Джейн Остен и Сэнди Лернер

[AnotherLady]

По Джейн-Остеновской рассылке прилетела статья о восстановлении деревни Чотон, где жила Джейн Остен с сестрой и матерью. Статья (на английском) очень любопытная, я ее выложу сюда на случай, если кому пригодится.

From The Sunday Times
April 5, 2009

Sandy Lerner: Underwriting Austen
What do you do when you've made a mint in Silicon Valley? You indulge your passion for Jane Austen. Sandy Lerner has transformed the writer's Hampshire village. But first she had to win over the locals. By Godfrey Smith. Main photographs by Pal Hansen
The pleasure of your company is requested this summer at what sounds like the party of the year. It's at Chawton House, in the Hampshire village where Jane Austen lived eight of the last years of her life and wrote or revised all her great books. To celebrate the 200th anniversary of her arrival in the village, on July 3 there will be a Regency Ball that will faithfully mirror the sort of occasion at which Jane loved to dance. The women will wear those ultra-feminine, floaty gowns, the men will preen themselves in tight breeches and ornate cravats - or the dashing uniforms of officers in the Hussars.

Carriages will crunch up the drive just as they did then, the Great House (as it was then called) will glow in the soft light of candelabra. There will be country dances like the Prince of Wales's Fancy, waltzes, cotillions and possibly a quadrille, though they are very difficult. Tuition will be supplied before the start of the party by the Hampshire Regency Dancers, a group of amateur enthusiasts who do the dances for fun. The caller will be Ellis Rogers, the leading expert on the social dances of the 17th and 18th centuries, and Green Ginger, a group who specialise in music from 1700 on, will play.

There will be celebrity guests who starred in the most memorable BBC TV series from Jane's oeuvre: Pride and Prejudice, Persuasion, and Sense and Sensibility. There's just one possible snag: tickets will cost you $5,000 each, or £3,000 if you prefer to pay in sterling. All the proceeds will go to further the educational role of Chawton House as the home of early women's writing.

It may seem a bit much even so, but your hostess is confident that they will sell. The first $5,000 tickets were bought by Americans in February.

The story becomes yet more unlikely when you know that 15 years ago Chawton House would hardly have done for a barn dance. Indeed it was scarcely habitable. Richard Austen Knight is a direct descendant of Jane's brother Edward, who inherited the house and most of the village from some cousins called Knight, whose name he took, in 1809. Richard, who now farms in Gloucestershire, inherited the house in 1987:

"It had wet rot, dry rot and deathwatch beetle. Everything leaked. It was almost impossible to live in - except for the very wealthy. But it's been put in first-class order. Basically, it's been taken apart and put together again."

The driving force behind this stunning transformation is Sandy Lerner, a gentle, soft-spoken, humorous 53-year-old American woman with a nutcracker brain and a will of steel. She needed it to work the magic at Chawton. She bought a 125-year lease on the house without seeing it for £1.25m - and then her troubles began. The rumours proliferated. "They said it was going to be a lesbian commune," she says wryly. "Then it was going to be a Euro Disney. And then it was going to be a secret Ministry of Defence installation." (Villagers knew vaguely that her wealth came from computers.) And then she was going to ruin the lives of the local badgers. (Wrong again. All animals are safe with Sandy. The Hampshire Hunt is not allowed to pass over her land. Foxes may not be shot on her farm. And she owns five cats.)

Sandy grew up in California. Her parents were poor. Her father was an artist, her mother a window dresser. They divorced when she was four. She was then cared for by two aunts, one who lived on a 108-acre pear farm in northern California, where Sandy was driving a truck by the time she was nine. The other aunt was a chic lady who looked like Lucille Ball and lived in the Hollywood Hills. At 13, Sandy was an anti-Vietnam-war activist, and at college she first read political science, specialising in the theory of communism. Then, seeing there was no money in it, she switched to maths and computer science. It was at this point that she stumbled on Jane Austen. The BBC television account of Pride and Prejudice was her epiphany and the perfect antidote to the gritty imperatives of her course work. From that moment she read everything of Jane's she could lay her hands on: Persuasion, her favourite novel, 70 times.

It was at this period too that she met her future husband, Len Bosack, a fellow computer nerd at Stanford University. Together they devised a system that, so the romantics will tell you, enabled them to speak together by e-mail. It was a bit more complicated than that, but their multi-protocol router, an innovation of software and hardware that linked previously incompatible computer networks, was to become Cisco Systems, which they were to sell for £120m. Was it true, I asked her, that she'd had to go to 50 venture-capital companies to find the money, and didn't that show a remarkable persistence? "It was more than 70," was her laconic response.

She and Len split up but remain close and more mutually protective than many married couples. In 1990 they formed a foundation to pursue their many charitable interests; he underwrote half the capital she needed for the Chawton venture. For her, there were other initiatives: a cosmetics company, a state-of-the-art audio system, a Harley Davidson. She has an 800-acre farm called Ayrshire in Virginia run on organic principles. Nearby is the English pub she started. But Jane remains her principal obsession; she lives at her mill near Castle Combe in Wiltshire three months of the year and comes over to keep an eye on things at Chawton, where she stays in the stable block. It took 10 years and a further £10m before it was ready. It now houses her library of books by women published between 1600 and 1830, and Edward's Great House is known throughout the academic world for the rigour of its scholarship.

"People in the Austen world were suspicious of Sandy Lerner initially, but I think she has won over everyone by her generosity and commitment," says Claire Tomalin, author of an acclaimed biography of Jane Austen. "She impressed me as someone who dedicates herself to projects and makes them work. She is tremendously rich and busy. We were supposed to dine together after I gave a talk at the Society of Antiquaries, and she was so late she missed the talk and most of the dinner too, but it really didn't matter. I like her no-nonsense straightforwardness and regard her as a good thing."

It costs nearly $4,000 a day to realise Sandy's American dream in Jane's Hampshire village. Sandy's original benefaction pays most of it, but the team who work there are expected to generate some revenue too. They hold seminars and workshops, host conferences and weddings, and provide a sumptuous set for film companies. They are led by an affable former economics lecturer called Steve Lawrence, who earned an impressive track record as a fundraiser during his 18 years as director of development at Aberystwyth University. The 17 people who work with him have an eclectic mixture of backgrounds: Susie Grandfield, who heads the PR, did the same job for 15 years at the Savoy hotel group. Her deputy is the crime novelist Lindsay Ashford. The operations manager, Emma Heywood, was with the National Trust, and the assistant horseman, Keri Cairns, was director of the monkey sanctuary at Looe in Cornwall. He helps to look after four magnificent shire horses, because Chawton House is also a working estate of 300 acres with parkland and a walled garden producing organic fruit and vegetables. Schoolchildren come regularly to learn about raising organic produce and see at first hand how a farm worked in Jane's day.

The focus in 2009, though, is the year-long celebration of Jane's arriving at Chawton, with her mother and sister Cassandra, to live in the bailiff's cottage Edward had given her. Whether she had the slightest idea of the impact her little harvest of books would have on the great world is uncertain. "I think I may boast myself to be, with all possible vanity," she confessed, "the most unlearned and uninformed female who ever dared to be an authoress." She thought Pride and Prejudice "too light and bright and sparkling" and would no doubt have been diverted to learn that Winston Churchill got his actress daughter Sarah to read the whole of it to him when he was laid low with illness as wartime prime minister - or that Benjamin Disraeli read it 17 times. Yet somehow you feel she would have enjoyed the junketings this year at her brother's house: the Regency card party and "Tea with Mrs Austen"; the talk on Regency gardens followed by "Tea with Mrs Knight", with recipes from the family cookery book; and, perhaps best of all, "Undressing Mr Darcy". This, visitors are promised, is "a wry look at what made the hunk in the wet shirt so irresistible".

Not surprisingly, people arriving at Chawton get confused between the cottage and the house, though in fact their roles are quite different. In 1940, a small group of residents, distressed at the dilapidated condition of Jane's last home, started the Jane Austen Society to try and help. They became known as the Janeites - a term first coined by Rudyard Kipling. Today there are 2,000 Janeites here, and flourishing sister societies were formed in America in 1979, Australia (1989) and Japan (2006). Back in 1946, it was clear that, although membership had risen to 285, they simply did not have the funds to do much good. A letter was therefore sent to The Times that year seeking national support.

A solicitor called Edward Carpenter saw it and bought the cottage in memory of his son, who had died in the war. It opened to the public in 1949. Today it attracts an annual 37,000 visitors - from 20 countries on one typical day last year. They are able to go round and see, as nearly as humanly possible, how Jane lived.

Chawton House, on the other hand, is an ideal setting for the uniquely valuable library that sets the context for Jane's fiction. It houses not just other novels, but books on cookery, midwifery, and conduct - these last written, perversely as it may seem to modern sensibilities, by men. The relationship between the two places is cordial and - in Sandy's characteristic word - symbiotic. She is happy to explain the importance of context in reading Jane's novels. Nothing, she explains, in her prose is wasted. What carriages the characters take or do not take carry a coded meaning. When in Pride and Prejudice Lady Catherine de Bourgh drives to Elizabeth's house to bully her into not marrying Mr Darcy, she arrives in a carriage drawn by post horses. That, it has been calculated, is roughly the same scale of gesture as hiring a Learjet for the trip now. But Sandy herself has the best possible personal context: the house where Jane was such a frequent visitor. "We four sweet Brothers and Sisters dine today in the Gt House," she wrote to her niece Caroline in 1815. "Is not that quite natural?" Sometimes if it was late she would sleep in her brother's house rather than walk home. And Sandy has the singular pleasure of sitting in the alcove of the Oak Room where Jane loved to sit and watch the comings and goings up and down the long drive to the village. A telescope, surely once belonging to one of her two sailor brothers, both destined to become admirals, was found during the renovations in one of the cupboards. Best of all, perhaps, in the library is a small bundle of paper only a few inches across, held together with an ancient dressmaking pin. It contains, in Jane's square black writing, the manuscript of her short play, Sir Charles Grandison. Her crossings-out shiver down the years.

The library is in the safe hands of Jacqui Grainger. She took a degree in English at Reading and taught in a sixth-form college for 10 years before taking an MA in women's studies at York. Then she became a librarian and was encouraged to add an MA at University College London in library studies. One of her modules in it was advanced preservation. This took her to study the care of books and manuscripts in old houses like Chawton four years before she became librarian there. "I feel incredibly privileged and lucky," she says, "because the mission here could not more perfectly fit in with my personal and professional interests."

She looks after more than 9,000 titles - most from Sandy's library (though she also has the Knight family collection on loan). There are books by Aphra Behn, Maria Edgeworth, Mary Shelley and Frances Sheridan. Recently, with the help of an anonymous donor, they bought a set of manuscript cookery books written by Quaker women of the Richardson, Pease and Gurney families. They hold some early books by American women, though in the years they cover, wealth and therefore leisure to write had not yet come to the New World as frontier families moved west. In the past year the number of visitors to the library has tripled - often highly regarded professors but also many A-level students. Southampton University offers an MA in 18th-century studies for which Jacqui's archive is a unique resource. But some visitors come just for fun. One woman arrives regularly once a month and spends the day quietly reading before travelling home again.

There is accommodation in the house for up to three visiting fellows, who live without charge in one of the stable bedrooms for up to three months, but do their own cooking or go to the pub. They tend to be bright young women, but male fellows are welcome too; 28 people applied for one fellowship recently. Fellows are invited to help in the fields at harvest time: many do. The house also hosts fellows' lectures, with wine served first in the Old Kitchen. The day I was there they were looking forward to the talk that evening by Professor Norma Clarke of Kingston University: her theme was "Mrs Pilkington's Memoirs: Sex, Scandal and Celebrity". Clarke is the author of a new biography of Laetitia Pilkington, "a woman determined to be a writer on equal terms with men".

The reception Sandy got when she first came to Chawton was not England's finest hour.

How things have changed. "She is a very successful entrepreneur and highly intelligent philanthropist," says Richard Knight, who keeps up the family connection as a trustee at Chawton. "She has taken a fairly derelict country house and brought it back to life."

Tom Carpenter, grandson of the man who bought Jane's cottage for the nation and now its senior curator, goes even further about his neighbour in the Great House: "She has given it another 200 years." Steve Lawrence is in no doubt either: "Sandy's energy and enthusiasm is critical to both the vision and the delivery of the Chawton mission." Deirdre Le Faye, editor of Jane's letters and one of the most learned of all the Janeites, concurs: "Her idea for converting the Great House into a library was truly inspirational."

There has to be a downside. Elizabeth Grice, in a long and otherwise admiring profile written in 2003, the year the library opened, reported Sandy as saying that if anyone tried to harm a hair on her former husband Len's head, she'd tear them apart. "Being torn apart by Sandy Lerner would be terminal," Ms Grice noted. "She may be courteous and she may love cats, but she must be a frightening adversary." It's true that she can seem rather alarming. She holds a bachelor's degree in political science from California State University at Chico, a master's degree in econometrics from the Claremont Graduate School, a master's degree in statistics and computer science from Stanford University and an honorary doctorate from Southampton. She was also the first person to pose nude for a financial magazine (Forbes in 1997).

Let's leave the last word with the village. Rachel Pearson has lived there with her husband, Mark, and family for 16 years. "We think Sandy is an astonishing lady," she says. "What she's done for the landscape - and children's education - is fantastic. Everything she touches seems to succeed. There was some suspicion at first that she would create a kind of Jane Austen theme park, with candles and chamber pots, but that's partly because Americans and English don't speak the same language. But now I don't think there's anyone who's not on her side."

Sandy seems to agree about being separated by the same language. She once remarked that the English don't say what they mean. Sometimes they do, though, particularly these days in Chawton.


Я, в общем, и раньше знала, что Чотон восстанавливали и создавали там библиотеку и литературный центр на средства одной американской дамы, сделавшей себе состояние на компьютерах, и слышала о ней много хорошего от людей, ездивших в Чотон, а тут почитала о ней поподробнее. Дама эта, Сэнди Лернер, оказывается, вместе с мужем создала компанию Cisco Systems, которая, если я правильно поняла, заложила как минимум одну из основ интернета. Собственно, вот тут ее биография излагается поподробнее, хотя об Остен упоминается только мельком. А я в компьютерных технологиях понимаю не сильно много, но не могу не восхищаться людьми, которые с таким размахом и глубиной подходят к своим увлечениям (и столько всего полезного в результате творят).