Jane Austen is one of England’s most celebrated and greatest novelists and Hampshire - the county where Highclere Castle is situated -  played an important part in her life, not just as the place she lived but as inspiration to many of her novels.

Jane Austen is one of my favourite authors so I was thrilled to sit down with Lizzie Dunford - Director of Jane Austen's House - one of the most treasured Austen sites in the world.

The cottage, in a village to the south-east of Highclere called Chawton, is where Jane Austen lived for the last eight years of her life.

Here her genius flourished and she wrote, revised and had published all six of her globally beloved novels: Sense and Sensibility, Pride and Prejudice, Mansfield Park, Emma, Northanger Abbey and Persuasion.

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