chawton house library events diary february - june 2016

Events DiaryFebruary - June 2016

www.chawtonhouselibrary.org

FEBRUARY

Call 01420 541010 Email [email protected] book: Visit www.chawtonhouselibrary.org

Chawton House Library conserves a unique collection of women’s

writing (1600-1830) within the Elizabethan manor house once

owned by Jane Austen’s brother Edward.

Visitors can enjoy the ‘Great House’ referred to in Jane Austen’s

letters, now sensitively restored, relax in the peace and tranquillity

of the gardens, and find inspiration in the lives and works of our

women writers.

6.30pm drinks reception for 7.00pm talkEvening TalkRomantic London

Matthew Sangster (University of Birmingham)London around the turn of the nineteenth century was a burgeoning metropolis immortalised by writers, publishers and artists across the city. By using Richard Horwood’s remarkable PLAN of the Cities of LONDON and WESTMINSTER the Borough of SOUTHWARK, and PARTS adjoining Shewing every HOUSE (1792-99), Matthew Sangster examines the different visions and versions of London that survive today, explored on his website Romantic London. By contrasting poetry by William Wordsworth and William Blake, and novels by Frances Burney and William Godwin, with grand visions of the city like Rudolph Ackermann’s Microcosm of London and squalid accounts of inequality and exploitation like Harris’s List of Covent-Garden Ladies, Matthew will consider the ways that London changed for the men and women who imaginatively and actively inhabited it as genres developed, distinctions sharpened and the city reached an unprecedented size and eminence.

Tickets: £11; Students/Friends £8.50 (includes drinks and canapés)

18FEB

Chawton House Library is open to the public for self-guided tours around the House and Gardens from 21 March to 28 October 2016 at the following times:

Monday to Friday 1.30 pm to 4.30 pmSunday 11.00 am to 5.00 pm

Admission fees are: House & Gardens Gardens OnlyAdult £7.00 £4.00Child (6-16) £3.00 Free

Emma at 200: from English Village to Global AppealIncluded in the House and Gardens entry fee from 21 March to 25 September is access to this exhibition marking the 200th anniversary of the publication of Jane Austen’s Emma.

‘English verdure, English culture, English comfort, seen under a sun bright without being oppressive.’ Emma, 1816

07FEB

11.00am to 5.00pmSnowdrop SundayVisit the gardens to enjoy the snowdrops on the south lawn, discover the walled garden and explore the wilderness. Soup, hot drinks and cake will be available to purchase in the Old Kitchen.

Tickets: £4; Children: £2

6.30pm drinks reception for 7.00pm talkEvening TalkJane Austen and the Common Reader: Responses to Emma in 1816

Peter Sabor (McGill University)Emma attracted more contemporary reviews than any other of Jane Austen’s novels. One of these critiques, by Walter Scott, showed considerable insight into Austen’s art, and its merits were acknowledged by the author herself. While Scott’s and the other published reviews have often been discussed, much less attention has been paid to responses to Emma by private individuals: ‘the common reader’, in Dr Johnson’s famous phrase. These responses include the forty-one that Austen herself recorded in her ‘Opinions of Emma’, as well as many others unknown to her. Johnson praised what he termed ‘the common sense of readers, uncorrupted by literary prejudices’. This talk will consider whether readers of Emma in 1816 showed the kind of common sense that Johnson admired, or whether they were simply befuddled.

Peter Sabor, Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, is Professor of English and Canada Research Chair at McGill University, Montreal, where he is also Director of the Burney Centre. His publications on Jane Austen include an edition of her early writings, Juvenilia (CUP, 2006), and The Cambridge Companion to Emma (CUP, 2015). He is currently a visiting fellow at Magdalen College, Oxford; in 2015 he held visiting fellowships at Chawton House Library and at the Houghton Library, Harvard.


MARCHFEBRUARY

To book: Visit www.chawtonhouselibrary.org Call 01420 541010 Email [email protected]

1.30pm to 4.30pmCard-making workshop with Artist in Residence, Angela Thames Join our Artist in Residence for an afternoon cutting and printing your own lino cuts inspired by the flora and fauna from books held at Chawton House Library. Angela is running a creative workshop to introduce the printing techniques of lino cutting. She uses this process in her own work to illustrate her unique hand-made artists books.

Angela graduated from the University for the Creative Arts in Farnham in 2006 with a degree in Fine Art and has been printmaking and making artists books in her studio in East Hampshire ever since. She has taught workshops across the South East of England and her work can be found in public and private collections in the UK and Italy.

Tools, lino, inks and card are supplied. Extra materials can be supplied at a small cost. We advise booking early as places are limited.

Tickets £20; Students/Friends £18.50

23FEB

03MAR

MARCH


2.30pm to 5.00pmMother’s Day TreatMany of our women writers were mothers, including Elizabeth Blackwell, a remarkable woman who produced a beautifully-illustrated Herbal – a book of plants for physicians, describing their appearance and uses in medicine – as a means to support herself and her child and free her husband from debtors’ prison.

If you are looking for a way to give your mum a thank you treat, what better way to celebrate Mothering Sunday than a visit to Chawton House Library? Tickets include a traditional afternoon tea, a talk and preview of our new Elizabeth Blackwell herb garden, self-guided tour of the house, and a gift for Mum to take home.

Tickets: £20; Family ticket £55 for two adults and up to three children

MARCH

06MAR

6.30pm drinks reception for 7.00pm talkEvening TalkDorothy Wordsworth: as revealed through her manuscripts

Jeff Cowton, MBE (The Wordsworth Trust)‘I gave him the wedding ring with how deep a blessing! I took it from my forefinger where I had worn it the whole of the night before – he slipped it again on to my finger and blessed me fervently.’ Dorothy Wordsworth (1771-1855), October 1802

Upstairs in Dove Cottage, the famous poet William Wordsworth parts from his sister Dorothy in order to be married to Mary Hutchinson. She documents this private ‘ceremony’ in her journal, written at the cottage in Grasmere. Little of her writing was published in her lifetime. Jeff Cowton, Curator at The Wordsworth Trust, delves into the life of Dorothy through her journals, letters and poetry, found only in manuscript owned by the Trust, and presents her as a vibrant and important writer of the period.


17MAR

27MAR

11am to 5pmEaster Sunday at Chawton House LibraryExplore the walled garden and the wilderness while hunting for Easter eggs! Each child gets a prize and activity pack. Refreshments will be available in the Old Kitchen.

Tickets: Standard admission price + £1.50 per child

APRIL


APRIL

02APR

07APR

6.30pm drinks reception for 7.00pm talkEvening TalkThe Other Jane: Miss Scott of the Sans Pareil Theatre

Jacky Bratton (Royal Holloway, University of London) While Jane Austen was laying down the pattern for the Romantic novel in rural Hampshire, another writer called Jane, known to the world of her day as ‘Miss Scott,’ lived in London’s Strand above her father’s shop, making a similarly central contribution to the foundation of the West End stage. She persuaded her father to build the theatre that became The Adelphi, and she managed it herself, writing and starring in more than fifty plays, from gothic melodramas and multi-media spectacles to modern comedies. In recalling the formative contributions of Georgian women to modern culture, we should not forget ‘the other Jane.’

Jacky Bratton is Emeritus Professor and Honorary Fellow of Royal Holloway University of London. Her work has explored popular culture in the long nineteenth century, especially the theatre; her most recent publications are The Making of the West End Stage (CUP 2011), and a collection of plays from the early work of Charles Dickens created for the West End of his day, to be published by Oxford University Press.


Matinee 1.30pm refreshments for 2.00pm performanceEvening 6.30pm refreshments for 7.00pm performanceEvelina in SocietyThe John Kerr CompanyA charming adaptation of Frances Burney’s Evelina (1778), which tells the story of a young country girl’s introduction to London society and the adventures that follow, told in letters to her guardian. The show combines narration with delightful period songs and piano music.

Maureen Lyle (Adaptation and Narration), Abigail Sudbury (Soprano), Gary Branch (Piano)

Tickets: £18.50; Students/Friends £15 (includes refreshments)


MAYAPRIL

6.30pm drinks reception for 7.00pm talkEvening Talk‘My Dearest Tussy’: Coping with Separation during the Napoleonic Wars – the Fremantle Papers, c.1800-14

Elaine Chalus (Bath Spa University)Many naval historians are familiar with the diaries of Elizabeth (Betsey) Wynne Fremantle (1778-1857) as a rich source of information on life aboard ship in Nelson’s navy, before and immediately after her marriage to Captain Thomas Francis Fremantle (1765-1819) in January 1797. Less is known about the subsequent, more representative period of her life as a naval officer’s wife at home in England, often on her own for extended periods of time, during the remainder of the Napoleonic wars. This talk draws upon Betsey’s largely unpublished diaries for 1801-14 and the Fremantles’ surviving correspondence for the period in order to examine a working naval marriage that developed into a trusted, complementary partnership – and the strategies they employed to advance the family in the navy and society.

When Fremantle left to take up his command in 1800, he left his pregnant twenty-one-year-old wife and three small children on her own to manage their house and estate, act as the family representative socially and politically, and forward his career. This talk considers the human side of the story of naval service in Nelson’s navy – the way that families coped with loneliness and loss, and sustained intimacy, sometimes over years apart. It looks at the strategies that Betsey Fremantle used during these years to create a virtual family circle that bound ship to shore, building her husband into the family and forwarding the family interests through both the education of her children and astute use of the social arena.


21APR

Two-Day ConferenceCharlotte Brontë: A Bicentennial Celebration of her Life and Works Keynote Speakers: Juliet Barker (author of The Brontës), Justine Picardie (author of Daphne and Editor-in-Chief of Harper’s Bazaar and Town and Country) and Professor Sally Shuttleworth (University of Oxford)2016 marks the 200th anniversary of the birth of Charlotte Brontë, one of England’s most beloved authors. Her writings, which constitute some of the most original and striking literature of the nineteenth century, continue to provoke rigorous academic debate. Brontë’s first published novel, Jane Eyre, written under the pseudonym of Currer Bell, rocked polite society with its portrayal of passion and madness. Yet astonishingly, the author was discovered to be a small, plain and shy clergyman’s daughter. This anomaly has inspired contemporary and subsequent generations to examine both the life and work of the woman described by contemporary writer, Harriet Martineau, as ‘the frail little creature who had done such wonderful things.’

This bicentennial conference – in the village of Chawton, where another woman writer, Jane Austen, penned her much-loved novels – will celebrate the tremendous impact of Charlotte Brontë’s work. Over the course of this two-day event, the speakers will endeavour to map out new directions for research as the writer enters her third century.

For full programme details and registration, please see our website

13MAY

14MAY

26MAY


JUNEMAY

6.30pm reception for 7.00pm talkEvening TalkElizabeth Carter: Stoicism, Sentiment and the Bluestockings

Judith Hawley (Royal Holloway University of London)The poet and scholar, Elizabeth Carter (1717-1806), one of the most successful of the late eighteenth-century bluestocking circle, earned fame for her translation of the Greek Stoic philosopher, Epictetus. Although she gained the nickname ‘Epictetus Carter’, she was also known as ‘my dear Miss Carter’ to her bluestocking friends. This talk will explore the tension in her life and works between Stoic rationalism and sentimental feelings. It will analyse how far this tension exemplifies a conflict between the life of the mind and that of the heart in the careers of women writers in her period.

Judith Hawley is Professor of Eighteenth-Century Literature in the Department of English, Royal Holloway University of London. Her edition of works by Elizabeth Carter appeared in the Pickering & Chatto series, Bluestocking Feminisms. She regularly appears on BBC radio programmes such as In Our Time. Her research centres on eighteenth-century literary groups and networks such as the Bluestockings and the Scriblerus Club. With Mary Isbell, she is co-director of an international network of Researchers working on Amateur Performance and Private Theatricals: www.RAPPT.org

Tickets: £11; Students/Friends £8.50

09JUN

2.00pm to 4.00pmBook Launch and Afternoon TeaA Man of Genius, the extraordinary debut novel by internationally-renowned Cambridge scholar and Chawton House Library patron Janet Todd OBE.‘A mesmerising story of love and obsession in nineteenth-century Venice. Dark and utterly compelling.’ – Natasha Solomons

Set in the bustling society of Regency England and against the declining glamour of Venice, it portrays a woman’s psychological journey through her obsession with the ‘man of genius’, her flight from him as he descends into madness, and the subsequent series of revelations she is forced to confront about her relationships, her parentage and herself.

Janet Todd, until recently President of Lucy Cavendish College, Cambridge, is best known for her non-fiction works on early women writers and for her books about Mary Wollstonecraft, Aphra Behn and Jane Austen.

Tickets: £11; Students/Friends £8.50

Elizabeth Carter as Minerva


JUNEJUNE

Regency WeekThe Library and Gardens will be open as usual for self-guided tours Monday to Friday at 1.30pm to 4.30pm and on Sunday at 11.00am to 5.00pm during Regency Week, with refreshments available for purchase in the Old Kitchen.

Entry tickets include access to our Emma at 200: from English Village to Global Appeal exhibition.

There will also be dancing from the Hampshire Regency Dancers from 1.30pm to 4.30pm on Sunday 26 June.

18-26JUN

2.30pmSpecial Curator’s tour of Emma exhibition with Gillian Dow, Executive Director of Chawton House LibraryEnjoy an exclusive tour of the exhibition Emma at 200: from English Village to Global Appeal 2015/2016 marks the 200th anniversary of the publication of Emma. Austen’s writing took place in one of the most transformative eras in British history marked by revolution abroad and unrest at home.

Dr Dow will take you through the exhibition explaining the context behind each item on display, which will include first editions of the novel from the UK and overseas, and unique manuscript material exploring the world of Austen’s novel and its readers.

Standard admission price + £2

19,21

& 23JUN

1.30pmOpen Air Opera in the Walled GardenChamber Opera Society of Southampton presents: Dido and Aeneas Join us for the first outdoor opera performance at Chawton house Library. Dido, the widowed Queen of Cartage, is in love with Aeneas, a noble Trojan warrior who has landed on her shores. He seems to reciprocate, but will the two lovers resist the supernatural powers that are pulling them apart? The powerful story of love, betrayal, and loss, based on Book IV of Virgil’s Aeneid, is presented in Dido and Aeneas, Henry Purcell’s first and only fully sung opera.

The University of Southampton’s Chamber Opera Society is a student-led organisation dedicated to producing exciting and historically-informed opera performances in a variety of settings.

Tickets: £8.50; Students / Friends £5

12JUN

6.30pm drinks reception for 7.00pm talkEvening talkFashion in the Regency period

Dr Kathrin Pieren, Curator of the Petersfield MuseumThe Regency period was an exciting one for fashion, not least because the Prince Regent loved clothes and was well aware of the power of dress. It was also a time of radical change. After the enormous robes, breeches and silk stockings of the eighteenth century, the French Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars contributed to push fashion towards simpler styles influenced by military outfits and the use of more practical cuts and fabrics. This talk, illustrated with real examples, will take a historical journey through the fashion of the Regency era providing examples of what Jane Austen and her contemporaries would have worn and putting this in the context of preceding and succeeding styles.


22JUN

During the week we will also be holding the following special events:

Chawton House Library is a UK registered charity that depends on philanthropy. If you can help us maintain access to our library collection, please donate or become

a Friend of Chawton House Library by calling 01420 541010 or visiting the website.

Home to early English women’s writing

Chawton House Library, Chawton, Alton,Hampshire, GU34 1SJ

T: 01420 541010E: [email protected]

W: www.chawtonhouselibrary.org

Registered Charity Number 1026921

Registered Company Number 2851718

chawton house library events diary february - june 2016

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