AFTERWORD

On 23 February 2017, a couple of months before the bicentennial of Jane’s death, I woke to the most exciting news. A set of Jane’s novels from 1833, complete with Montagu’s bookplate, had been discovered in Texas, and the owner, Sandra Clark, who had been collecting Austen editions for years, had generously sent them back to Chawton House.

I contacted Gillian Dow, the CEO of Chawton House Library, to find out more. It was an important first edition of a set of Austen novels by Bentley, who, for the first time, had published Jane’s novels as a ‘complete works’. The set was listed in a 1908 library catalogue that Montagu had compiled, which was the first record of these books in the family collection at Chawton House, but there was no way of being sure when the family had bought the set or when it had left our collection. Montagu had put his bookplate in many books that were bought by previous squires of Chawton, so we could not make assumptions. But it didn’t matter. At least one of our family’s copies of Jane’s books, which I had looked for in the library when I was a child, had returned home.