Dancing With Mr. Darcy: Stories Inspired by Jane Austen and Chawton House Library (19 page)

Biographies

Lane Ashfeldt
grew up in Ireland and England, and has lived and worked in several European countries. She is working on a collection of short stories. Her ambition is to live in the past; somewhere sufficiently far back for there to be no mobile phones or speaking buses, but not so far back that chalk gets passed off as food. Information about areas of Europe with permanent network voids gratefully received – contact Lane via her website www.ashfeldt.com.

Esther Bellamy
is 28 and lives and farms in Hampshire. She read history at Oxford and worked at the House of Commons before studying land management at Cirencester Agricultural College. Between chasing beef cattle and avoiding paperwork she is studying for a Masters in Research in English at Southampton University where she is writing her thesis on the concept of failure in the novels of George Eliot. She is working on a novel. She reads omnivorously and a trail of destruction at the back of her house indicates that she may recently have taken up gardening as a hobby.

Kelly Brendel
was born in 1989 in South London. She is currently a student at the University of York studying English Literature.

Suzy Ceulan Hughes
was born in England but has lived in mid-Wales since 1977. She is a writer, translator and book reviewer. This is her first short story to be published.

Beth Cordingly
was born in Brighton and attended Birmingham University where she gained a double first in English and Drama. She is currently doing the MA in Creative Writing at Birkbeck. She is a founding member of Nomads, a writers’ workshop and of Lou’s Crew, who are working on a comedy series for television. She is an established television and theatre actress.

Felicity Cowie
is a former BBC Panorama journalist and a student on the MA in Creative Writing course at Bath Spa University. She is currently finishing her first novel and wrote ‘One Character In Search Of Her Love Story Role’ whilst developing the central character of Hannah Peel.

Felicity was longlisted for the Fish International Short Story Prize 2006 and, as a teenager, won the WH Smith Young Writer of the Year Competition. As a journalist, her most interesting guest was Buzz Aldrin.

Elaine Grotefeld
was born in Montreal, Canada and grew up in the UK, where she read English at Jesus College, Cambridge. She wrote two of her dissertations on her favourite writer, Jane Austen (the second to attempt reparation for the first). Since then she’s lived and worked in London, Vancouver, Hong Kong and Singapore – where she ‘headhunted’ technology executives by day and wrote poems, short stories and her novel by night. Happily squeezed between mountains and sea, Elaine is now back in Vancouver – with her Scottish husband, two children, and the occasional rummaging bear.
Persuasion’s
theme of long-lost love inspired Elaine’s short story ‘Eight Years Later,’ as well as her first and almost-cooked novel,
Meeting Joe McManus.

Jacqui Hazell
was born in Hampshire in 1968. She studied textile design at Nottingham and has had a range of humorous greetings cards published. She has also been a runner-up in the Vogue Talent Contest for young writers and worked briefly as a secretary at Buckingham Palace. She is a journalist and magazine editor and is currently studying for an MA in Creative Writing at Royal Holloway. Her first novel is entitled,
The Flood Video Diaries.
She lives in London.

Elizabeth Hopkinson
usually finds her imagination veering towards the fantastic, and is therefore very pleased (and a little surprised) to find herself doing so well with a (nearly) straight story. She lives in Bradford, West Yorkshire, where she finds an endless source of inspiration in the coffee shop in the old Wool Exchange. Her stories have appeared in several genre magazines, webzines and anthologies, and her themed collection of 12 short stories,
My True Love Sent to Me,
is available from Virtual Tales. Her website is: www.hiddengrove.pwp.blueyonder.co.uk

Mary Howell
was born with many advantages, most of which she turned her back on.

Educated to be a lady at a private convent, she excelled at truancy, managing only to achieve a fistful of star A levels. Her university career and her nursing career both ended abruptly with spells in prison. Both times she was released without stain.

She has lived all over the world, with as many aliases as lovers, She has been an orthodontist’s assistant, a serial absconder, sawn in half by a magician and a happily married mother of three. She now lives in North Wales.

Clair Humphries
graduated with a BA Hons in English Literature. She has worked in the Official Publications Reading Room of the British Library and is currently employed at a London university, where she provides support for disabled and dyslexic students. She writes humorous contemporary fiction and lives in Kent with her husband, Steve.

Kirsty Mitchell
is 25 and was born in Ayr on the west coast of Scotland. She now lives in Glasgow. Her short stories have previously been published in
Mslexia
magazine, and placed in the Cadenza Short Story Competition, Frome Festival Short Story Competition, and the Bristol Short Story Prize. She is a graduate of Philosophy and History at Glasgow University.

Victoria Owens
worked first in the book trade and later as a legal executive before reading for an English degree. PhD research on John Dryden’s translation of the
Aeneid
followed; she finished her thesis about ten days before her eldest daughter’s birth. She wrote her first novel when her younger daughter started playgroup and her second on Bath Spa University’s MA in Creative Writing, but neither has found a publisher. Victoria runs and swims to keep fit, enjoys choral singing and belongs to the Gaskell Society. She lives near Bristol.

Penelope Randall
was born in Leicester. She grew up in Norfolk and Nottinghamshire and, for three teenage years, in the Bahamas. She read Engineering Science at Oxford University and has worked as a civil servant, editor, typesetter and playgroup assistant. She currently teaches science and maths and wants to start a campaign against education buzzwords. She has always loved writing stories, and recent successes (and near-misses!) encourage her to hope that her three novels may one day find a publisher. She lives in Manchester.

Nancy Saunders
lives in a Hampshire village and works in Library Aquisitions, sending out lovely new books to hungry readers. Writing, fiddle-playing and enjoying the great outdoors are all squeezed in around the job. Nancy is a past member of Alex Keegan’s Bootcamp online writing group – without which her writing would not have won a couple of prizes and appeared in various publications. Elly and Oscar are Nancy’s two true significant others.

Stephanie Shields
was brought up in the Midlands but has spent all of her adult life in the north of England, where she has combined sheep farming with a career in further education. She has written poetry since childhood, but short fiction is a more recent development. Having had some early publication of her poetry in the 1970s, she has continued as a covert writer. She is a member of the Otley Courthouse Writers, based in the market town of Otley, West Yorkshire.

Elsa A. Solender,
a New Yorker, was president of the Jane Austen Society of North America from 1996-2000. Educated at Barnard College and the University of Chicago, she has worked as a journalist, editor, and college teacher in Chicago, Baltimore and New York. She represented an international non-governmental women’s organisation at the United Nations during a six-year residency in Geneva. She has published articles and reviews in a wide variety of American magazines and newspapers, but ‘Second Thoughts’ is her first published story. She has been married for 49 years, has two married sons and seven grandchildren.

Hilary Spiers
lives in Stamford, Lincolnshire, works in adolescent health policy part-time and writes every day, when time and life permit. She has won a number of national writing competitions, been published in several anthologies and had some of her stories broadcast on the radio. Her abiding passion remains playwriting, for stage and radio. Her play
Hoovering on the Edge
was staged by Shoestring Theatre in September 2009 and she has had work performed at London’s Hampstead Theatre and the Oundle Literature Festival. While collecting rejection letters, she acts in and directs other writers’ plays.

Stephanie Tillotson
joined the BBC in 1989 and worked in television and radio for many years, at length crossing to the independent sector in Wales. For the past ten years she has been writing, directing and performing for the theatre. Originally from Gilwern near Abergavenny, she now lives in Aberystwyth, where she has been teaching in the Department of Theatre, Film and Television Studies at the university. At present she is editing a book of short stories for Honno called
Cut on the Bias,
a collection of fictional writing about women’s relationship to clothes and image.

Andrea Watsmore
was born in the London/Essex borders in 1966, has four children and a Fine Art degree from Chelsea School of Art. This has led to a number of opportunities including usherette, engineer, tote operator, teacher, shop girl, bag lady and artist.

She has always written, whether in paintings or on lonely walls. Now she generally limits it to a spiral-bound notebook and laptop. ‘Bina’ is her first published story.

The Judges

Sarah Waters
was born in Pembrokeshire. She has won a Betty Trask Award, the Somerset Maugham Award and was twice shortlisted for the
Mail On Sunday
/ John Llewellyn Rhys Prize.
Fingersmith
and
The Night Watch
were both shortlisted for the Man Booker and Orange Prizes, and
Fingersmith
won the CWA Ellis Peters Dagger Award for Historical Crime Fiction and the
South Bank Show
Award for Literature.
Tipping the Velvet, Affinity
and
Fingersmith
have all been adapted for television. Her latest novel
The Little Stranger
, was published by Virago in 2009. She lives in London.

Lindsay Ashford
is a former BBC journalist and the author of four published crime novels. Her second,
Strange Blood,
was shortlisted for the Theakston’s Old Peculier Crime Novel of the Year Award. She has had short stories published and broadcast on BBC Radio 4 and has edited two collections of short fiction and prose for Honno:
Written In Blood
and
Strange Days Indeed.
She splits her time between a home on the Welsh coast and Chawton House, where she is a PR consultant.

Mary Hammond
started her career writing historical novels for an American book packager in the early 1980s. She is now Senior Lecturer in Nineteenth-Century Literature at the University of Southampton, specialising in book history, and convenor for Southampton’s MA in Creative Writing. She is the author of numerous books and articles on the print culture of Victorian Britain and has also written on contemporary creative writing.

Rebecca Smith
is the five-times great niece of Jane Austen (descended from Jane’s brother Frances, through his daughter Catherine Ann, who was born at Chawton House). She is a Teaching Fellow in Creative Writing at Southampton University. Her first novel,
The Bluebird Café,
was published by Bloomsbury in 2001. Other novels are
Happy Birthday and All That
(Bloomsbury 2003) and
A Bit Of Earth
(Bloomsbury 2006).

Janet Thomas
is a freelance editor, living in Aberystwyth. She has edited a wide range of books, including four short-story anthologies for Honno:
Catwomen from Hell, The Woman Who Loved Cucumbers, Mirror Mirror
and
Safe World Gone,
which were co-edited with Patricia Duncker. She has published short stories and her children’s picture book
Can I Play?
(Egmont) won a
Practical PreSchool
gold award.

Chawton House Library

Two hundred years ago Jane Austen made a momentous journey. On a July day in 1809 she set out from Southampton at the invitation of her brother, Edward. He had inherited the Manor of Chawton after being adopted by a wealthy, childless couple and had offered her a new home on his estate. On taking up residence there with her mother and sister, Jane did something she had felt unable to do for a very long time: she took up her pen and began working on a novel.

Her arrival in the Hampshire village marked the start of what was to be the most productive period of her literary life. Jane had begun writing many years earlier when her father was the vicar of Steventon. She had produced draft versions of three of her novels – including the manuscript that would eventually become
Pride and Prejudice
-before she reached the age of 25. But her father’s sudden decision to retire and go to live in Bath greatly upset his daughter. Leaving the house where she had been born and seeing her father’s extensive book collection sold off, along with many other family possessions, plunged her into depression and effectively disabled her as a writer.

The following decade was spent moving from one rented house to another, first in Bath and later – following her father’s death – in Southampton. During this period the prolific output of fiction she had produced during the 1790s came to a grinding halt. It was only when her brother Edward offered her a permanent home in what had been the Bailiff’s cottage on the Chawton estate that she found the peace and security she needed to flourish as a writer.

Sense and Sensibility, Pride and Prejudice, Emma
and
Mansfield Park
were all published while she lived in the village.
Northanger Abbey
and
Persuasion
were published posthumously after her death at the age of just 41.

So the Great House, as Edward’s Elizabethan mansion was known then, was inextricably linked with Jane Austen’s destiny. Her brother provided an environment in which she could thrive and in those last fruitful years she would often make the short walk from her cottage to the grand building that rose above the parish church of Saint Nicholas.

Chawton House had a fine library that was an undoubted attraction to Jane. The house was also the setting for many Austen family gatherings: ‘…we four sweet Brothers and Sisters dine today at the Gt House. Is that not quite natural?’ she wrote to her friend, Anna Lefroy.

The house has recently been restored to its former glory thanks to an American entrepreneur who is a devoted Austen fan. For centuries it was the comfortable country home of the Knight family (it was Thomas and Catherine Knight who adopted Jane’s brother, Edward, and he subsequently changed his name to Knight). Following the First World War, however, it fell into decline due to inheritance taxes and ever-increasing running costs – the fate of many other country estates in England.

By 1987, when Richard Knight inherited the property from his father, it was on the verge of financial and physical collapse. Its long and distinguished history, from mediaeval manor to one of Hampshire’s great country houses, seemed to be drawing to an end. Its associations with Jane Austen looked destined to become mere memories.

Five thousand miles away in California, Sandy Lerner, co-founder of Cisco Systems, Inc., learnt of this misfortune. Sandy had discovered Austen while under unbearable pressure as an undergraduate computer science student at Stanford. She read
Persuasion
and was instantly hooked (she has since read the book more than seventy times).

After floating Cisco in 1990, Sandy and her former husband, Len Bosack, had turned a large percentage of the proceeds over to a foundation dedicated to scientific research, animal welfare and literary endeavours. She realised that Chawton House could be the perfect home for her collection of books by the long-forgotten early English women writers who were Austen’s literary mothers and sisters. In Sandy’s vision, Chawton House would be the ideal environment for research and study in a manner that would bring to life the social, domestic, economic, cultural and historical context in which the writers lived and worked. In short, a unique opportunity to study the works in an appropriate setting.

From this resolve she acquired a long lease from Richard Knight and began an extensive programme of conservation work. The house reopened in 2003 as Chawton House Library – the world’s first centre for the study of the lives and works of women writing in English before 1830. As well as an original manuscript and early editions of Jane Austen’s work, authors such as Mary Shelley, Mary Wollstonecraft, Frances Burney and Aphra Behn feature in the collection of more than 8,000 books. The library is open by appointment to members of the public and there are visiting fellowships available for more specialised research.

The Jane Austen Short Story Award was initiated by Chawton House Library to encourage contemporary creative writing. The 2009 competition attracted nearly three hundred entries from all over the world. The hope is that two centuries on, a new generation of writers will be inspired by Jane’s work and the Great House she knew so well.

Lindsay Ashford, July 2009

For more information about Chawton House Library, visit the website: www.chawtonhouse.org