I had a great meeting with Gillian Dow at Chawton today. To be honest, I’d been worrying about it for weeks, knowing that the story development was in no state to be complete in time to run the even in March as we had agreed. I’d even been nervous about contacting Gillian, knowing I was letting the Library down on a promise I’d made last year. But worrying was not going to solve anything, so I bit the bullet last week, and wrote a short email explaining my problem, and fixing today’s meeting.
Gillian was very understanding, and we’ve fixed a new date for the experiment – the week between the 4th June and the 11th. But not only that, I think we cracked one of the main story problems I’d been having. Gillian went straight to the crux of my problem: that Montague Knight seems the obvious character to hang the story of the house upon, and yet his own biography doesn’t quite offer the emotional arc that I was looking for. Though he wrote (with his cousin, William Austen Leigh) the history of Chawton and its owners, its stops short of his own time there, and the emotion beat of loss happens after he dies, childless.
But it doesn’t, Gillian pointed out. Yes, Montague’s home improvement efforts at Chawton all seem positive and upbeat, but they are counterweighted by the loss of the home he grew up in family seat. When he was 30 his father, Edward, sold the family’s Kent home, Godmersham Park. Suddenly, all the work Montague put in at Chawton gets an extra significance. And there’s an emotional beat, loss, which can resonate in the story of the dismemberment of Godmersham and Chawton’s libraries. It could also celebrate the news of some of that collection, a 1833 “Bently” set of Austen’s work with Montague’s bookplates in, being donated back to Chawton.
In other news I also tested the out the wifi plug controller and speaker with Chawton’s network, and they both worked. So all in all, it was a VERY good morning.
*Edited to reflect my realization that Montagu didn’t grow up in Godmersham – his father lived with this family in Chawton from 1826.
The Interpretation Game 