Chiswick House in the time of Jane Austen
Did Jane Austen ever visit Chiswick House? How does her work connect with the House’s most famous inhabitants? Torin Douglas, Director of Chiswick Book Festival, links the history of Chiswick House to Jane Austen’s life.
As Chiswick House & Gardens Trust and the Chiswick Book Festival celebrate the 250th anniversary of Jane Austen this week, it would be wonderful to think that the author might have visited the House & Gardens, as Queen Victoria did on several occasions a few decades later.
In truth, the nearest that Jane would probably have come to Chiswick House was in a carriage travelling along the Bath Road, on one of her frequent visits to London.
But there are strong parallels between Jane Austen and one of the best-known women of the age, Georgiana Duchess of Devonshire, who called Chiswick House her “earthly paradise”. Those parallels were reinforced by the screen appearances of Keira Knightly, who played Georgiana in the 2008 film The Duchess and Lizzie Bennet in the 2005 film of Pride & Prejudice.
The timelines are intriguing and help us place Chiswick House in the context of Jane Austen in fact and fiction.
1774/1775
In 1774, on her 17th birthday, Lady Georgiana Spencer married William Cavendish, the 5th Duke of Devonshire, owner of Chiswick House. The following year, Jane Austen was born at Steventon rectory in Hampshire.
1795
In 1795, the 19-year-old Jane Austen wrote Elinor and Marianne, a forerunner of Sense & Sensibility and her sister Cassandra became engaged to Tom Fowles (who died two years later). In the same year, a print of The Duke of Devonshire’s House at Chiswick recorded the House for posterity.
1805/1806
In 1805, Jane and Cassandra’s father, Revd George Austen, died in Bath, leaving them homeless. In 1806, Georgiana Duchess of Devonshire died, aged 48, in Devonshire House, Westminster.
1811
In 1811, William Cavendish, the 5th Duke of Devonshire, died at the age of 62. Sense & Sensibility was published in the same year, followed by Pride & Prejudice in 1813. Jane Austen died in 1817, aged 41, in Winchester.
1840/1841
In 1840 in Miss Austen, Cassandra Austen visited Kintbury vicarage to seek out Jane’s letters, five years before her death, aged 72, near Portsmouth. In 1841, the 22-year-old Queen Victoria paid her first visit to Chiswick House.
Jane Austen scholars have made much of the fact that in Pride & Prejudice Jane named Darcy’s young sister Georgiana. In an article entitled ‘The Two Georgianas: The Duchess of Devonshire and Jane Austen’s Miss Darcy’, Stephen Derry writes: “The most celebrated bearer of the name “Georgiana” in Jane Austen’s lifetime was Georgiana Cavendish, Duchess of Devonshire (1757-1806). So there could be no more appropriate name for the daughter of a Whig family living in a great house in Derbyshire.”
And in 2009, 14 costumes from the film of The Duchess were put on display in Chiswick House, including the red dress worn by Georgiana when she drunkenly knocks over a candelabra and sets her wig on fire. The outfits were created by designer Michael O’Connor, who won that year’s Oscar for Best Costume Design. He said: “It is satisfying to know that the costumes are installed in one of the houses where over two centuries ago one can imagine them actually being worn.”
