The moral seems clear: Bonnets are no match for the brutal imperatives of capitalism.
It’s been five months since the owners of a failing hotel with Jane Austen associations proposed repurposing the vacant property into college-student housing. And last week, local authorities in Southampton, England, agreed to the plan, over the objections of Janeites, some of them in costume.
“Keeping historic buildings in active use is the best way to ensure their upkeep and maintenance,” the local council’s head of transport and planning wrote in a report recommending approval of the proposal. “The Council cannot insist that an unviable business remains open.”
The Dolphin Hotel, which began life as a coaching inn in the seventeenth century, is an at-best-peripheral Austen site: We know that Austen attended a ball there in 1793, on the cusp of her eighteenth birthday, and returned for another ball fifteen years later. But the slenderness of the connection didn’t prevent Janeites from protesting the new proposal, which came after other efforts—a £4 million ($5 million) renovation, a government contract to house asylum seekers—failed to transform the hotel into a going concern.
All may not be lost for people who hope to preserve the memory of Austen’s Dolphin links: In a May addendum to their planning application, the building’s owners offered to assuage concerns about limiting public access to the historic site by allocating ground-floor space to “a museum /interpretation centre dedicated to Jane Austin [sic] relating to her connections to the building and the Southampton area.”
In theory, this could be a good idea: Austen spent more than two years of her short life, from 1806-09, living in Southampton with the family of her brother Francis. The house she lived in is long gone, and she seems to have written next to nothing during those years, but hey—every scrap of information about her life is worth memorializing.
Given that the hotel’s owners apparently don’t even know how to spell Austen’s name, I’m a tad skeptical about their ability to create a useful exhibit, but perhaps they will be wise enough to hire someone more knowledgeable.
In the meantime, it looks like some lucky college students will soon be able to say that they are living in a place where Jane Austen once danced.
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