Driveway to Chawton House

Image: © Marathon Taken: 13 Aug 2011

Chawton House and Church are a little way out of the village. The house at the end of the drive here was originally Elizabethan but has been altered since. On the left are the stables, dating from 1591. In 1781, Thomas Knight II inherited Chawton House, but when he and his wife Catherine showed no sign of having children of their own, they adopted a son of the Reverend George Austen, who was a cousin of Thomas Knight's. The Austens had six sons and two daughters, and the Knights adopted the third eldest son, Edward. Edward Austen Knight eventually took over management of the estate, and in 1809 he offered a house in the village to his mother and two sisters Cassandra and Jane, and it was this that brought Jane Austen to Chawton. The house is now Chawton House Library whose mission is ".. to promote study and research in early English women's writing; to protect and preserve Chawton House, an English manor house dating from the Elizabethan period; and to maintain a rural English working manor farm of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, for the benefit of everyone."

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