If Kent lacks any proper memorial for the clear links that Ian Fleming and his creation 007 has in the county, the relative silence on Jane Austen and the part of her life she spent here is even stranger. There were significant enough to fill a whole book – `Jane Austen in Kent’, by Terry Townsend (Halgrove, Wellington, 2015). There have been plenty of other articles about her links to such places as Horsmonden, Tonbridge, Sevenoaks, Dartford, Chilham, Canterbury, Lenham and Ramsgate. This names only a few of the locations that figure in her letters or records about her.
Austen (1775-1817) may have been a native of Hampshire, and is buried in Winchester Cathedral. But she lived a strangely peripatetic life. Some of this involved excursions to Bath, which is stronger at commemorating its links to her. But the chief reason why she came to Kent was to visit her brother, Edward Austin, who had changed his name to Knight after being adopted by the wealthy Thomas and Catherine Knight, who left him their large mansion at Godmersham near Ashford on the death of Thomas in 1791. It is here that Jane often came, and according to one of her more recent biographers, David Nokes, it is most likely here that she completed `Mansfield Park’ (1814). The `elegant library’ on one of the wings on the ground floor `had long been one of her favourite rooms, and she was content to remain there for most of the day while the men of the house went about the grounds, shooting pheasants or netting rabbits.’ (Nokes, `Jane Austen’, 422). `We live in the library except at meals,’ she wrote to her sister Cassandra, `& have a fire every eveng’. The link with Austen and this place is strong enough for it to have been featured on the Ten Pound notes issued in 2017 – though the house today serves as headquarters of the Association of British Dispensing Opticians, and while clearly kept excellently, is largely off limits to visitors, except for the occasional days when the gardens around it are open. There is also a very small museum celebrating Austen’s links with the house in an outbuilding, but it is only infrequently open.
Godmersham house may have served as the inspiration for setting of Mansfield Park. But her novels were famously focussed more on the social world, and were far stronger on the interior places where human interactions happened through spoken language and dialogue rather than the wordless natural world. Her own status as a spinster, and one that had very limited financial means (her books were only moderately successful in her life) meant that she lived the life of someone who came across as quasi-homeless. That means that the places that she is linked to in Kent mostly fall into the category of ones she briefly stayed in on the way to somewhere else, or passed through. The demolished Bull and George Inn in Dartford is one such place, the building on the site now bearing a blue plaque commemorating this. Another is Ashford, where she sometimes attended balls held at 57 High Street, where a branch of Boots the chemists now stands. Her letters show that they did not particularly enjoy these occasions!
The most significant other place in Kent for her was Rowling House, near the grand and still standing mansion at Goodnestone, east of Canterbury. Austen first came here in 1794, after the marriage of Edward Knight to Elizabeth Bridges, whose ancestral family home Goodnestone was. It was at around this time that she was working on very early versions of `Sense and Sensibility’ (1811) (David Noakes, `Jane Austen’, Fourth Estate, London, 1997, 163.) Today Rowling remains a private house, just visible from the road outside. It is strange to think that one of the most celebrated works in world literature may have partially been written here.
Many of these links are ones that are largely either not commemorated, or done in a very underwhelming way. Godmersham House in particular would make a tremendous museum to her work, and has as good a claim as any place to this.