Immersive Literature Experience
Year 12 English Literature pupils visited Chawton House: Centre for Women’s Studies and the Jane Austen Museum in Chawton this week to enjoy a day of academic enrichment and to experience university-style research and lectures.
Pupils were taken on a Curator’s Tour, led by Dr Kim Simson, who lectured at Literary Society earlier in the year. They learned about the history of Chawton House and Jane Austen connection via her brother Edward Austen. Following this, they took a curator’s look at the exhibition, Sisters of the Pen, an exhibition that places Jane Austen amongst her sister artists—the novelists and playwrights who inspired her, and those who, in turn, took influence from her. Most excitingly, pupils gained access to the rare book collection, where they were able to see first editions and learn about book handling and conservation.
After a trip to the tearooms, pupils then undertook a guided viewing of manuscript items in the collection and learned about how working with unique manuscript items like letters and diaries can make their research stand out.
During lunch, pupils visited the Parkland Exhibition in Dyer’s Barn, Exploring Austen’s Landscape before the afternoon’s workshop focusing on Writing Women’s Rights.
Towards the end of Jane Austen’s final complete novel, Persuasion, the heroine Anne Elliot laments stereotypes of women in fiction, noting ‘Men have had every advantage of us in telling their own story. Education has been theirs in so much higher a degree; the pen has been in their hands.’ The works in Chawton House’s library of women’s writing tell a different story, with many women from the seventeenth to the nineteenth centuries writing to earn livings, to support children, to address the gender inequality they saw in the world, or to shape new types of female heroines.
In this workshop, pupils met some of the most famous early feminist writers such as Mary Wollstonecraft alongside their lesser-known contemporaries, exploring the ways that they started some of our most important current debates, from gender difference to education, equal pay to #MeToo.
After a jam-packed session at Chawton House, pupils visited the Jane Austen Museum, experiencing a unique insight into the life she led in the most cottage compared to the grandeur of manor.
