At my synagogue, members sometimes engage in public religious rituals to mark what we discreetly call “significant birthdays”--in other words, birthdays enumerated by a zero following a digit large enough to suggest that vagueness might be preferable to precision.
Next year, Jane Austen will celebrate a very, very significant birthday—a three-digit one!--although by now she is so far beyond petty human vanity that the specific number is anything but a secret. Indeed, it’s a logo.
By contrast, the birthday she reaches this year--she was born exactly 249 years ago today, on December 16, 1775—is not quite that significant. But it’s important enough that Chawton House--her brother Edward’s Hampshire mansion, down the road from the house where Austen herself lived for the last eight years of her life--is throwing a party.
Show up at 5:30 pm today, and you’ll have half an hour to explore the house on your own. At 6 pm, mulled wine and mince pies will be served “in front of the roaring fire in the Great Hall.” From 6:30-7:30 pm, curators will offer a guided tour of some of Chawton House’s literary treasures, including the copy of Emma that Austen inscribed to her friend Anne Sharp and the manuscript, in Austen’s handwriting, of a play based on Richardson’s novel Sir Charles Grandison.
They’re charging £30 per person (about $38) for the event, which is more than twice the house’s usual admission fee. Still, it sounds worth it to me, if only for the chance at a quieter after-hours viewing of a place that Austen knew well.
It may not be a lavish party—no doubt next year’s significant birthday will merit something flashier—but a celebration seems in order nonetheless. For us Janeites, whatever the number, every Jane Austen birthday is significant.
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