Sydney meeting
Annotation and Inscription: Jane Austen, Unmarried Women, and the Austen-Knight Family Library
Francesca Kavanagh

Francesca Kavanagh is a Lecturer in English at La Trobe University and a PhD candidate in the Department of English and Theatre Studies at the University of Melbourne. Her current research focuses on eighteenth- and nineteenth-century women’s reading and writing practices. Her other research interests include the Gothic, and cultures of celebrity and fandom from Romanticism to the present. Her work on Jane Austen’s nieces has been published in The Australasian Journal of Victorian Studies. Her other work has been published in The Eighteenth Century: Theory and Interpretation (online supplement) and European Romantic Review.

This talk explores the inscriptions and annotations made by unmarried women of the Austen-Knight family in books from their family library, now on loan to Chawton House. It examines the books and inscriptions of Jane Austen’s niece Marianne Knight (1801–96) to show how unmarried women used books to carve out a space for themselves within the patriarchal household. Marianne managed her father’s house and then spent the remainder of her long life at the homes of brothers and nephews. Her books remain in the Austen-Knight library as a record of her claim to the family home and the relationships between the women that supported it.