England

I have so many matters to write about, that my paper will hardly hold it all. Little matters they are to be sure, but highly important. ~ Jane Austen, in a letter to her sister

Same, Jane, same.

The morning got off to a rough start. Because of what was going on with my companion, I had to scrap most of what I had planned for the day. The one that was hardest for me to let go of was doing initiatories for some of my English ancestors in the London Temple. But adjust we must!

We needed to get back to Heathrow to pick up the rental car. My original plan was to take a rideshare there, but every app I downloaded and attempted was unhelpful for where we were in outer London. Took forever to get out of the city between bus and train timetables, but we did eventually make it!

Before we knew it, we were heading down the M3 in a turquoise Citreon headed towards the village of Chawton.

Chawton is where Jane Austen lived the last eight years of her life and wrote and published all six of her complete novels. It was an absolute dream to come here!

We ate at a pub across the street from Jane’s house. Cute decor. Kind employees. Very mediocre food. I’m easy to please, guys, and I wouldn’t eat there again. The food wasn’t even worth taking a photo of haha.

The car and restaurant window sill decor, both with Jane’s house in the background.

Then we started our tour of Chawton Cottage! It felt very surreal to walk through this home and sit in this garden where an ordinary woman lived an ordinary life, likely having no clue the impact she’d have on oh so many for generations after her.

Can we talk about the fact that Jane’s mother was also very clever? Look at this rhyming recipe that she wrote. This tickles me pink:

This is the desk where Jane presumably wrote. Why it was oddly tiny no one knows:

Do you see the rich wallpaper?? 😍 There are three different wallpapers used in her house today that are replicas of original patterns in her home. I now have two things on my dream home wishlist:

1. A roll top bath (that’s been on my list for a while 😉)
2. Wallpaper from her house! The company that provided it for the museum also sells it to the public. My favorite is the Chawton vine as seen here. In the gift shop, they sell journals with the wallpaper prints for the covers. You can also purchase them online here.

Above, clockwise from top left:

1. The view out of a back window. How many times did she look out of this same window? It’s the little things like this that ignite my imagination.
2. Opposing view from the bakehouse.
3. A signed extract from Winston Churchill’s WWII memoirs. P&P helped him escape his anxiety and the uncertainty of life during the war. I just love the image of his daughter reading it to him from the foot of his bed while he was lying sick.
4. They put a lot of time and effort into keeping up the garden, for which I am very grateful. It is beautiful!

After Chawton, we headed for nearby Steventon, an even tinier village where Jane lived the first 25 years of her life. We passed Wheatsheaf, a roadhouse where the Austens sent and collected their mail almost every single day. I had originally planned to eat at the pub there, but it didn’t work out.

Down a tiny lane that felt like the backroad of a backroad is St Nicholas Church where her father, George Austen, preached. As a young girl, Jane wrote her name and those of fictional husbands into the marriage register. Haha!

Some notes from my pre-trip research:

• The Austens lived in a nearby rectory that no longer exists. The coordinates are roughly 51°13’39.1”N 1°12’51.7”W. In the picture of a meadow above, their home would have been somewhere in the background.
• Halfway up the nave is a plaque with her name.
• In the chancel to the left is a memorial to her brother, James, and his two wives, Anne and Mary.
• Underneath that, on the floor, is the gravestone of Jane’s maternal grandmother, Jane Leigh, who lived with the Austens until her death.
• In the cemetery to the left of the church are the graves of James and second wife Mary—a large flat stone with an inscribed metal plate.

I discovered there are public footpaths through the meadows between the church and where her home would have been. I took a walk along these paths and wondered how many times Jane made this same walk. Or if she climbed the giant yew tree in front of the church as a child. Fun to think about.

I won’t go into detail about some of the more difficult parts of this trip, but it was a deeply challenging experience for me and took time to recover from afterward. Even so, there were moments of real kindness and awareness that carried me through. One of those came when my bishop reached out at just the right time while I was walking here—something I really needed. I’m grateful for the quiet ways God is aware of us and supports us when we’re struggling.

We decided to call it an early day and went to our Airbnb in nearby Whitchurch. I could get very used to it here…

I made sure to breathe in the beauty of this country every day!

I ran to Tesco (supermarket) to get some food: fruit, veggies, hummus, “American” pizza (something that I think was supposed to look like pepperoni pizza? 😜), salad, and my mom’s favorite chocolate—a Cadbury fruit and nut bar. It’s funny, I never cared for it when she was alive. But ever since she passed away, it’s my go-to chocolate when I’m in the mood. When she passed and I was actively grieving, my therapist told me that one of the surest ways to feel connected to her was to cook and eat the food she used to make for me. Well, thanks, Cadbury! And thanks, England, for supplying Cadbury in spades!!

Even though we speak the same language, there are enough differences that make me chuckle:

I took my first in-country bath and went to bed early.