Lovely Response from Rebecca Smith, Writer-in-Residence at Jane Austen House Museum and Jane Austen Descendant

Here's the info on Ms. Smith that I completely missed on the website - she is the great, great, great, great, great neice of our beloved J.A. and a novelist in her own right:

Rebecca Smith at Amazon

"From October 2009 until May 2010 Rebecca Smith will be the Writer in Residence at Jane Austen’s House Museum.

Rebecca is the author of three novels published by Bloomsbury - The Bluebird Café (2001), Happy Birthday and All That (2003) and A Bit of Earth (2006). During the residency she will be finishing a novel that follows five generations of a family from Hampshire to India and back again. It was partly inspired by Chawton - Rebecca is Jane Austen’s great great great great great niece!

Rebecca is an experienced creative writing tutor and is a teaching fellow in the English department at the University of Southampton. She will be running workshops and helping to set up groups for writers and readers at the Museum."

Here's the response she so graciously sent to me based on my questions - it's posted on her blog site at the Museum as well:

Writer-in-Residence at Jane Austen's House Museum Blog

Dear Chris,

I hope you are well and enjoying your project. I have got very behind with everything. We have had crazy weather resulting in schools being closed and no time for me at Chawton, but I have started answering your questions and have put the first answers on my blog - I know you can access them there, but as the questions were from you - here are the first answers...

"The Writer Back In Residence.

Today is my first day back at the Museum for a month. I have felt like The Writer Not In Residence - it has been awful. Each day I was meant to be here it has been too snowy. Chawton seems to be in the middle of The Hampshire Snow Triangle, a place where people end up spending two nights awaiting rescue in their freezing cars. But today I’m back, and today … it’s snowing.
   I have had some really nice emails from an American writer. Her name is Chris Stewart and she is doing a brilliant project , inspired by Sense and Sensibility which involves reading along with Marianne Dashwood. Anyway, Chris asked me some questions and I thought I might try to answer them here…they are big questions and I’m sure that my answers will change as my time here goes on.

1. How has being in Jane Austen’s house affected your writing and your feelings about yourself as a writer?
2. Is it inspiring  being there, or do you feel any pressure to produce something amazing or a mixture of both?
3. Have you adopted any of Jane Austen’s writing habits under the influence of the house (and possibly her presence!) or do you share similarities in your style of writing already? 4.What projects are you working on, and does Jane Austen figure in any of them?
5. If you were doing a project such as mine, what would you be interested in learning/doing?

Well, I think the first thing I have noticed is how 200 years now seems to be such a short time, and I think this has changed the way I feel about everything. 
   If 200 years isn’t so long, the past and its people are more present, and less seems to be lost. I find this comforting. One of the odd and lovely things about being here is that some of the objects in the Museum are things that were once owned by my great aunts. For instance, a box that was carved by Jane’s brother, Francis, was, until not that long ago, something that my Aunt Diana kept cereal box and cracker toys in for the amusement of visiting children; and some of the smaller portraits I recognize as having once hung on their walls. I only had vague ideas of who these various Austens were when I was growing up - I probably wasn’t paying attention -  but here they are now. It is as though I am following them round and we have all ended up where we should be.  I do have this feeling - probably quite misplaced - of coming home. And this is ridiculous - why should I pay more attention to this branch of my family tree than any others? I have some really interesting Scottish ancestors too, including a captain who was shipwrecked on an island and was rescued to tell the tale. I had an  Indian grandmother who died when my father was tiny - we know close to nothing about her. These stories are what I’m interested in writing about at the moment. It will be fiction, but the novel I’m trying to finish follows the story of five generations of a family from Hampshire to Canada and India and back again. I’m only going as far back as the Edwardians and the novel isn’t to do with Jane Austen.
   I’m interested in ideas about home and belonging (and not belonging). But I can see that it is rather convenient of me to feel the pull of Jane Austen’s cottage in Chawton, which happens to be gorgeous and only 27 miles from where I live, rather than the houses in Scotland or India or Canada or the north of England where other ancestors dwelt.
   My novel is about (I hope) the pull of places. It was going to be called Dancing on The Boat but now it is called The Home Museum.
   Being here has really helped with the writing of it. It has helped me to shape it. I love being in a museum and I have been so interested to see what goes on behind the scenes. I’m so interested in the whole business of curating - it seems to me to be rather like what I have to do with the huge amount of material that I have to work with; and what any novelist has to do when they decide which things, scenes, conversations, images and so on are going to be included in the novel. I guess I’m also interested in the way that we curate our own lives, the stories and memories that we keep, the things that we decide are significant and those that we discard deliberately or without a thought
   The fourth generation person in my novel is a library assistant (a fantasy job of mine) but volunteers to help in a rather dusty local museum (hence the title) which was once the house where her great grandparents lived. My fictional museum is nothing like The JAHM which is never ever dusty. I’m still a long way from it being finished, and who knows if anybody will want to publish it, but my aim now is that the semi-amorphous mass will become a sleek creature by August 1st - an evolution from amoeba (the single cell of the first idea) through countless stages (creatures who dwell where there is no light) to the colossal squid of my ambition and dreams.

Question 2
It is inspiring being here. I think everybody finds that - that is why there are so many dedicated volunteer stewards. It would be hard not to find the house and garden and its setting restful and beautiful and so inspiring - there's peace and holy quiet here. There is space to think here. It must be bit different for Louise and Ann and the other people who work so hard here, ensuring that this wonderful atmosphere is maintained, but of course they are here because they love the place and the wonderful spells it casts.
I don’t find it intimidating, though. I don’t expect ever to be in Jane Austen’s league - who could? So I just carry on and write the novel that I feel compelled to and try to make it as good as I can. Meanwhile, I can read and learn, from her letters as well as from her novels.

Question 3
Her writing habits - I’m not quite sure. I’ll have to think about that. With Christmas and the snow-extended school holidays it seems a long time since I did any proper writing. That’s probably enough for now. I should do some writing…" 

  
With very best wishes,
Rebecca.
  

Rebecca Smith
Writer in Residence
Jane Austen's House Museum. writerinresidence@jane-austens-house-museum.org.uk

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[discount coach]

It’s true that we don’t know what we’ve got until we lose it, but it’s also true that we don’t know what we’ve been missing until it arrives.