We continue our celebration of the festive season by counting down the Sundays until Christmas Eve

 We continue our celebration of the festive season by counting down the Sundays until Christmas Eve, highlighting different holdings, with connections to Christmas and the festive period, in our library's collection. Today we have an insight into the preparations for the Twelve Days of Christmas by an eighteenth-century housewife.

In Elizabeth Moody’s mock-heroic, a strain that pervades Moody's works, poem ‘The Housewife, or The Muse Learning to Ride the Great Horse Heroic’ (1...798), the narrator asks her muse to aid her in her domestic chores and the preparation for Christmas, who in turn summons Greek heroes to help the narrator in her works. The poem’s final stanza describes the narrator preparing a Twelfth Night cake, a treat which can be enjoyed at our Georgian Christmas on 13 December, amongst other delicious Georgian Christmas treats taken from the Knight Family’s Cookbook. For more information on the Georgian Christmas or the recipe of Georgian Ginger Cake see Dr. Annie Gray’s blog on our website: www.chawtonhouse.org

Chawton House Library's

Chawton House Library

Chawton House Library's team of library volunteers and interns begin the annual deep clean of the reading rooms and store rooms today (including Josje and Suki pictured here). We are extremely grateful for all the work they do throughout the year!

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The Historic Kitchen of Chawton Cottage when it was still a labourer’s cottage.

Looking through the photo archive at Museum you find all sorts of weird and wonderful images from the Museum’s past. This is the first of several blogposts where we will share a few that we found interesting, or fun. jane-austens-house-museum

The House That Inspired Jane Austen's Pride And Prejudice Is For Sale. Come, Look Inside...

Wentworth Woodhouse in South Yorkshire is the largest privately owned home in Europe. The listed building was once home to the Fourth Earl Fitzwilliam who is thought to have inspired Jane Austen's much-lusted after character Mr Darcy.

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Cornel West loves Jane Austen.

That's right, Cornel West -- the famous public scholar and political polemicist whose many books include Race Matters, Democracy Matters, and The Rich and the Rest of Us -- cares about the novels of a dead, white, privileged British woman of the Regency Era. I first learned this surprising fact at a convention of the Jane Austen Society of North America in Brooklyn, where he gave a talk on "Jane Austen and Power," not power in terms of oppressor and oppressed as I and everyone else in the audience probably expected, but the power to look within and to change, to transform society from the inside. Since then, I got to spend two hours interviewing this most unexpected and fervent of Austen enthusiasts, and began to see her through his eyes, as a radical for personal virtue as the key to social reform. Read all: huffington post

Jane Austen's fashion history: 200 years of cover designs – in pictures

Thomas Egerton’s first edition of Jane Austen’s debut novel, Sense and Sensibility (1811)

 

 

In Austen’s time, books were bound very simply in cardboard covers with only a paper label bearing the title on the spine. Private purchasers would have the books rebound to match the other books in their library, like this “half calf” rebinding of the first edition of Austen’s first book, Sense and Sensibility: the front and back were covered in mottled paper, while the corners and the spine were covered with leather, providing cheaper protection. Novels would rarely have received a full leather binding in those days, as they were not considered worth such treatment – it would have been reserved for more “serious” books, such as history or poetry. Read more: 14/jane-austens-fashion-history-200-years-of-cover-designs-in-pictures

“At Christmas everybody invites their friends around them and people think little of even the worst weather…”.

JANE Austen wrote in her novel Emma, “At Christmas everybody invites their friends around them and people think little of even the worst weather…”.
And there are plenty of ways to celebrate the festive season in Hampshire’s Jane Austen’s House Museum in the village of Chawton. The rooms of the house will be decorated for the festive season in traditional Georgian style and you can see Stitched Together, a special exhibition of textile artworks inspired by the building and its collection for two weeks only from December 4-16.
The temporary exhibition of The Watsons manuscript (below) – a rare surviving example of one of Jane Austen’s unfinished novels – will be there until December 16. Read more; Jane_Austen_s_House_Museum