Description
small 4to, VII, 219pp. Hardcover with lime green cloth on boards and vellum attachment to the sound spine in good condition though with shelf wear to the edges and corners and mild soiling of the vellum on the spine plus there is a a gold Knight family-crest embossed on the front board in excellent condition, and no d/w as issued. text and all plates are in excellent condition o/t significant foxing at both front and rear largely involving the endpapers but on occasional other pages too. There is a neat hand-written owner name written on top right of ffep as well. ” Chawton House is famous today as the home of Jane Austen’s brother Edward, who was adopted by a wealthy relative , Thomas Knight, and inherited his Hampshire estate. Edward then offerred the former bailiff’s cottage close to the great house to his mother, who then lived there with her unmarried daughters Jane and Cassandra. (The house is now a study centre and library, for women’s writing especially), and when this book was published in 1911, the main building was still the Knight family home. Montagu Knight, the grandson of Edward, supplied material from the archives of the manor, while the book was largely written by his cousin William Austen Leigh, the son of Jane’s nephew and memorialist. It covers the history of the manor from the Norman Conquest to the death of the second Edward in 1879, and , apart from the Austen connection, is a fascinating illustrated history of a typical English parish.” There are fourteen beautiful portraits including one of Jane, all with protective tissue guards and eight full-page plates with twenty-two illustrations in the text and additional plans of the estate with a large Appendix and Index as well.