When Jane Austen moved to Chawton cottage in 1809 she sent off a poem to her brother Francis that celebrates the occasion:

It was at Chawton that Jane Austen, settled with her mother, sister, and friend, found the conditions that fostered the writing of three of her greatest novels. Mansfield Park, published in 1814, Emma, published in 1816, and Persuasion, published after Austen's death, in 1818, develop that complicating of a romantic narrative with social satire and psychological insight so characteristic of her earlier work. These novels also display a more intensified sense of the influence of place and environment on personality and action, a broader and more thoughtful social critique, and a much greater power of imagining her figures within the social and geographical spaces they inhabit. In the action of the novels that Jane Austen wrote at Chawton, communal, family, and physical settings - homes, houses, and, indeed, 'rooms concise or rooms distended' - play an important role.