Eighteen months ago, not a single statue of Jane Austen was on public display anywhere in the world. And now, it appears, we will soon have three within a ten-mile radius.
Back in July 2017, the Hampshire town of Basingstoke, where Austen shopped and danced but never lived, unveiled a bronze figure of the author to commemorate the bicentenary of her death. In June of this year, the nearby village of Chawton, where Austen not only lived but also wrote or revised all six of her completed novels, installed its own, smaller version of the same statue.
And last month, Winchester Cathedral, where Austen is buried, quietly inaugurated a fund-raising campaign for its own Austen bronze, to be installed in the cathedral’s Inner Close. The sculptor is Martin Jennings, who has created public statues of everyone from George Orwell to the late Queen Mother. He envisions Austen backgrounded by a tree, a quill pen, and the famous writing desk on display in nearby Chawton cottage, aka Jane Austen’s House Museum. (I’m not bowled over by the mockup visible in this video, but I’m no art critic, so don’t pay attention to me.)
The cathedral has set an ambitious-sounding fundraising target of £250,000 (about $316,000) for the project, but so far its publicity efforts seem curiously low-key, at least to a pushy American like me. Although I have a Google alert for online mentions of Austen’s name, the campaign never surfaced there; instead, I stumbled across the Winchester effort by accident – only to learn that a JustGiving page has apparently been operational for nearly a month.
It looks as if I’m not the only Janeite in the dark: As of this morning, the crowdsourcing had raised a grand total of £71.65 ($90) from three donors, one of whom cheerfully commented, apropos of exhorting continued effort, “It isn't what we say or think that defines us, but what we do!” (**headdesk**)
Meanwhile, when a local newspaper reporter went looking for a quote last week, “a cathedral spokesman declined to discuss the Jane in the Close project.” Umm – what? It’s two weeks before the year’s biggest gift-giving holiday, and you don’t seize the chance to publicize your effort to raise money to commemorate one of the world’s most beloved novelists? It might be time to shop for a new spokesman.
Perhaps the spokesman is speechless with bemusement (which I share) at the proliferation of images of someone whose face is essentially unknowable. Whether you meet Austen's statue in Basingstoke, Chawton, or Winchester -- or wherever town next chooses to erect a bronze version of Our Jane -- you'll always be meeting a fiction. Which, come to think about it, is actually kind of appropriate.
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