It is impossible to leave Lyme Regis without recalling how Tennyson, when he was shown the place where the Duke of Monmouth was supposed to have landed, cried: "Don't talk to me of the Duke of Monmouth! Show me the exact spot where Louisa Musgrove fell!"
Jane's intimacy with places was chiefly confined to Steventon, Godmersham, Chawton, Southampton, Bath, and their neighbourhood. It is not a { 237} day's walk or an hour's motoring from Steventon to Chawton, where, after the long interval of comparative inactivity, the later novels were "born." At Chawton, according to one of her later biographers, the "cottage" where she lived and worked has disappeared. This is happily not true. It is true that it is now turned to other uses than that of sheltering a parson's widow and her daughters. It has been divided internally, and now forms a couple of labourers' cottages and a village club, where tired toilers who have never read a line of the books that were written under that roof discuss the merits and defects of the tobacco tax and the Old Age Pensions Act. Chawton House itself shows little structural change, and the park is scarcely altered since Jane walked across from the Cottage to take tea with her relations at the great house.
At either of these villages, Steventon the birthplace of Jane herself and of _Pride and Prejudice_ and _Mansfield Park_, and Chawton where _Persuasion_ and _Emma_ came into being, you may find scenes which you will associate with this or that story or incident, but nowhere are you likely to feel the influence of locality more strongly in { 238} connection with either author or novels than at Godmersham, the home of her brother Edward, where, until long after her death, her relations dwelt amid their own broad acres. The place, with other property, came to Edward Austen from Mr. and Mrs. Knight, who had adopted him, and whose name he ultimately took. There is no more typically English seat in the typically English county of Kent. The small sylvan village, the old church above the Stour river, offer no special attractions for tourists, and Godmersham House itself is one of the plainest even among the country seats of the early Georgian age. Its one external charm is its unpretentiousness. It has not even the huge classic portico on which so many of the country houses of its period depend for "impressiveness." Plain, commodious, well-placed, the house is lovely for us only in that it sheltered for many a week, from year to year, the author of _Pride and Prejudice_. It is just such a house as Sir John Middleton filled with visitors at all seasons, or Mr. Darcy showed to his future bride and her Uncle and Aunt Gardiner.