The Jane Austen Society of Australia

JASA tour to Jane Austen country 

Would you like to stroll along the Cobb at Lyme Regis (and even jump down those infamous steps if you can find a Captain Wentworth to catch you!), walk up and down the Pump Room just like Catherine Morland, meet the authors of books about Jane Austen, see inside places associated with Jane Austen not open to the general public and eat afternoon tea in Jane’s Bath home? Then why not join a JASA tour ?

Read about the 2003 tour...

In her delightful work 84 Charing Cross Road American writer Helene Hanff reports an interesting observation:

I remember years ago a guy I knew told me that people going to England find exactly what they go looking for. I said I’d go looking for the England of English literature, and he nodded and said: ‘It’s there’. 

This was exactly what the tour group which I had the great pleasure of leading, went looking for when they left for England in mid-August this year for a 3-week visit. And it was ‘the England of English literature’ which we found in a variety of beautiful, intriguing and evocative places.

I was so fortunate that the group was made up of such delightful people. From the beginning the group members got on well, rapidly finding that they had many things in common, quite apart from a shared love of good books. However, the fact that they all got on so well should not have come as a surprise to me because at least half the group was made up of members of JASA and, as we all know, JASA attracts extremely nice people! Some were members I knew well, others were ones who had only come to a few meetings or lived out of Sydney and it was a joy to get to know them better. I was especially thrilled to find that on the first JASA meeting after the tour ended, all those who had participated were gathered in an excited huddle and could hardly be prised apart as they swapped photos, reminisced and just enjoyed being together again. 

Of course, for all those members it was the Jane Austen related visits which were the real highlight of the tour. For me, the best moment of all was getting inside the house in College Street, Winchester, where Jane Austen died. Many times I have stood outside this house and longed to get in, but it is not open to the general public. Thanks to the kindness of Rhonda McMaster, wife of the school teacher who currently lives there, I was finally able to enter and it was a visit I will never forget. We all stood in the small room with its bow window and I read the last letter Jane Austen wrote to her nephew James Edward and then went on to read the beautifully written letter by Cassandra, dated the day after Jane’s death. I could barely see to read by the end, and you could have heard a pin drop in the room. When I looked up with tear-filled eyes, it was to find almost all the others as moved as I was. A very special moment! But there were other more cheerful Jane Austen visits as well. Tom Carpenter entertained us at the House Museum at Chawton and allowed us to see and touch Jane’s letters and music books; we did a Jane Austen walk through the streets of Bath, we jumped down the steps at Lyme Regis (but there was a woeful shortage of Captain Wentworths waiting to catch us!!) and we picnicked at Box Hill where some local cyclists who kindly stopped to take a group photo, were astonished (and delighted) to find several of us practising our flirting skills on them! In Lyme we bumped into Diana Shervington, who is connected to Jane Austen on both sides of her family, in Bath we enjoyed tea at 4 Sydney Place and, just like Catherine Morland, we missed out on seeing Blaise Castle.

The tour was so full of interesting visits and memorable moments that it is impossible to do justice to them all. Some highlights, loved, I think, by all the group:

• meeting Nigel Nicolson at Sissinghurst and sitting in the old library as he told us about his mother Vita Sackville-West and the day she found the ruined castle which she would turn into one of the most famous gardens in the world.

• a visit to Batemans, the mellow Jacobean stone house which was Rudyard Kipling’s home for over 30 years, and which was a house we all wished we could possess. It is the sort of house every Janeite should own.

• walking through Salisbury, one of the loveliest of cathedral towns, and standing on the spot where Trollope dreamed up The Warden as he gazed at the spire of the cathedral.

• getting inside Max Gate, the home which architect Thomas Hardy designed for himself and where he entertained so many famous writers (most of whom, it appears, were bitten by his ferocious dog Wessex, whose grave is in the garden).

• wandering among the ruins of Tintern Abbey, using headphones to listen to an excellent audio commentary about the lives of the monks who once lived there.

• travelling during one day from the home of miner’s son, D.H. Lawrence, in grimy and depressing Eastwood, to the Lord’s home, Newstead Abbey, which Byron inherited at the age of 10. The contrast was amazing and both places were absolutely fascinating to visit.

• seeing The Red House at Gomersal, in Yorkshire, the home of Charlotte Brontë’s friend Mary Taylor. The house itself is another one that we all wanted to own, and the exhibition on the lives of Victorian women was superb.

• enjoying the James Herriot Centre at Thirsk, the house where Herriot lived and worked as a vet for many years. The house also includes the only museum of Veterinary Science in the UK and it is a very good one. We all had lovely memories of the charming BBC series of his novels and enjoyed seeing a film on the life of James Herriot (real name Alf Wight).

• standing in the lovely garden laid out by William Wordsworth at his home Rydal Mount and reading Daffodils as we looked out over the field where the poet planted thousands of daffodils in memory of his beloved daughter Dora, who died young.

• attending a church service in the Unitarian Brook Street Chapel in Knutsford, Elizabeth Gaskell’s home town and the church where she worshipped. The incredibly warm welcome from the congregation and the singing of Bunyan’s To Be A Pilgrim, so appropriate to our literary pilgrimage, was unforgettable.

• attending a brilliant performance of Cymbeline at the atmospheric Swan Theatre in Stratford-upon-Avon.

• admiring the charming and newly erected statue of Hodge, Dr Johnson’s cat which he famously described as ‘a very fine cat indeed’, which stands outside his London home in Gough Square.

There was only one part of the tour which I did not enjoy – saying goodbye. However a reunion party has been planned, and every JASA meeting will offer chances of catching up with at least some of the group. I must admit that I felt nervous about leading a literary tour for the first time, but the nerves were quite needless. We had so much fun – fun on the coach drives when we listened to appropriate poems and music and did literary quizzes (won by JASA members Roslyn Russell and Amanda Jones), fun in the evenings when we got together for dinners, fun on the walks we did through delightful English towns and landscapes but, most of all, fun discovering for ourselves the England which English literature has made so special and so real for us.
Susannah Fullerton

Susannah Fullerton
President, JASA

Granny’s Teeth, the Cobb, Lyme Regis

FEEDBACK: info@jasa.net.au

31 March 2005