Jane Austen

Residence 1

📍Steventon, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG25 3BQ, United Kingdom

“I was born in the Rectory at Steventon on the sixteenth of December 1775, the seventh child of Cassandra and George Austen. My father was the Rector and a man of considerable education — his library was the school I actually attended, since girls were not sent to proper institutions. From girlhood I wrote stories to amuse my family, then plays, then burlesques of the novels I was reading. My sister Cassandra was my first audience and my last confidence. The house was demolished by my brother James after my mother and sisters left in 1801, which I have never forgiven him for in principle, though he was practical. All six of my novels were begun or germinated in these rooms — the country balls, the social embarrassments, the marriages that saved women and those that ruined them, the irony that a woman can observe everything and decide almost nothing. Steventon was the laboratory. The rest of my life was the experiment.”

Sources: Wikipedia: Jane Austen

Residence 2

📍Winchester Road, Chawton, Alton, Hampshire GU34 1SD, United Kingdom

“My brother Edward gave Mother, Cassandra, and me this cottage at Chawton in 1809, when I was thirty-three and had published nothing. I sat at a small table by the sitting-room window and revised Sense and Sensibility, which had been laid aside for years. It was published in 1811. Pride and Prejudice followed in 1813. Mansfield Park in 1814. Emma in 1815. Eight years, six novels, and a creaking door that warned me when someone was coming and I had time to hide the manuscript.”

Sources: Wikipedia: Jane Austen