Janeite Spotlight: Introducing Caroline Jane Knight, Pt. I—Life at Chawton
- Sarah Hurley
- Jul 28
- 5 min read
Updated: Aug 7
Hello, dear readers, and welcome to the Janeite Spotlight project’s grand finale! As many of you know, the Janeite Spotlight project is dedicated to showcasing and connecting Austen fans around the globe, without whom Jane Austen’s legacy might have disappeared in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. The first installment in this very special two-part article series recounts the early years of Caroline Jane Knight, Jane Austen’s own fifth-great niece—former resident of Chawton House, author of Jane & Me: My Austen Heritage, and founder of the Jane Austen Literacy Foundation. So, without further ado…
A little over fifty years ago, Caroline Jane Knight was born in a little hospital in Alton, Hampshire, in England, a stone’s-throw away from her family’s legendary ancestral estate: Chawton House. While most people now know Chawton as an open public building, made special by its connection to the indominable Jane Austen, to young Caroline, it was simply home. Until Caroline was eighteen years old, she lived at Chawton House alongside her parents, siblings, and grandparents, when it was still a private family residence.
Chawton Cottage, where Jane Austen herself lived and composed many of her written works, rests only four hundred meters from the front door of Chawton House. Unlike the House, the Cottage has consistently attracted flocks of visitors after opening as a public museum in the 1940s. As a young girl—no more than five or six—Caroline recalls visiting the village shop (in the building which now boasts Cassandra’s Cup, a beloved local café that serves some of the freshest peppermint tea this author has ever encountered) across from Chawton Cottage and asking her mother why so many people were waiting in line to see Aunt Jane’s house.
It wasn’t her first time seeing Chawton Cottage’s hoard of visitors, but it was the first time she realized they were there for a reason of historical and cultural significance. “Obviously, at five, I had no comprehension at all of why people would travel from all over the world to come and see the house of somebody who died over two hundred years ago. I didn’t get it at all!” Caroline laughs. “And I remember my mom telling me not only that Jane had been an incredible writer, but that Jane Austen was a woman who had the passion and determination to follow her own path.” Eschewing societal expectations, Jane had done what she knew she was meant to do.
Despite the grandeur of Chawton House, Caroline did not lead a particularly wealthy or privileged childhood. Although the Austen-Knight family retained the estate, their fortune had dwindled by the time Caroline was born; both of her parents worked full-time jobs in town, and Caroline attended the local village school.
Caroline’s grandmother also operated a tearoom out of the Great Hall in Chawton House, offering Janeite visitors from all over the world the opportunity to dine in their family home. When she was very young, Caroline loved to “help” her grandmother prepare tea and serve their guests, although she jokes that she was probably more of a nuisance than anything at that age. She vividly recalls informing the customers, with all the confidence of childhood, that Jane Austen was a pioneer: “I didn’t have a clue what the word ‘pioneer’ meant,” she confesses, but she’d heard other people use it in reference to other great historical figures. As a teenager, she really did begin working in the tearoom on weekends for pocket money.
Perhaps surprisingly, literacy was not a significant part of Caroline’s childhood: growing up, her father and brother suffered from dyslexia, a condition which remained undiagnosed for many years, and which prevented them from reading or writing very well. Despite “living in the heart of [a] literary legacy,” literacy was an issue for Caroline’s family. “I didn’t grow up in a house where we were talking about reading or sharing books all the time,” she tells me. “We wouldn’t have been sitting around the table talking about the brilliance of Jane Austen’s work because half of our family couldn’t engage with Jane Austen’s work.”
Although Caroline tried to read Pride and Prejudice when she was eight or nine years old, she couldn’t yet grasp the language. However, having grown up hearing the names “Lizzy” and “Darcy” tossed around like those of dear family friends, she was determined to learn their story for herself. She recalls asking her mother why so many people seemed to love Mr. Darcy, but of course, at so young an age, she didn’t have the emotional maturity to understand her mother’s answer on “what a woman might want in a man.”
Caroline was fifteen years old when she truly read Pride and Prejudice for the first time, feeling as though she needed to experience her family’s literary legacy firsthand before her grandfather—the owner of Chawton House, whose death Caroline knew would signal the end of Caroline’s residence at Chawton House—passed away. She realized the death of the Knight family’s reigning patriarch would mark the end of Chawton House as she knew it, not only as her home but as the Knight family home altogether.
Perhaps it is no surprise, then, that when reading Pride and Prejudice for the first time, Caroline connected most not with any of the famed Bennet sisters, but with Mrs. Bennet herself, whose anxiety over Longbourn’s entailment to Mr. Collins drives her desire to see her daughters married off to wealthy husbands.
“In my childhood naivety,” Caroline divulges, “my first thought as I was reading [Pride and Prejudice] and realizing that these people were in the same position as we were was ‘How did she know?’ And I thought in that moment of naivety that it was like she’d written a story that … was actually a version of what was happening to us.” Chawton House was entailed to Caroline’s uncle Richard, who—like Mr. Collins (although Caroline is happy to report that Richard is nothing like Mr. Collins in disposition or manner!)—did not live in the house with Caroline and her family before her grandfather’s death. Because she didn’t have any friends who lived in such spectacular, historically rich homes, Caroline perceived their situation to be unique, leading her to believe that Jane had possessed a near-clairvoyant awareness of their family’s future, which she’d expressed in her writing.
When Caroline was eighteen, her grandfather finally passed away and Richard inherited the estate. Heartbroken, she left the home she’d always known—where seventeen generations of her family had lived—and ventured out into the world. Her identity was so strongly tied to Chawton that she felt adrift without it: “I didn’t know who I was anymore if I wasn’t Caroline Jane Knight from Chawton House.”
In fact, she felt so adrift that she didn’t tell anyone—not even her closest friends—about her connection to Jane Austen until twenty-five years later…
Excerpted from Zoom interview with Caroline Jane Knight, October 21, 2024.
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