CHAWTON HOUSE AND ESTATE BELONGED TO JANE AUSTEN'S brother Edward Austen Knight. Because of this, Jane Austen, her mother, and her sister, Cassandra, came to live in Chawton village, and the "Great House" occupies a special place in Jane Austen country as the setting for Austen and Knight family gatherings. A charity to support research into early writing by women in English, and to preserve the house and grounds for the benefit of the public, was founded in the 1990s and operated mainly as a dedicated research library, garnering a worldwide reputation as a place from which comes scholarship of excellence and renown. Katie Childs, with an impressive track record of working in great national institutions and government departments, took up the role of chief executive in February 2019, succeeding Dr. Gillian Dow, whose fourteen-year commitment to Chawton House secured its reputation as a research center of significance and worldwide reach.