The North American Friends of Chawton House (NAFCH) is an official charity registered in the USA and Canada; we are a non-profit tax-exempt 501(c)(3).  We exist expressly in order to raise funds for Chawton House and support its primary mission to raise awareness and increase our understanding of the early women writers who preceded, inspired, and influenced Jane Austen.

 

Chawton House in Hampshire, England, is “The Great House” formerly belonging to Jane Austen’s brother Edward Austen Knight. It is just up the road from the cottage (“Jane Austen's House”) where she resided for some years.  Jane regularly walked up to the Great House during her years in Chawton in order to dine there with family, spend time with her motherless nieces and nephews, explore the gardens, and worship at St. Nicholas Church next door.

 

Until 1992, the estate remained the Knight family home. Chawton House still safeguards the Knight family’s books, paintings, and antiques, but it also contains an extraordinary collection of works written by early women writers and historic portraits of notable women. These were assembled by American philanthropist Sandy Lerner, co-founder of Cisco Systems and Urban Decay Cosmetics, after discovering how understudied and uncollected many early women authors were.

 

Lerner also funded the restoration of the property and oversaw its transformation into an academic center that opened in 2003. Since then, hundreds of scholars have attended conferences at Chawton House or used its research library to study and write about Jane Austen, the women who shaped the literary world she knew, and the women writers who succeeded her.

 

Since 2017, Chawton House has run independently and added robust public-facing programming to open the property to a wider audience through exhibitions, online lectures, reading groups, and seasonally themed house and garden tours.

​

Chawton House currently covers well over 80% of its annual budget through these activities but depends on its own fundraising and that of NAFCH to close that gap and to cover the costs of one-time projects. Please join us. Become a Friend of  “The Great House,” its lovely rooms and historic garden, and the many early women writers, including Jane Austen, whose legacy and works reside within.

 

​​​Many thanks,

Linda Troost

President