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| In the footsteps of Jane Austen...I pass by the little village of Steventon every week - the village where Jane Austen was born in 1775 and lived for the first 25 years of her life. Her home, the Rectory, where she lived with her father, the Rev. George Austen and the rest of her family, is gone now, but the little church still remains.
I stayed in the very same bedroom as Jane when in Bakewell in Derbyshire last year - the room from which she revised "Pride and Prejudice" (using Chatsworth House as the inspiration for "Pemberley"). There was a framed description of her stay at the Rutland Arms just outside our bedroom, and this is what it has to say...... "In this room in the year 1811 Jane Austen revised the manuscript of her famous book "Pride and Prejudice". It had been written in 1797, but Jane Austen, who travelled in Derbyshire in 1811, chose to introduce the beauty spots of the Peak into her novel. The Rutland Arms Hotel was built in 1804, and while staying in this new and comfortable inn, we have reason to believe that Miss Austen visited Chatsworth, only three miles away, and was so impressed by its beauty and grandeur, that she makes it the background for "Pemberley", the home of the proud and handsome Mr. Darcy, hero of "Pride and Prejudice". The small market town of "Lambton", mentioned in the novel, is easily identifiable as Bakewell, and any visitor, driving thence to Chatsworth, must immediately be struck by Miss Austen's faithful portrayal of the scene - the "large handsome stone building, standing well on rising ground and backed by a ridge of woody hills." There it is today, exactly as Jane Austen saw it, all those long years ago. Elizabeth Bennet, heroine of the story, had returned to the inn to dress for dinner, when the sound of a carriage drew her to the window. She saw a curricle driving up the street, un- doubtedly Matlock Street which these windows overlook, and presently she heard a quick foot upon the stair - the very staircase outside this door. So, while visiting this hotel and staying in this room, remember that it is the scene of two of the most romantic passages in "Pride and Prejudice", and "Pride and Prejudice" must surely take its place among the most famous novels in the English language. Journal prompt....Have you ever visited somewhere because of its associations with someone famous? Who was it - and where? Write about how it felt to walk in the footsteps, look out of the same windows, see the bed in which they slept, the table at which they ate or wrote, the chairs in which they sat? Was any "atmosphere" present there for you - or was it all a little disappointing?. If you yourself found fame, literary or otherwise, and your own home was to become a place of similar pilgrimage, in which room do you think visitors would find your own "imprint" residing most strongly? |