Chasing Jane Austen
This summer I have been in Britain, meeting old friends and making new ones. I have visited a lot of places, some of them with a literary past. I have been chasing Jane Austen, a great novelist you should know.
We don´t study a lot of women who write, but there are, and some of them are very interesting. Jane Austen
wasn´t a rebel like Mary Wollenstonecraft but she dedicated her life to writing.
I am not going to bore you with a lot of biographical information. I just want to show you the places where I have been and make you interested in this woman.
She was born in Steventon, Hampshire (England) in 1775. Her father was a Vicar in the Church of England and she had seven brothers and one sister, Cassandra, her confidante. You can see a picture of the church and a plaque commemorating Jane Austen.
When She was 20, she fell in love with Thomas Lefroy, but they broke up because he was not able to marry her because she didn´t have money. She had another suitor, Harris Bigg-Wither. She accepted his marriage proposal but the next day she changed her mind and withdrew it. (Her sister and she never married) After that they moved to Bath, a beautiful place famous for its thermal springs. You can see the pictures of her house- museum there and a residential road called the Royal Crescent. A beautiful georgian building for rich people, built at a time when they had to pay additional taxes for their windows. Now some of these houses are apartments, hotels or belong to famous people.
The most amazing place for me was another of Jane Austen´s houses in Chawton, where she spent her last days. I could see the little table where she wrote and in a way, I felt she was still there. The day I was at that cottage they were celebrating two hundred years since the publication of her novel ‘Sense and Sensibility' and a lovely woman read a piece of it.
If you want to Know more about this writer you should investigate, write an essay about her, read one of her famous books: Emma, Pride and Prejudice, Sense and sensibility; or see the films about them: Clueless, Pride and prejudice, Sense and Sensibility, Jane Austen in Manhattan, La joven Jane Austen The Jane Austen Book Club, ( Conociendo a Jane Austen)...
Nick Johnson and Reyes Esteban
