Reading with Austen

Over a fifteen-year period from 1798 to 1813, Jane Austen visited her wealthy brother Edward at Godmersham Park on six occasions, for a total of about ten months. Eight years her senior, he was the most fortunate of her six brothers. Adopted in 1793 by a rich, childless couple, Thomas and Catherine Knight, he subsequently became heir to all their estates, including Chawton House in Hampshire and Godmersham Park in Kent. In 1798, he and his growing family moved into Godmersham Park, a fine Palladian building dating from about 1732, which contained a large library in the east wing, added to the house in 1781. In 1812, on the death of his adoptive mother (his adoptive father had died in 1794), Edward and his family formally changed their name from Austen to Knight. As we know from her surviving letters written during her stays at Godmersham, Jane spent much of her time there in the library, reading, writing, and browsing the shelves.

Those shelves, regrettably, exist no more. Although the house survives in much altered form, the library has been turned into offices, and the three immense bookcases that it contained, each one about fifteen feet wide, were last seen in the 1920s. Happily, however, an invaluable guide to the contents of the library has survived: a two-volume catalogue compiled for Edward in 1818, just a year after Jane's death. It provides the titles of some 1,250 books, many in multivolume sets. Some five hundred of these titles, well over a third of the total, are extant today, on loan to Chawton House from their present owner, Richard Knight, Edward's great-great-great-grandson. In addition, a considerable number of books have migrated over the years to various locations in the United Kingdom, the United States, Canada, and Australia. They can be identified by the presence of one of several bookplates used by members of the Knight family or by ownership signatures.

In August 2015, I spent a month as a visiting fellow at Chawton House Library, studying the books in the Knight Collection. This gave me the idea of creating a website, entitled Reading with Austen, that would show each book in its proper position on the original shelves at Godmersham Park, as Jane Austen would have seen it. The website, indicating which Godmersham Park items are extant, at Chawton House or elsewhere, took three years to build from its beginnings to its launch at the JASNA AGM at Kansas City in September 2018. Reading with Austen aims to give as much information as possible about the items in the collection. In addition to bibliographical information, the site provides, where possible, links to online editions as well as photographs of the spines and title pages of extant volumes, together with their bookplates and marginalia.

Reading with Austen will, I believe, enable closer study of the literary quotations and allusions in Austen's novels and letters than has hitherto been possible. Here is just one example, first noted in a recent article by the classicist Herbert W. Benario. In Northanger Abbey, Elinor Tilney mentions her pleasure in reading "the genuine words of Caractacus, Agricola, or Alfred the Great" (qtd. in Benario 222). As Benario points out, Austen would have been familiar with the two Romans—Caractacus and Agricola—through her reading of the historian Tacitus. Godmersham Park Library possessed four copies of Tacitus, including one of 1728 in the English translation of Thomas Gordon. Austen would have had ready access to this volume during her first, two-month visit to Godmersham in 1798, when she was writing Northanger Abbey, and might well have written Elinor's panegyric on history at a library table, with Edward's copy of Gordon's Tacitus ready to hand.