Jane Austen’s novel Persuasion opens with a description of the heroine’s father, Sir Walter, reading and annotating his favourite book, the Baronetage. The vain but financially troubled Sir Walter finds solace in the book and his hand-written additions, which represent his social importance. For his unmarried daughter Elizabeth however, Sir Walter’s annotations are a record of her exclusion from lines of inheritance. As an unmarried daughter, Elizabeth finds no space for herself in the Baronetage
Join speaker Francesca Kavanagh to explore the inscriptions and annotations made by unmarried women of the Austen-Knight Family in surviving books from their family library, now on loan to Chawton House, Hampshire. The books and inscriptions of Jane Austen’s niece Marianne Knight (1801–96) demonstrate the way in which unmarried daughters, aunts, and sisters carved out an ongoing space for themselves.
Unmarried all her life, Marianne managed her father’s house and servants until his death and then spent the remainder of her long life moving between the houses of her brothers and nephews. Her books remain in the Austen-Knight family library as a record of her claim to the family home and the relationships between the women that supported it.
Francesca Kavanagh is a Lecturer in English at La Trobe University and a PhD candidate in the Department of English and Theatre Studies at the University of Melbourne. Her current research focuses on eighteenth- and nineteenth-century women’s reading and writing practices with a particular interest in space and material culture. Her other research interests include the Gothic, and cultures of fandom from Romanticism to the present. Her work on Jane Austen’s nieces has been published in The Australasian Journal of Victorian Studies and her most recent article on frame narratives and the Gothic in Stranger Things is out now in European Romantic Review.
