2025 marks the 250th anniversary of Jane Austen’s birth and Southampton will be celebrating the city’s links with the world famous author.

Dr Gillian Dow – Associate Professor of English Literature at the University of Southampton and the former Executive Director of Chawton House Library – has been immersed in Jane Austen’s world since she first read her novels in the mid-90s (and watched Colin Firth’s lake dive with enthusiasm)! As our city gets ready to celebrate the 250th anniversary of the author’s birth, Gillian discusses how Southampton influenced Austen’s writing.  

“Jane Austen is often positioned as the quintessential English novelist—her world hemmed in by hedgerows and drawing rooms. Her novels, at first glance, appear to present a small world view: village life; family drama; the delicate dance of courtship; the rigid expectations of class.

“But Austen’s fiction, though rooted in the local, ripples with the currents of the larger world. Beneath her irony and wit, global events shape the backdrop of her characters’ lives. Jane Austen was no mere chronicler of parochial and patriarchal society; her writing reveals an acute awareness of the far-reaching forces that shaped her era.

“She was born eight months after the start of the American Revolutionary War, and she died two years after the Battle of Waterloo. With brothers Francis and Charles in the navy throughout, and a cousin who married an aristocrat who was guillotined during the Revolutionary Terror in France, Global events were never far from home.

“Southampton played a big part in Austen’s life, and that must have shaped her fiction. It is often thought that she stopped writing after the Austen women moved from Bath to the rented property in Southampton that they lived in from 1806 -1809. But there’s no real evidence to support that. We know that Pride and Prejudice was begun in the 1790s: that manuscript must have travelled with her. Most writers will tell you, you don’t just stop writing. Her time in Southampton saw Austen building up to an extraordinary period of productivity and publication, starting with Sense and Sensibility in 1811. At the very least we know she wrote brilliant letters from Southampton, most to her sister Cassandra.

“During Austen’s lifetime Southampton was a port, a spa resort, and a bustling place of commerce. Austen captures this activity in her letters. She writes compellingly of a fire at Webbes, who was a pastry cook, bringing in cast of fire engines, a toyshop in danger, and a man who seems to have had a haberdashers who was so scared he would lose his stock, he started giving away his valuable lace to anyone who would take it! And her accounts of visits from acquaintances really show her ironic pen at work – some of them are a real scream.

“In her letters from Southampton, we really get a sense of scenes and character studies Austen must have stored up for later use. And now, as we’re coming up to the 250^th anniversary of Jane Austen’s birth the city is reconnecting with Austen.

“There is a city-wide programme of events taking place, starting with an exhibition of Jane Austen’s own writing desk that is on loan to God’s Tower from the 15th of November 2024 through to the 23rd of February 2025 –we’ll really get to see where some of the magic happened!

“Then Southampton is yet again positioned on the world stage, as the University of Southampton is hosting a conference entitled ‘The Global Jane Austen: Celebrating and Commemorating 250 years of Jane Austen’. We have scholars and enthusiasts from across the Globe, and (almost) every continent committed to coming, and we’ll be welcoming the general public too. The conference will take place from the 10th to 12th of July 2025.