FOREWORD

Caroline Knight’s Jane & Me: My Austen Heritage is not a work of fandom or fantasy. It is the authentic and extraordinary story of a life interwoven with Jane Austen’s in many compelling ways. Caroline grew up in Chawton House, the sixteenth-century manor inherited in 1798 by Jane Austen’s brother Edward Austen Knight—Caroline’s fourth great-grandfather—a home that had been in Caroline’s family for many generations. But when Caroline’s grandfather died, it was no longer possible to maintain the family home of four hundred years, and Caroline was forced to leave it behind—she was seventeen, and she didn’t want to hear anything more about Chawton or Jane Austen. How Caroline came to terms with the troubling heritage she was left with and eventually founded the Jane Austen Literacy Foundation is the arresting personal narrative running through these chapters.

This book is a major contribution to the now vast library of works about Jane Austen. It sheds a great deal of light on country-house life in England in the early twentieth century, as well as on the Knight and Austen families, and includes much information that will be thrillingly new to Jane Austen’s readers and scholars. The last of the close family memoirs, Caroline Austen’s My Aunt Jane Austen, was published in 1867. How wonderful it is that in the twenty-first century those family recollections are now being complemented and transformed in this contemporary and dramatic story.

– John Wiltshire