I serve as an active board member working with North American Friends of Chawton House. North American Friends of Chawton House (NAFCH) was founded to raise funds for Chawton House and support its primary mission to raise awareness and increase understanding of the early women writers who preceded, inspired, and influenced Jane Austen.
Chawton House in Hampshire is “The Great House” formerly belonging to Jane Austen’s brother Edward Austen Knight, just up the road from the cottage where she herself resided for some years and which became Jane Austen's House Museum. Jane walked up to the “Great House” regularly during her years in Chawton in order to dine there with family, to spend time with her motherless nieces and nephews, to explore the gardens, and to worship at St. Nicholas church next door.
Presently, Chawton House safeguards the Knight family’s library books, a few important paintings and antiques, as well as an extraordinary collection of works by early women writers. Chawton House has become a center for the study of the female pens that preceded and inspired Austen’s own: many scholars, bibliophiles, and philanthropists have added to the core collection. Much new scholarship has emerged from work done on site.
NAFCH is an official 501(c)(3)charity registered in the USA and Canada.
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