. So we have some audio playing, we have the piano playing. So for example in 2020 which is really when we began sort of working like this the world

closed down and we had the COVID pandemic. And when we reopened, and I'm sure that this was the same sort of everywhere around the world, we were, everyone was very scared and worried and we were trying to limit how many people were in a space at one time. We were trying to keep people distant from each other and you had to have signs up asking people to stay apart. And we were worried that at that point the house would feel

sort of clinical because of that. So we went all out to try and counteract that by introducing, we introduced scents, historic scents, so coal fires. At Christmas we have things like mulled wine and baking and freshly baked bread and laundry in the laundry room. Then we have audio throughout the house because as you said, sometimes the house is very quiet.

And sometimes visitors feel a bit like they can't talk because it's all so quiet and they have to whisper. So we wanted to make the house feel populated. So in most of the rooms, several of the rooms, I think four or five of the rooms, we have recordings of actresses speaking from Jane Austen's letters or from her novels. So there's a kind of little background, little hubbub. It's not intrusive, but it's just the sense that the house is occupied.

as it would have been when the Austen's were here. There's the sound of the piano from the drawing room. There is a washing line in the courtyard with the washing hanging on it, blowing in the breeze. There were things like that that just tried to make it feel a bit more lived in, I think. There's actually a museum in London that I found very inspiring called ⁓ Dennis Sabber's House. I don't know if you've ever been there. What they try to do, and it's just such an extraordinary experience to visit,

is create the sense that the people that lived in the house have just left the room. So the food is on the table, it's on the plates, there are clothes sort of strewn on a chair, there's the sense that it's completely lived in. So that was kind of our inspiration and we tried to take it to around the year 1816, is before, Jane Austen was sort of riding a bit of a wave, before she gets ill, she's published a number of novels at that point.

⁓ everything's looking quite good. So that's sort of the time period that we tried to pinpoint.

Jonathan Thomas (22:30)
So sounds like you've made the house more theatrical, which feeds from your theater background, right?

Sophie (22:32)
a little bit, yeah.

Yeah,

and it's been a lot of fun to do,

Jonathan Thomas (22:39)
That sounds

really cool. Now you've just given me like a reason to come visit Jane Austen's house again. And now I'm like, okay, now when am I going to put this on my itinerary? And I like that approach because I've been to other famous authors houses. Like a few years ago, we went to Thomas Hardy's house in Dorset where he was born. And it's a beautiful thatched cottage in a garden in the middle of the woods. And it's beautiful and it's great, but

Again, it kind of feels more like a museum than it would as a place that was very lived in because there's, like you said, there's no sound, there's no, everything's as it was when the family lived there, but it's quiet. And so it kind of feels like a mausoleum almost.

Sophie (23:19)
Yeah, absolutely.

something, I mean, obviously once I got this job, I started wanting to visit all the other literary house museums and artists house museums there are, and there are so many, particularly in the UK. And it is fascinating all the different approaches and something that we, again, we're talking, Lizzie and I were talking about a lot and a real problem that there seems to be with house museums.

is that it's the easy thing to do. And the thing that most house museums have to do just because of the objects that are available is to show the domestic life of the person that lived there. So you get to see the stuff in the kitchen, the pots and pans, the cups and saucers, and maybe the clothes and maybe the jewelry. And that's great. That's really fantastic because it creates a sort of, you know,

an idea of what their lived experience in the house was like. But something that's really difficult to do and that most museums don't do is set out to really showcase the creative life of that person. So something that we have done and just opened at the end of last year. So this was really something we did for Jane Austen 250.

And it was, we've done loads of things for this year, but this is probably the biggest thing and I'm so proud of it. I think it's quite amazing actually. And I think I can say that because I didn't just do, I had a lot of help. worked with Professor Catherine Sutherland at Oxford University, who's our patron and who really sort of spearheaded this project. We have created an exhibition, a sort of permanent exhibition in one of the rooms upstairs in the house.

that really focuses on Jane Austen's writing life and tries in a very small space, it's quite a dense exhibition, tries to tell as many stories as we can about how Jane Austen wrote, the importance of what she was doing, her style, where she was getting her ideas from, all her inspirations, how the publication worked, sort of everything.

the physicality of her writing. So we have things like inkwells and feather quills and 18th century laid paper that people can touch. We have a display case that looks at her reading material because it was so incredibly influential. She was a voracious reader and we have a number of her own books in the museum collection. We also know a lot about her reading material from

references in her letters and in her novels and things like that. So we're able to sort of pull out specific texts that were clearly really, really influential for her. We're able to showcase objects like we have two topaz crosses in the museum collection that belong to Jane and her sister Cassandra. They were given to them by their brother Charles who was in the Navy. And they're just a perfect example. They're a sort of gift for a museum curator of how

Jane Austen's life influenced her art because in Mansfield Park you have Fanny Price, whose brother is also in the Navy and whose brother gives her a gift of an amber cross. And it's just the most perfect example of how she was taking something in her own life and putting it into a novel. We have worked with the National Library of Scotland to have the John Murray archive. Murray was one of her publishers and we're able to showcase some amazing.

objects from their archive, things like a royalty check to Jane Austen for the money that was coming in for Emma, ⁓ a ledger showing all of her expenses for Emma. Most of her novels were published on commission, so she had to pay for everything before she got to take any money back. So that's really fascinating to see. In the middle of that exhibition, have a really beautiful display of first editions. So we have a first edition of each of the novels.

which is really exciting to see. They're very rare. We're able to look at the physicality of those books, everything from why she was publishing anonymously to why the three volume format, all sorts of things like that. So we're able to sort of really have this sort of deep dive into the writing life and the writing experience as well as the domestic experience, which I think is really special and maybe unique.

Jonathan Thomas (28:00)
It sounds absolutely fascinating. And you're doing a great job at answering my questions before I even asked them. So in addition to that exhibition, and how else is the house celebrating this milestone year? What other things do you have going

Sophie (28:00)
Yeah.

What are we doing? we are, well to start with, we're open a lot more than normal. ⁓ We are open most of the time. I think we're not open one day a month. So pretty much whenever you turn up to Chawton, you can come in and explore, which is great. It does make things a little bit hard behind the scenes, but that's okay. We're doing a lot of events. So we're running five quite ambitious festivals throughout the year.

We've done two of them. So we always do a Pride and Prejudice Festival in January, which marks the first publication of Pride and Prejudice. And it falls at the end of January. So it's a lovely time to have something that feels fun and exciting. And it's sort of, you know, it's a really dark, miserable time of year. So it's great to have a little burst of joy. In May, we had a Sense and Sensibility Festival, which was wonderful as well.

So in July, we've got an Emma Festival coming up, which will be a lot of fun. In September, we have a persuasion festival. Just gone on sale last week, I think, or the week before. And then in December, we'll have a festival that celebrates Jane Austen's birthday specifically, but also Christmas, obviously. So a lot of things that you, sort of special things, lots of talks, performances, all sorts of things, special.

themed tours, village walks, all sorts of things. We've also got lots of special events scattered in between though, so there's lots of opportunities to experience the house in a slightly different way. It's always lovely to have things like live music in the house or performance because it sort of brings it alive in a slightly different way. And that all feels very true to the Austen's own life in the house because they did a lot, I mean,

they were incredibly creative, fun people. They did lots of dancing and music and they would put on plays and they would do readings of novel readings for each other, all sorts of things like that. So we're sort of trying to stay in that vein. We've also written a book. Well, I've written a book which is doing really well, apparently. It's called A Jane Austen Year and it's a coffee table book essentially, which has a...

chapter for each month of the year and has lots of beautiful photos of objects in the collection and of the house and extracts from Jane Austen's novels that are set in that month and things in her life that happened in that month and things at the museum in that month and all sorts of things like that. So you can sort of obviously just dip into it or you can follow it throughout the year. And then we also have our own podcast also called The Jane Austen Year, which does the same thing.

But it's one episode a month dropped on the first of the month and it's very slow and mindful and beautiful and it's all the people that work at the museum lending their voices essentially to a kind of montage of things in that month. So it's very seasonal and it's sort of leaning into the need that I think we're all feeling this year for slowing down and

focusing on mental health and a real sense of wellbeing. So that's kind of, yeah, that's some of it. I'm sure there's more, but that's the highlights.

Jonathan Thomas (31:45)
Well, we will put links to all of those things in the show notes so that everybody can explore those and I'll have to get a copy of your book. ⁓ So, very lovely. ⁓ So, this art, I apologize, this question's on the list, I just thought of it. ⁓ So, do you get a lot of American visitors to the house?

Sophie (31:47)
Thank you.

I can show you. Here's one. It's here. It's very pretty.

yeah, go for it.

Jonathan Thomas (32:12)
And what do they primarily want to see and do when they visit the visit this place?

Sophie (32:16)
Yeah.

Okay, good question. Yes, we do. I think it's the easy answer. We actually get visitors from all over the world. I think North America is kind of clearly the winner. If it was a competition, how many people were coming from each country, but it is quite amazing and it's quite humbling. I think so many people from all over the world want to come to Chawton and...

sort of if they're in the UK for a kind of once-in-a-lifetime trip, they come here especially. So I think that's something that we always really try to be really mindful of, that it's a very special place to people. They might just be coming that one time and they need to have a wonderful experience. So as for what do American visitors particularly want to see, I think probably, okay, there are a few things, but the table.

think that's what everyone wants to see is the tiny writing table because it's very iconic and it is quite well it's very moving. We get many visitors who burst into tears over the writing table because not only is it seeing where this extraordinary writer who they admire so much worked but it's such a tiny table. It's so modest and you're thinking

So many writers, you know, think of Dickens, his desk is very large and imposing and has a leather top and he had a lovely comfy chair and he had his own room that he could shut the door and he could talk to himself and, you know, read aloud and it was all very, very fine. Jane Austen didn't have that. She had this tiny, tiny, funny little table and it's barely big enough for a sheet of paper. She...

The idea is the story goes and I have to sort of caveat everything because we don't know that much about Jane Austen. Most of what we know is based on her family, mostly her nephew and her niece wrote a memoir of Jane Austen in the 18, published in 1870. And a lot of what we know is drawn from that. We should take a lot of it with a pinch of salt. We know some things from her letters directly, ⁓ but the writing table.

we are told was convenient because she could move it around. She had quite bad eyesight so she would move it right into the best light essentially. The story is that she would place it by the window so she had the best possible light. She could also look out of the window. mean Jane Austen was certainly somebody who enjoyed seeing what was going on outside, keep an eye on her neighbours, take inspiration perhaps from people walking up and down the village street.

And then also, I think the thing that I find particularly moving about the writing table is that she was not, she was not, even in a household that was supporting her as much as they possibly could, she got this tiny, tiny table. Like she was just making do. She was scribbling on little bits of paper, covering them up when someone came in. She was writing in the dining room. Like people would come and go. It's not.

an ideal writing scenario. So that I think is obviously sort of most people's number one. Something else that American visitors love to see, and I'm afraid they can't see it right at the moment, although they will be able to again in a few months, is Jane Austen's ring. And I think that in particular that's of interest to American visitors because there's a bit of a story, I don't know if you're aware of this, Jane Austen's ring

Jonathan Thomas (35:34)
No, no it's not.

No.

Sophie (36:03)
we acquired in I think 2012 came up for auction, was before I worked at the museum, but it came up for auction and it was sold and it was actually bought by ⁓ Kelly Clarkson, the pop star. ⁓ And the museum then, ⁓ well the British government put an export license, put an export ban on it. The museum had I think two months to come up with 150 grand to buy the ring. The way that export

⁓ fans work is you have to pay the person what they paid for it. So she had spent 150 grand on it. We had to come up with that. And I think that happened in about a week. There was a public appeal and some people were very, very generous. So that happened very quickly and the museum was able to acquire it. And Kelly Clarkson was very gracious about the whole thing and wonderful. And she has a replica. Anyway, so the ring. I don't think so,

Jonathan Thomas (36:58)
Has she been there? Has she been to see it?

Sophie (37:02)
Maybe that's a step too far. But I have seen photos of her wearing the replica. So I think she's a real fan. So the ring, think particularly because it has that kind of American sort of connection, is always fascinating to American visitors. However, it is actually in America at the moment. There's an exhibition at the Morgan Library in New York called A Lively Mind. And that's their big summer blockbuster exhibition.

about Jane Austen and we sent a number of objects over there and the ring is kind of a superstar object in their exhibition. However, ⁓ we have got a facsimile ring on display so visitors don't lose out because they can try the ring on which I actually think is almost as good because you get to sort of, I don't know, cosplay a little bit and sort of imagine that you're trying on Jane Austen's ring. It's very small actually, most people

I actually live in fear that someone's gonna get it stuck on their finger and then we'll have to work out how to manage that. I hope I'm not responsible for that. I don't think I am. But yeah, so the ring is another object that people really love to see. And the other thing, if we have time for a third thing that people love to see, particularly Americans, but everyone. So we did some really interesting research about five years ago and...

Jonathan Thomas (38:15)
Absolutely.

Sophie (38:25)
We spoke to visitors and asked them all sorts of questions about the house and it was really, really interesting, their responses. One of the questions was what people's favourite room in the house was. And I would say 90 % of the people we asked said Jane Austen's bedroom, which I just think it, I mean, makes a lot of sense actually. It's quite a small room and it's very intimate. I mean, the reason that I was...

interested in that is that it's not a room with lots of Jane Austen's own objects in. I don't think it actually has any. But it's a room where people feel very, very close to her. It's very emotive. So I think just the experience of standing in that room, looking out the window and knowing that this is, I mean, it's not quite the view that she would have had, but very nearly the view that she would have had from her bedroom window. People just find that very special.

Jonathan Thomas (39:18)
So ⁓ let's get into some literary talk here. ⁓ You've described Austen as a feminist before there was such a word. Can you elaborate on how her writing challenged the conventions of her time, particularly regarding women's roles in agency? Because Regency Britain is almost an alien world compared to how we conceive of society now.

Sophie (39:25)
Okay, yeah, go for it.

Yes. So it's a bit of a dangerous thing to say really, isn't it? I'm not even quite sure when the word feminism was sort of coined, but I think it is fair to say that Jane Austen wrote novels where she gave female characters agency in a time when that didn't happen. The novels that Jane Austen grew up reading

And the novels that were all around her in the sort of ⁓ late 18th century were on the whole quite melodramatic. And they had heroines who screamed and ran away from villains and had to be rescued. And that wasn't the kind of women that Jane Austen wanted to write about. She wrote about people who were very realistic and

I think we can stray into sort of your next question about why she's so important, but it sort of all merges to me. She wrote realistic female characters. She could have invented the Bechshale test. She has, I don't think a scene without a woman in, and certainly she doesn't give her male characters particular...

they're not as three-dimensional as our female characters. They don't have thoughts and as much to say in the way that ⁓ you sort of might expect. I think something that's really important to remember when you're thinking about Jane Austen like this is that you have to go back to the novels. There are all sorts of ideas about Jane Austen today that are based essentially on the film adaptations, which is...

fine, like that's all great. I love the film adaptations and they certainly bring most people to Jane Austen I would say today. ⁓ But the film adaptations create very ⁓ attractive, sexy, heartthrob male characters and Jane Austen's novels don't tend to do that. She really sidelined the men.

So when Jane Austen is described as a romance writer, mean, there is obviously that is undeniable in that all of the novels end in a wedding. But actually none of the novels are really about a heroine trying to get married and trying to fall in love. What they are about are young women in difficult situation, difficult circumstances, because of

the rules of Regency society. So young women from the class that Jane Austen herself belonged to, which is essentially gentry class, probably with the exception of Emma Woodhouse, they're all gentry class who don't have enough money, who are at risk of not having a home unless they get married. Essentially exactly Jane and Cassandra's own situation. If you don't get married, what are you going to do? You are going to be a burden on your parents.

You're going to be Miss Bates in Emma. You're gonna be laughed at. You're gonna be a bit embarrassing. Society doesn't have a place for you. And I think the thing that makes me feel like she's a feminist is that she gives those women more of a chance than just get married. She doesn't throw it all up in the air because in the end they do all get married. She doesn't push it so far that

it would be complete fantasy for people reading at the time, but she does say, what if you don't just get married to the first person that asks you? What if you actually demand a bit more for yourself and you want to marry somebody that you respect and who respects you? And I think it's just as much about that as it is the kind of fantasy. I mean, it's way more that than the fantasy about falling in love. Although of course there is that too.

And fascinatingly, so one of the most famous ⁓ quotes I would say from Jane Austen, from Pride and Prejudice, is Lizzie Bennet saying that she will only get married if she is in love. And ⁓ brilliantly, Jane Austen wrote a letter to her own niece where she said exactly the same thing. She said, please don't marry this man unless you're in love with him.

So I think she is whole, you she's definitely demanding that. And she didn't get married, which is very significant. She had the opportunity to get married and she decided not to because she wasn't in love with the guy. And because she obviously decided that life as an unmarried spinster, which was the word, it's pretty horrible word, but that's what they were called then, was better because she was able to make her own decisions.

to some extent. So yeah, I think that is all absolutely fascinating. And the other thing is that she wrote realistic characters who people still relate to today, still recognize in their friends and people they know and in themselves. And that's quite an extraordinary achievement as well to really bridge the gap over the last 200 plus years.

Jonathan Thomas (45:27)
So in terms of the development of the English novel, and that's the big picture, what specific innovations did Austen bring to literature that we still see influencing writers today? I what did she do other than tell good stories?

Sophie (45:44)
Okay.

Yes, well, okay, I think telling good stories is the most important thing. But she, ⁓ she, well, she did a number of things, and I guess I hesitate to say that she completely was completely the innovator of any of them. But she did them brilliantly and did them consistently. So one of the things obviously that she's most well known for is her use of free and direct style.

Jonathan Thomas (45:49)
Okay.

Sophie (46:13)
She's really hard to explain quickly what that means, but essentially it's a writing device where you slip unconsciously into the voice, the narrator, the narrative voice slips into the perspective of one of the characters. So essentially she's writing, most of her novels are written from a rather unreliable narrative point of view. And it just gently

influences you as the reader so that your perception of events is skewed and you are thinking a little bit, you're just seeing things as Mrs Bennett would have seen them or you're just seeing them a little bit as Emma Woodhouse saw them and that's a really clever tool for just manipulating the reader a little bit. It's all very subtle. I think the point about Jane Austen is that she has the lightest touch. There's nothing

heavy-handed about anything she does. So she also writes realistic novels in a time when that really wasn't the norm. And again, like she wasn't the first person to do that, but she is the first person perhaps to do it very successfully and consecutively. And certainly there was before Jane Austen that wasn't the norm. After Jane Austen, that does become much more what the English novel is doing.

She wrote really brilliant, realistic dialogue ⁓ and that has, I think, been one of the big reasons that her novels have stood the test of time in the way that they have because really not, it didn't take all that long for people to start writing ⁓ theatrical adaptations of her novels. ⁓ Fascinatingly.

they were first used in girls schools as a sort of teaching aid. So the girls would put on scenes from Jane Austen's novels and you could buy like people wrote sort of books of duologues and ⁓ things that you could buy and use in schools. Then in the... ⁓ So this is kind of early 20th century and then in the 1930s you get...

the first stage adaptation, which was on Broadway of Pride and Prejudice. Then that became a film in 1940 with Laurence Olivier. And then you sort of snowball and you start to get film and TV adaptations. And the fact that the novels have such brilliant, speakable dialogue in them makes them very easy for a writer to adapt to a stage or film. So I think that that's a really like, and yet another thing that

she wasn't doing it for that reason but that's really really helped sort of keep her novels in the public consciousness. And yeah her novels are about everyday life, they're about things that people of her class in her time were experiencing and I think that that was a very novel thing to be doing because previously most novels were

heightened and melodramatic and had sort of heroes and villains and she obviously sort of just brought everything down to earth and wrote things that were recognizable from everyday life and that that was novel.

Jonathan Thomas (49:47)
So on top of that, how do you see Austen's relevance to contemporary readers, especially younger generations who might encounter her first through social media or modern retellings? How do you kind of square the circle with come back to the books?

Sophie (49:46)
That's it.

Well, yeah, it's a really interesting one. think it's really fascinating actually to see how Jane Austen's stories have had a real resurgence in the last five years even. I mean, she's been very, very popular ever since I would say the 1995, the year of 1995 was a real high point.

for sort of Austen consciousness in the world. There were four Austen adaptations that year. There was kind of Austen mania and she stayed very, very popular ever since then. But it is really noticeable that the last few years, the sort of TikTok generation have discovered Austen and I think really embraced her. And I'm sure there are so many reasons for that.

there are, she's very quotable, she's very memeable, you know, she's full of sort of pithy one-liners and brilliant characters that can be really skewed. So I really get why they find her. I don't know that it's even necessary to say you then have to go to the novels. I personally would because the novels are the best form of Austen, you know, there is no adaptation that's as good as one of the novels.

But not everyone wants to read novels. Certainly not everyone wants to read 200 year old novels. So I don't sort of feel, certainly the museum doesn't feel that we, we're not purists about Austen. We don't feel like you have to read the novels. You should come to it in whatever form you want. If it inspires you to go away and read them, then that's wonderful. But there are so many forms today that you can sort of

absorb Dino Stins through. are film adaptations, there are internet adaptations, there are audiobooks, there are, I don't know, graphic novels, there's so much. There are also hundreds of very beautiful editions of the novels and some people obviously don't read novels at all and other people collect hundreds of different versions of them because they're all beautiful and they want to get sort of, it becomes a sort of collector's item.

So she kind of spans this whole range. And I think what's extraordinary about her is that once you start to sort of look for it and you get your eye in, she is in sort of every aspect of our culture. She pops up on T-shirts and obviously the first line of Pride and Prejudice, it is a truth, universal knowledge. That is in every, I mean, it's been turned into every single imaginable universal truth that you could imagine.

on coffee mugs and on t-shirts and, you know, screen savers and just absolutely everywhere. So, I mean, that's sort of a phenomenon, it's in its own, totally its own thing.

Jonathan Thomas (53:01)
One wonders what she would think if she saw somebody wearing a t-shirt or holding a coffee mug with her words on it. Kind of like that scene in Doctor Who when Vincent van Gogh sees everyone enjoying his paintings. Like, can't even comprehend what they would think of us admiring and wearing the t-shirt. It just just...

Sophie (53:08)
Yeah.

I mean, I'm sure

she would think that we were all very weird, actually. I think my favorite thing about Jane Austen is the fact that she kind of has this, people seem to sort of have this idea of her as a very gentle, romantic soul in a bonnet and a long dress and, you know, perhaps going to a ball. And actually she was a very spiky person. She was, she didn't take.

Jonathan Thomas (53:22)
You

Sophie (53:49)
you know, she didn't take falls lightly. was, she wrote some extraordinary letters to her sister where she is very rude about their neighbors and their friends and their family. Like she was

brilliant. I mean, she was brilliant. And she liked other people to be brilliant, I think she was kind and lovely and wonderful and fun. But she was also just a human being. And I think, yeah, I think she would be quite amazed by the phenomenon that her work has become. And I don't think she'd understand it at all. I mean, I don't see how anyone could, it would be like catapulting yourself from nobody appreciating your work barely

barely being able to get it published and barely earning anything for it to the most extreme celebrity. Like it wouldn't compute, I don't think.

Jonathan Thomas (54:35)
So you mentioned that the time she lived in the house was a very creatively productive period of her life. Can you walk us through what daily life would have been like for her while she was in this sort of fugue state of creativity?

Sophie (54:51)
Yes, I mean, again, this is something that for the most part we're relying on the recollections of her nephew and niece who were teenagers at the time and who then wrote down their recollections some 50 years later. So it's not totally watertight, I'd say, but what they tell us...

is that the household probably rose quite early and it was usual for them to have breakfast at around 10am so they would probably get up and do some household jobs first thing and Jane was excused those and she played the piano for an hour first thing in the morning and the story is that she did that because the rest of the household who was her sister, her mum, her best friend

and ⁓ whoever else was staying in the house and the servants. The story is that the rest of them didn't really like the piano playing that much. So she would play when everyone else was busy. So I guess this is kind of eight, nine o'clock in the morning. She would play for an hour. Then they would have breakfast and Jane's job was to make the breakfast. And it was quite basic. It was probably tea and toast.

Jane's other household job was to look after the stores of tea and coffee and alcohol and sugar, which were all very expensive things that you'd keep under lock and key. So she would do the breakfast and then we don't have a specific timetable but presumably she would then have some time for writing. At some point in the day, most days, there would be some form of visiting so either they would go out and visit their neighbours and friends or

people would come and call on them. They might walk into Alton, which is the local town about a mile away to go shopping. And we have letters that Jane Austen writes to Cassandra where she says things like, there's one letter in particular where she says, ⁓ my mother is gonna go into Alton so I'm writing this letter and I'm gonna give it to her so she's gonna post it for me. So we know that they would do that. They would probably have...

dinner at about three o'clock, four o'clock in the afternoon. At that point, lunch hadn't been invented, so you had a kind of late breakfast and a big meal in the kind of afternoon. And again, like this is so flexible. In the countryside, it was probably eaten around three or four o'clock. In London or in a bigger city, it was probably eaten later that was more fashionable. Probably maybe five or six o'clock. And as time goes on,

that meal gets pushed even further back and then people start having a snack in the middle of the day and then that turns into lunch and then you kind of have the sort of meal format that we know today. And then after dinner they would probably all sit together probably I would say in the drawing room and they would do their sewing. ⁓ Needlework was an incredibly important part of being a woman in the 18th century. ⁓

they might read aloud. So we know that certainly there were specific occasions where we know that Jane Austen read, for example, Pride and Prejudice aloud to a group. ⁓ If they had ⁓ nephews and nieces staying, we know that there were occasions where Jane would play the piano and they would push the furniture back and they would all have a little dance. It's quite a small room, so it probably wasn't lots and lots of people, but they would just sort of do like country dances in the middle of the room.

I think it's always really important to remember that they're in the middle of the countryside and it's a period before things like gaslight had been invented. So as you'll remember from visiting the house in January, ⁓ it gets dark, it's probably raining, it's pretty cold. So they would have all sat, they would have tried to, and they weren't very well off. So they would have ⁓ tried to conserve lighting and fuel as much as possible. So they would have probably all sat together in the drawing room, had a fire, kept it warm.

Jonathan Thomas (58:51)
Yeah. Yeah.

Sophie (59:09)
had the candles in there, probably been doing their work, sewing work, ⁓ potentially somebody reading aloud, potentially they had guests. So there's kind of a, you know, sort of flexible sort of format that we can sort of see that the life would have been lived. And to be honest, within that template, it's quite hard to see where Jane was doing her writing. So presumably she was saying things like, I can't go visiting, I can't go and see that person, I'm gonna stay behind and have some nice quiet time and...

Jonathan Thomas (59:31)
Yeah.

Sophie (59:38)
crack on with work. And I'm sure that that was completely acceptable too.

Jonathan Thomas (59:43)
Yeah, I can't imagine. mean, it's hard enough to you know, with kids in the house and dogs and now we have chickens. it's, it's, ⁓ yeah, it's, it's always hard enough to find even 30 minutes to write, to have concentration to write. So I, sympathize.

Sophie (59:50)
Yeah.

Amazing. Yeah.

So the

Austen's had all of those things too, which again, like they lived on a tiny, tiny farm, essentially, as so many people did. So they would have had chickens and ducks and ⁓ they had donkeys. They had probably had a cow. They, we know that Cassandra had a dog. So yeah, like they had a kind of little tiny small holding. So that all had to be done as well.

Jonathan Thomas (1:00:24)
So I'm going to wrap up with a few quick questions so that to call the rapid fire around ⁓ and forgive me. didn't this one I just added because I just thought of it. ⁓ Have you seen the new film Jane Austen wrecked my life?

Sophie (1:00:34)
Okay.

my gosh, I haven't seen it yet. No, have you?

Jonathan Thomas (1:00:41)
Yeah, I saw it last week. It opened in an art house theater nearby. It was a lot of fun. So it's the most French British film I've ever seen. you know, it purports to be set in an English manor house. But as I was watching it, I was very skeptical. And it's I found out that it's actually filmed at a French manor house. So but it made it look very English. ⁓ But I'm sure I'm sure as a as a museum curator, you'll be following all the details.

Sophie (1:00:45)
Yeah good, now I'm looking forward to it, I'm gonna see it.

have to say this job does ruin most ⁓ adaptations for me because I'm sort of spotting the things wrong. Whereas obviously that really doesn't matter. what matters is whether it's fun to watch.

Jonathan Thomas (1:01:20)
Yeah.

So what's your favorite novel of Jane's?

Sophie (1:01:25)
Oh my goodness, that is such a hard question. Yeah, I love them. I love them all, So I'm going to go out. Oh, I don't know. mean, Pride and Prejudice was the first one that I met. So that and also it's quite different to the other ones, I think. It's almost like a fairy tale and I think it's completely wonderful.

Jonathan Thomas (1:01:28)
To get your favorite child, right?

You

Sophie (1:01:51)
perfect. So I do love that. ⁓ I also really love Persuasion. It's so beautiful. ⁓ I actually grew up, my life is slightly mirrored at Jane Austen novel because I grew up in Somerset and went to school in Bath. So I really sort of love the Bath aspects of Persuasion. I sort of really recognize it and I love the sort of the slowness and the sort of more maturity to that novel. ⁓

I love Emma because it's so clever and just she's really at the top of her game, I think, in Emma. I love Mansfield Park because she's doing something different and she's trying and it's bit darker. It's a bit more difficult. It's kind of about, it's really about mental health and it's just fascinating. I suppose I'm not loving Northanger Abbey and Sense and Sensibility quite as much, but I do love them. They're fantastic. And I'm going to go out on a limb and I know this was meant to be a quick...

But I'm just gonna throw something in which I think is interesting and you might not know about and certainly your listeners might not know about so there is a Jane Austen wrote a lot that was never published and when she between she started writing when she was age 11 and When she was about 18, she started writing novels. So between the ages of 11 and 17, she wrote a whole series of

kind of experiments. They're short stories. There are a couple of plays. There are some sort of things that begin and never get finished. There are a whole load of things written in letters. And they're called Jane Austen's Teenage Writings now. And they are all ⁓ sort of clumped together. there's a, there they are. And they are amazing. They are fascinating. They are so not what you would expect Jane Austen to be writing. They are really wild. She's

playing with what can I do? Like how does a story work? What happens if I like just don't have any characters or if I just abandoned them or like there's, ⁓ they're just amazing. There's a character who she kidnaps her children, they eat her fingers and they're all on a raft at sea. Like there are girls that steal each other's boyfriends and then like they.

get really drunk and then they all run away. Like it's just incredible and crazy and really fun. So I would recommend, I'm not gonna say they're my favourite because that would be kind of ridiculous, but they are really great. And if you've read all of Jane Austen's novels and you wish that there was more, it's very lovely to discover that there is.

Jonathan Thomas (1:04:32)
Alright, was a very long answer, which is fine. ⁓ So, what's your favorite TV drama?

Sophie (1:04:35)
Sorry, sorry.

The BBC Pride and Prejudice, I think it's perfect.

Jonathan Thomas (1:04:43)
I'm pretty sure 99 % of Anglotopia readers would agree with you. ⁓ then TV dramas aside, what's your favorite Austen film adaptation? It's a very different medium.

Sophie (1:04:56)
Yeah, I think actually it's probably Emma Thompson's Sense and Sensibility, which was also in 1995. And it's so interesting because the BBC adaptation of Pride and Prejudice is so accurate to the novel and that's why it's so brilliant. Emma Thompson famously barely used any of the lines from the novel. She wrote a lot of it herself, but I think the

soul of the film is very, very true to the book and I just think it's beautiful.

Jonathan Thomas (1:05:30)
All right, well, thank you for joining us on the Anglotopia podcast, Sophie, for those inspired by today's conversation about Jane Austen and her enduring legacy. You can plan your own visit to Jane Austen's house in Chawton by visiting janeAustens.house. We'll put the link in the show notes where you'll find all the information you need about visiting our special exhibitions and all the upcoming events for the 250th anniversary. And we'll also include links for her Sophie's book and all that wonderful stuff.

⁓ If you enjoyed learning about how Jane Austen's house continues to inspire visitors from around the world and Sophie's insights into bringing literary history to life, please subscribe, like us, or leave a comment. If you like the Anglotopia podcast, please consider joining the Friends of Anglotopia Club where you can get early access to new episodes and connect with other Britain enthusiasts. So join us next time as we continue to explore the people, places, and stories that make Britain's cultural heritage so endlessly fascinating to discover.

So thank you, Sophie.

Sophie (1:06:26)
Thank you, it was really fun.