CHL was founded at Chawton in 1992 because of my belief—regardless of the fact that we, as readers, read and reread the novels and every other of those precious words over and over again—that we understand little and misunderstand much of what Jane or the other women of her time were saying. I wanted to establish a place where people of to-day could study the complete context of the lives of “our ladies,” understanding their world to better understand their words. To do this, I have collected as many of the novels as could be reasonably obtained, as well as other works by women and works about women of our period, roughly 1600-1830.

There has been so much social and technological change in the intervening years that many words have lost any meaning entirely (mantua, manchet), completely changed meanings (exceptional, nice), or simply ceased to exist as concepts for the modern reader (pattens, post*). In other cases, the language has been simply overtaken by events: advances in medicine (aspirin, antibiotics), transportation (motorways, jet airplanes), communication (telephones and (gulp) the internet), domestic comforts (plastic, central heating, microwave ovens), warfare (drones, nuclear weapons), as well as the largely unconscious, daily emotional debilitation of the modern person’s ability to find happiness within the constant threat of destruction unimaginable in Austen’s time, insatiable guilt over pollution, over-population, and famine on a global scale, and the incessant bombardment with the ever-present baser side of human nature that—incomprehensibly—is used to explain and justify the intrusion of the media and technology 24/7.

In 1994, I presented “Carriages in the Novels of Jane Austen” to the Stanford Jane Austen Society. What I modestly call “Lerner’s Theory of Austen” was first publicly expounded in that presentation, and has since been confirmed and refined. In its condensed form, it says, “Whenever Jane Austen uses a specific noun, she is making a context-specific, value-laden, descriptive comment about a person or society. Whenever she is using a word in a general form, she is using the word in a value-neutral sense.” For example: carriage vs. barouche-landau, out-rider or equipage; and my two personal favorites, mince pies, vs. supper, and landaulet, the latter a single word serving—on its own, and without any modern equivalent—to redefine Mr. Darcy’s character as a pale shade of Captain Wentworth’s, and my own firm conviction, that Jane meant, in her last novel, for this to be understood.