Jane Austen's House Museum

Although Jane Austen died an anonymous author, by the 1870s her identity was well known and readers were beginning to make the pilgrimage to Chawton to see the modest village house where she had written and revised all her major publications. By the 1940s another generation was well on its way to securing the house as a permanent memorial. Today, after seventy years as a public museum, Jane Austen's House has welcomed over one million recorded visitors and remains the most precious Austen site in the world, the epicenter of Jane Austen's England. Indeed, while it would be easy to fill a gazetteer with the places known to Austen—the first such publication dates from 1891—Jane Austen's House presents an unsurpassable authenticity (Adams). It is authentic for having been home to Austen's extraordinary creative genius as well as her day-today dwelling place, and it remains true to Austen's time in its little-changed village setting and beautiful quality of light. For the organization there is authenticity in being guardians of a famous collection of objects closely associated with Jane Austen, and also for having been founded and maintained as a charity dedicated to furthering public understanding of her life and works as well as enabling visits to her former home.

Today, authenticity is in fact among the governing values of the organization. One task ahead is to decide what this means in relation to the ways the house and its collections are presented to the public. What greets the visitor now are rooms and displays evolved over decades. During the 1950s five rooms were laid out according to their function in Austen's day, based on a proposal by Dorothy Darnell, a founding member of the Jane Austen Society.¹ Over the years, as the collection has developed, as public expectations of museums have grown, and as development funding has become available via bodies such as the National Lottery Heritage Fund, further themed displays have been created, more rooms have been opened, and others have been represented. Old photographs show that, along the way, authenticity has been expressed differently by different curatorial hands.

The organization has undertaken some small moves toward presenting the house and collection with greater historical accuracy. For example, two rooms have been redecorated with hand-blocked papers reproduced from wallpaper fragments discovered within the house from Austen's time. Elsewhere our curators have corrected historic cataloguing errors and tightened the development policy of the organization's collections to prioritize objects such as the letters Jane Austen wrote at Chawton, which both materially embody Austen and bring her subjects back home (Bilbey 25–26). Now, with the organization poised to undertake a program of vital building repairs, we have an opportunity, perhaps the first since 1949, to reconsider the presentation of the house in its entirety.

There are many questions waiting to be answered. How, for instance, do we present the house as the vessel of Austen's creativity, genius, and wit while acknowledging the three other women she shared her home with and the countless domestic duties they each undertook? How do we physically define Austen's creative space when we possess her writing table but no writer's study or fiction manuscripts? How do we illustrate the social and historical context of her time within such a small domestic space? What role might future acquisitions play? Then, once the interpretive content is agreed upon, how best do we integrate the layered hardware of display cases, text panels, audiovisuals, and touch screens? Finally, are there elements of the current presentation that are patently inauthentic? Examples include distracting modern furnishings, objects no longer associated with Jane Austen, or others bearing too peripheral a connection.

In developing plans for any new presentation, the other challenge will be to better understand the organization's audiences: to establish the degrees of "Austen knowledge" each person brings with him or her, to understand what is especially valued about the experience of visiting, and to learn where change is desired. We will also need to consider how to present the house...