I love the way the internet just makes stuff up.
Kidding!
I hate the way the internet just makes stuff up—not least when the stuff it makes up is about Jane Austen.
As, for example, in a recent featurette on the Indian travel website Curly Tales, titled “From Jane Austen To Agatha Christie, 4 Gorgeous Homes Of Authors To Book A Stay At.” (Ouch! Must we torture the English language in our pursuit of search engine optimization?)
I’m not qualified to judge the accuracy of the entries for the Gorgeous Homes of Christie, Ian Fleming, and Tennessee Williams. But the Jane Austen entry—Henry’s Townhouse, a boutique hotel in London’s fancy Marylebone neighborhood, where rooms this month start at £595 (about $755) per night—packs an impressive amount of misinformation into seven short sentences.
First, although it is certainly true that Austen’s fourth-oldest brother, Henry, lived at the hotel’s Berkeley Street address, it is not the case that this building is “one of this author’s homes,” as Curly Tales asserts. As I have noted before, it’s not even certain that Austen ever visited Henry there, although it’s plausible that she may have.
Not egregious enough for you? Keep reading.
If you go to Henry’s Townhouse, “you can get to witness some antique pieces, her first edition books and original letters written by her to her brother,” Curly Tales helpfully informs us. Except that none of Austen’s letters to Henry survives—and if one did, it seems a tad unlikely that it would be owned by a chichi hotel rather than, say, a research library.
Still not on board with my critique? There’s one more!
“It is believed that [Austen] penned down most of her novels at [Henry’s] place,” Curly Tales claims, blithely deploying that reliable old accomplice--the passive voice--to conceal the fact that this claim is entirely fictional, at least if it’s taken to suggest a widespread consensus about where Austen wrote her books.
"It is believed"? I suppose the author of this post may believe that Austen wrote her novels in a London residence she may never even have visited, rather than in the Hampshire homes where we know she lived and wrote. But believing doesn’t make it so. And neither does putting it on the internet, where it can misinform future generations for years to come.
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