Jane Austen

Danny Chambers Excerpts

Thursday 18th December 2025 Westminster Hall

[Dr Danny Chambers (Winchester) (LD)]

It is an honour to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Efford. As Mr Bennet said in “Pride and Prejudice”:

“For what do we live, but to make sport for our neighbours, and laugh at them in our turn?”;

so I thank my constituency neighbour, the hon. Member for Basingstoke (Luke Murphy) for securing this debate. I thought his speech was excellent, not just on the history of Jane Austen’s life, but on how relevant her works are today when viewed in terms of structural inequality, and how pioneering they were at the time. It was a very good speech, and I congratulate him on it.

The hon. Member has already talked about the links that Jane Austen has to my constituency; she is buried in Winchester cathedral. She is an immense source of pride for all of us in Hampshire—with everyone claiming their little section of her life—but particularly in Winchester. She moved there in 1817 and subsequently spent her final days there. She lived in No. 8 College Street and, to celebrate 250 years since her birth, Winchester College opened it to the public over the summer. It is a mere five minutes from the cathedral, a site that many of us here will have visited and where many people come from all over the world purely to visit Jane Austen’s headstone.

No. 8 College Street is a site where brilliant volunteers are brimming with knowledge about Jane Austen’s life in and around Winchester. It is also just a couple of doors down on the same street as P&G Wells bookshop, which is one of the longest continuously operating bookshops in the UK. It is very beautiful; Austen was probably one of its most famous customers, and it still sells beautiful collector’s editions of Jane Austen in the store. The cathedral, Hampshire Cultural Trust and many other local groups and businesses have put on excellent events and exhibitions to commemorate 250 years of Jane Austen this year. I thank everyone involved for their hard work, and everyone is welcome to visit.

The more we learn about Jane Austen, the greater our admiration becomes for a woman with such wit, skill and literary prowess. Through her work, we enter into the mind of a young woman in a society where that voice would not usually be heard—and it is not just any voice; it is bold, witty, ironic and very funny. Austen brings us a voice that had hitherto been sidelined; when it is given centre stage, we can hear all its incredible qualities. She has a sharp and honest sense of humour and a clear-minded understanding of people and society, and emphasises the importance of taking pleasure in a good novel, which should be an inspiration to us today, particularly at a time when the proportion of the UK population reading for pleasure has been decreasing significantly.

Austen delighted in the ridiculous, and was never one to take life too seriously, writing in “Mansfield Park”:

“Let other pens dwell on guilt and misery.”

As we celebrate her immense cultural legacy, I hope that that joy and amusement in the society of others will continue to inspire and enlighten us today. When I was younger, my mother and my two younger sisters watched the ’90s BBC adaptation of “Pride and Prejudice” on loop for about a decade, and I can still quote nearly every line from it—I should thank them for making me appeared more cultured than I actually am. As Lizzy Bennet says:

“Think only of the past as its remembrance gives you pleasure.”

It is with great pleasure, fondness and admiration that we celebrate the life and works of Jane Austen.