To celebrate our 20th year of opening, the Autumn exhibition at Chawton House will be installed throughout the house, displaying some of the most precious treasures in the collection, and drawing on both Knight and Austen family history and early women’s writing with never-before-displayed objects, new acquisitions, old favourites, and items unique to Chawton House.

In our main exhibition space, the first part focuses on the Chawton House story. Whilst property traditionally passed to male heirs, the women who owned and lived in Chawton House played a crucial part in its history, both before and after Jane Austen’s lifetime. From the formidable Elizabeth Knight (1674-1737), the first female squire of Chawton House, to green-fingered Florence Knight (1850-1935), to whom the development of the gardens owes a huge debt, the women of Chawton House are foregrounded in this part of the exhibition. Their lives are represented in the letters they wrote, the cookbooks they contributed to, the novels they owned and their personal notebooks, providing snapshots from Chawton’s past. On display here is our latest exciting acquisition, a music book owned and signed by Jane Austen.

The more recent story of Chawton House includes the renovation of the house in the 1990s, the establishment of the charity, and the birth of the women’s writing collection now at our core. The second part of the exhibition focuses on this unique collection of early women’s writing (1660-1860).