For a total of ten months spread over fifteen years, Jane Austen visited her brother Edward Austen Knight at his Kent estate. The brimming bookshelves at Godmersham Park were a particular draw for the novelist. During one stay in 1813—which would turn out to be her last—she wrote to her sister, “I am now alone in the Library, Mistress of all I survey.”
But which books did she survey? Interested parties now have an answer to this question. Chawton House, another of Edward's manors that now houses a library and research center, and the Burney Centre at McGill University in Montreal have together created a virtual version of Godmersham's library shelves. The collaboration is called “Reading with Austen.” Users can hover over the shelves and click on any of the antique books, summoning bibliographic data and available photos of pertinent title pages, bookplates, and marginalia. Digging deeper, one can peruse a digital copy of the book and determine the whereabouts of the original.
“What we've tried to do really is to imagine Jane Austen actually walking around the library and what she would see in different parts of it,” said Peter Sabor, director of the Burney Centre, who worked on the project for three years. “It's nice to envisage her looking at those shelves, and, I think, with the website, we can see her do that. We're basically looking over her shoulder as she looks at the bookshelf.”
There are books of history, travel, religion, literature, and agriculture, as one would expect from a country-house library a couple of centuries in the making. There are surprises, too, mainly in the amount of contemporary fiction, which was largely disdained at the time. Even more noteworthy, perhaps, are the novels by women, such as Maria Edgeworth and Charlotte Turner Smith, that signal the family's broad-minded reading practices.
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