Only in books does England look like this. A long, narrow drive through low, wet autumn meadows. Four great black shire horses, their vast backsides seal-sleek in the rain, sheltering under a chestnut whose last leaves flap in the wind like giant’s gloves. In front of me, a triptych of buildings, perfect as a picture: on the right, a small church sulking behind its yews; on the left a low, grey stone stable block. In front, raised up on a small hill, a gabled Elizabethan manor house, its red brick front flared with the more brilliant autumn red of Virginia creeper.
It is Chawton House, in Hampshire, which belonged to Jane Austen’s elder brother, the one who was adopted by childless wealthier relatives. He became their heir and took their name, and as Edward Knight he became a substantial landowner, able to house his widowed mother and spinster sisters Jane and Cassandra in the small, square bailiff’s house in the middle of Chawton village. I’ve just driven past it, on the road that runs only a few feet from the place where Austen sat, in the parlour right on the village street, and wrote, in secret, on a table no bigger than a tea-tray.
Almost the only sign that we are not still in the early 19th century is a discreet entryphone on a post by the gate. I turn left, and park in the stable yard.
”This is Katie Sunday.” A small, slim woman with dark hair meets me in the hall, a skinny scrap of cat winding itself round her ankles. “I found her wandering in the churchyard at the weekend.”
Sandy Lerner had just rescued another animal, to add to the horses in the field, and to literally thousands of abandoned or mistreated creatures to whom she has given a home at her farm in Virginia - all under the auspices of the Bosack-Kruger Foundation, the charity she set up with her then husband Len Bosack in 1990, when they sold Cisco Systems, the communications company they had founded.
Lerner had made me breakfast in the kitchen of the converted coach houses. French toast topped with chopped nuts - “to make it a bit healthy” - with maple syrup and fruit coulis, vegetarian sausages, “because you never know”, orange juice, coffee strong enough to curl your hair.
”Are you interested in Jane Austen politics?” I’m so delighted by the question that I don’t answer for a moment, but Lerner goes right ahead anyway, explaining how she came to buy Chawton House and turn it into a study centre for women’s writing before 1840, housing her large collection of books of the period. These 17th- and 18th-century women wrote poetry and fiction, of course, but also botany and chemistry, mathematics and linguistics, polemics, divinity, household management and much more. Almost 1,500 authors are here; about 50 of the novels are the only known extant copy. The rarity of these books reflects the neglect of a literary heritage that has only recently come to be valued.
A few years ago, Lerner decided to offer her growing collection to the Bodleian Library in Oxford, which held very few of these books. They said no. Now, she finds herself bidding at auction against the same institutions that ignored this work only a little while ago, as well as against buyers from as far afield as Japan. The prices, she says, are now shocking - as much as £16,000 a volume - even though, as she makes clear, she buys “for the text”, not for the rarity or beauty of the edition. “I am a nerd,” she tells me cheerfully. “An academic. I go for content.”
But back to the story of Lerner and Chawton. I’d made up for myself a version of her journey: shy young Stanford science student, at college after a troubled childhood shoved between two aunts, backpacking through Europe one summer, in Chawton to pay homage to the woman whose work had, as Lerner says, kept her sane, saw the beautiful manor standing empty on the hill, promised herself that if ever technology made her rich...
My imagined story was all wrong. “The first time I saw this house I already owned it,” Lerner says. She laughs. “And that is positively the last time I will ever have a temper tantrum.”
The fit of temper, in which Lerner phoned her secretary and told her to buy Chawton House, sight unseen, came after an argument at the Jane Austen Society about whether to acquire the house in Bath where Austen had stayed briefly (she hated Bath) or the empty Chawton, in the village she loved. But the “politics” run deeper. To think of Jane Austen as a sort of immaculate conception, in literary terms - a one-off genius, coming from nowhere - is what Lerner calls the “spinster on a pedestal” view. A male view. And a view that makes her cross. For Lerner had realised, through a meeting with Isobel Grundy, an expert on women writers of the 18th century, that Austen was the brightest flower of an immensely rich but disregarded tradition of women’s writing. To rescue these women from their obscurity, and perhaps to rescue Austen from her lonely pedestal, had become a mission - despite what Lerner calls her own “blinding ignorance”.
Then came the hard bit. For four years after she acquired the house, Lerner battled against planners and locals convinced that a Californian internet millionaire could only spell trouble - “they thought it was going to be a lesbian commune” - and only 18 months ago did the centre finally open.
We’re breakfasting in a conservatory extension at the back of the converted stables, and the big house is 50 yards up the hill to my right, perched there like a jewel box with its precious cargo. At one point I mention something that interests Lerner, and I say I’ll e-mail her the reference. She looks almost startled. “I quit reading e-mail two years ago,” she said. It is my turn to be surprised. The woman whose company was one of the first and most successful pioneers of commercial applications of the internet - and the source of all this wonderfully applied money - never logs on now. If she does, she’s horrified at what she finds. Does she feel, then, that because the internet is so riddled with pornography and violence she somehow helped to spawn a monster? “We never dreamed that it would go into this ‘freefall’.”
She and Len Bosack were “Johnny-come-latelys” to the internet in 1975 - others had already been at work on it for seven years. But they were “nerds”, she repeats, academics interested in its serious applications. (Her one published project is a Dilettante’s Dictionary of Science; her passions are physics, acoustics and audio-engineering.) Other people had trouble realising the full potential of the internet: the husband-and-wife team had to approach more than 60 venture capital companies before they found one who would invest in the embryonic Cisco Systems. And now Lerner laughs at herself for just the same lack of foresight - when she had an early opportunity to invest in e-Bay, she didn’t take it. “I loathe shopping and I thought, ‘Who on earth would ever be interested in that?’”
However, her personal aversion to the internet does not stop her ensuring that Chawton House has an excellent site (www.chawton.org), on which browsers can read some of the collection’s gems: 21st-century communication at its best, to spread the word about 18th-century communication at its best.
I ask her about the money - having it, giving it away. Her projects are many: apart from Chawton and the books, and the rescued animals, she has a make-up company that does no animal testing, and as a “recovering vegetarian” she has established an English pub next to her farm in Virginia that serves meaty fare from animals that have lived a happy life. But people regularly court her for money: she has seen “so many project directors”. Yet she remains, it seems, unjaded: “Pollyanna in an Addams body,” is how she describes herself. The Pollyanna bit was probably what enabled her to survive a miserable childhood, with an absent father, an artist from an old New York family - “he still wore spats” - and an abusive alcoholic mother who tried to teach her to drive when she was three and then left her to the aunts, a “burden”, a rescue kitten. And the last bit could not be more inaccurate as a description of this pretty woman who looks far younger than her years. In her quiet way, too, I reckon she is more than a match for those project directors.
There was one more thing I wanted to do. May I? I asked. Of course, she said, although she said goodbye and left me to go up to the big house with Susie Grandfield, Chawton House’s director. I’d seen the main library before; now we headed down a stone passage towards the old kitchens, into a small locked room half-underground, probably a larder. Grey metal shelves against bare walls hold some of the collection’s most valuable volumes. Chawton’s librarian handed me a pair of white cotton gloves to put on, and then a small bundle of raggedy paper, just a few inches across, the hand-torn sheets speared together with an aged dressmaking pin, covered in the firm black handwriting of Jane Austen. This is the manuscript of Sir Charles Grandison, unfinished, tattered, full of crossings-out and angry black lines, full of ebullient wit and brilliance and that inimitable spirit.
Dear reader, you will think me a fool, but I thought I was going to cry. Not just because Austen manuscripts are extraordinarily rare; certainly not because these few inches of paper are now worth a highway of diamonds; but because there was something so poignant, almost pathetic, about these scraps, filled with spinsterly economy to the very edges, holding a voice that has reached around the world.
As I drove away, I could see in the rear-view mirror the rescued horses, their great, soft heads nodding over their fence now, and the buildings that held Sandy Lerner, her rescued cat, and her rescued literary tradition.
From Lerner’s kitchen
2 x french toast, maple syrup, fruit coulis, vegetarian sausages, orange juice and coffee
