2 Best Sights in Chawton, The South

Located in an Elizabethan country house on a 275-acre estate (part of the South Downs National Park), this library specializes in works by English women writers from 1600 to 1830, including authors such as Mary Shelley, Mary Wollstonecraft, and Frances Burney. It also houses the Knight Collection, the private library of the family who owned the house for over 400 years. Jane Austen’s brother, Edward, inherited the property and added the walled kitchen garden, shrubberies, and parkland. You can see the dining room table where Austen joined her family for meals and the library collection that contains a manuscript written in her own hand.

This unassuming redbrick house is where Jane Austen spent the last eight years of her life, writing Emma, Persuasion, and Mansfield Park, and revising Sense and Sensibility, Northanger Abbey, and Pride and Prejudice. Now a museum, the house retains a modest but genteel atmosphere suitable for the home of a clergyman's widow and her unmarried daughters. The drawing room contains a piano similar to the one Jane would play every morning before retiring to a small writing table in the family dining parlor—leaving her sister, Cassandra, to do the household chores ("I find composition impossible with my head full of joints of mutton and doses of rhubarb," Jane wrote). In the early 19th century, the road near the house was a bustling thoroughfare, and although Jane was famous for working through interruptions, she retained one protection against the outside world—the famous creaking door, its hinges deliberately un-oiled to better warn her when someone was entering her workspace. The museum is often closed for special events, so call ahead.