Janeite Spotlight: Introducing Caroline Jane Knight, Pt. II—Life After Chawton
- Sarah Hurley
- Aug 11
- 5 min read
Updated: Aug 11
Welcome, dear readers, to the eagerly anticipated continuation of Caroline Jane Knight’s Janeite Spotlight, and the grand finale of the Janeite Spotlight project. As Jane Austen’s fifth great niece and last niece to grow up in Chawton House, Caroline possesses a unique connection to the Austen family legacy. You can read Pt. 1—Life at Chawton right here on the Jane Austen Summer Program blog.
When we last left her, Caroline Jane Knight was eighteen years old and mourning the loss of her childhood home—the Knight family’s ancestral estate, Chawton House—which passed to her Uncle Richard upon her grandfather’s death. Devastated, Caroline threw herself into a business career to avoid thinking about her lost connection to the family legacy: “I didn’t want to talk about Jane Austen,” she says of that dark time in her life. “I didn’t want to know about Jane Austen, I didn’t want to know about Chawton, I didn’t want to know about any of it.”
Although Caroline had read all of Austen’s novels by her twentieth birthday, she couldn’t bring herself to touch them again for another twenty-five years. She told no one in her adult life—not even her closest friends—of her connection with Jane Austen or Chawton House until the 200th anniversary edition of Pride and Prejudice was published in 2013. It was around that time that she conceived the initial idea for the Jane Austen Literacy Foundation, a not-for-profit organization channeling the Austen family name to support literacy programs locally and abroad.
Of course, at that point, nobody knew about her relationship to Jane Austen or the family legacy, and she figured the Jane Austen Literacy Foundation would have no justification or credibility to the public if she didn’t first establish her connection to Austen and Chawton House. Thus, her book Jane & Me: My Austen Heritage was born. Published in 2017, Jane & Me offers a first-hand account of Caroline’s childhood at Chawton House and details the emotional impact of leaving Chawton on Caroline’s life in later years.
Because Chawton House is now an open public building, Caroline wanted to capture the feeling of the estate as a family home, with children running around and dogs on the lawn. While the estate hosted several events a year during Caroline’s childhood and welcomed visitors into her grandmother’s tearoom in the Great Hall, it was primarily a private residence, home to real people with real lives and real problems. Caroline wanted to write “conversationally,” as if she were merely sitting down to chat with readers over tea, to convey the sense of normalcy she felt growing up in such a seemingly magical place.
The last member of Caroline’s family to write a book on Chawton House had been Montagu Knight, early in the twentieth century, and she considers this “treasure trove” of historical photographs and documentation to be “one of the most precious books in existence.” Jane & Me is her own contribution to the family’s historical record. At the end of her twenty-five-year “hibernation,” Caroline thought to herself, “I’ve got a memory [of the last twenty years of Chawton House] that should be part of that whole story. And if I don’t [write] this, there is no documentation—there is no storytelling from Chawton House since 1913—and that’s a shame.”
Writing Jane & Me was cathartic in soothing her heartbreak over leaving Chawton House. Because she had never truly faced the loss of her childhood home and heritage head-on, Caroline’s pain was still as fresh as the day she’d left. By writing her memoir, Caroline was able to make sense of the story in her own head, and at that point, she had so much to say about the ordeal that the words began “bursting out” of her.
However, nearly ten years later, she still doesn’t consider herself “an author” like her Aunt Jane. “Someday I will write another book,” Caroline reassures me, “because so much more has happened that [the story] needs to continue, but I’m not ready for that yet.”
In the meantime, Caroline remains as chair of the Jane Austen Literacy Foundation and is Patron and sponsor of Jane Austen Regency Week in Alton, Chawton, and Selborne every year, an authentic historical festival spanning ten days and featuring over fifty events. She attends the festival annually to give a speech and host the beloved Regency picnic at Chawton House with her family. Every time she speaks at an Austen-themed event, she tries to get people “as close to Jane Austen as I can, or as close to a family memory as I can.”
At many of these events, Caroline meets at least one person who is moved to tears by meeting Jane’s Chawton family. Caroline always enquires about their love of her aunt, and their answer is often the same: in some critical moment of heartbreak or trauma, someone instructed them to read Jane Austen, and her novels carried them through that rough patch of their life. “It’s otherworldly,” Caroline says of modern Janeite’ continued devotion to the late authoress, “beyond what you would expect in the human journey.”
Today, Caroline Knight is fifty-four and very happily married with no children. She lives in Melbourne, Australia, and as the former CEO of a marketing agency, has recently launched a new business, The Austen Pathway, which simplifies marketing for authors and creatives. During her spare time, Caroline loves boxing and participating in a boot camp, and in the last twenty years, she has become a frequent reader of her aunt’s novels, championing Austen’s independent spirit.
“She wasn’t a rebel, was she?” Caroline laughs, shaking her head. “She didn’t ‘follow her own path’ in a way that made others’ lives more difficult, or that was offensive to people, or caused trouble, did she? She was still part of a very loving, warm, close family and network of friends and was a well-loved aunt … and she found a way of doing her own thing.” Austen eschewed societal expectations, but not in a way that disrupted the lives of those around her—which Caroline believes is one of her most redeeming traits. “Believe me, there isn’t a person in the world I would swap Jane for.... I can’t think of anyone else alive or dead. I am the luckiest person to have grown up with Jane as a familial role model, and I know that.”
Excerpted from Zoom interview with Caroline Jane Knight, October 21, 2024.
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