Page:Jane Austen (Sarah Fanny Malden 1889).djvu/60

 her daughters chose the latter. Chawton Cottage, a small house on the Hampshire estate, was altered, improved, and fitted up for them, and in 1809 the party of four ladies (for Miss Lloyd remained with them) moved from Southampton and established themselves in what was to prove Jane Austen's last home. We may well believe that when she left Southampton she rejoiced in the hope that it would be her last move, but she could scarcely have foreseen for how short a time she would need any earthly home, and those who loved her so dearly would, indeed, have mourned if they had known that she would have been with them for only eight more years. Yet without those eight years how incomplete her life would have been, and how little of her work would have been left for posterity to admire.

For some time she had felt herself only a sojourner in strange towns, not really "at home" anywhere; and though she seldom complained of this feeling, it showed itself in the way she had dropped her favourite home pursuit of writing. Now, after the move to Chawton, she dwelt among her own people, and to such a domestic nature as hers this was a great boon.

Edward Austen—or Edward Knight as he had now become—deserves the warm gratitude of all Jane Austen's readers for the arrangement by which his sister found herself again in a real "home," and felt able to take up once more the writing which she had almost entirely laid aside after leaving Steventon. As one would like to know whether, on leaving her first home, she ever realised that in that quiet parsonage she had laid the foundations of a world-wide fame, so one longs to know whether, on settling at Chawton, she guessed that she should there