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Jane Austen | |
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Date of Birth: 1775 A brief history of Jane Austen and the MuseumJane Austen was born on the 16 December 1775 at the rectory in the Hampshire village of Steventon to the Reverend George Austen and his wife, Cassandra. Jane was the seventh of eight children. She had six brothers one elder sister Cassandra. The family moved to Bath on her father's retirement in 1801. In 1809 she moved to this house, now the museum with her widowed mother and sister. Until she was settled in Chawton none of Jane's work had been published. The period that she lived here was the most prolific and productive of her life. She revised Sense and Sensibility and Pride and Prejudice, which she had written some years earlier, and then wrote Mansfield Park, Emma and Persuasion. Late in 1816 she became ill and in May 1817 she and Cassandra rented rooms in Winchester to be nearer to her physician. There was no cure for the illness and she died on the 18 July 1817. She is buried in Winchester Cathedral. |
In her lifetime her work appeared anonymously, and although it was reviewed in the Quarterly and she was invited to Carlton House by the Prince Regent, she received little fame and very little money. She was apparently delighted when Sense and Sensibility made a 'clean profit' of £ 150. Her gift of characterization, comic irony and acute rendering of contemporary values and enduring moral dilemmas have won her recognition as one of the finest English novelists. The house was lived in by Mrs Austen and Cassandra until Mrs Austen died in 1827. Cassandra remained there alone until she died in 1845 when the house was divided into three cottages for farm workers. One hundred years later the house was bought by Mr T. Edward Carpenter in memory of his son, Philip, who was killed in the Second World War. He founded the Jane Austen Memorial Trust which owns and administers the house that was first opened as a museum in 1949. |
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Wordsworth's personality and poetry were deeply influenced by his love of nature, especially by the sights and scenes of the Lake Country, in which he spent most of his mature life. A profoundly earnest and sincere thinker, he displayed a high seriousness comparable, at times, to Milton's but tempered with tenderness and a love of simplicity. Wordsworth's earlier work shows the poetic beauty of commonplace things and people as in "Margaret," "Peter Bell," "Michael," and "The Idiot Boy." His use of the language of ordinary speech was heavily criticized, but it helped to rid English poetry of the more artificial conventions of 18th-century diction. Among his other well-known poems are "Lucy" ("She dwelt among the untrodden ways"), "The Solitary Reaper," "Resolution and Independence," "Daffodils," "The Rainbow," and the sonnet "The World Is Too Much with Us." |
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