In Training for a Heroine: Jane Austen's Travelling Writing Desk

Jane Austen’s travelling writing desk was gifted to the author around the time of her 19th birthday by her father, George Austen. The portable, mahogany desk was designed to fold into a case for ease of travelling and has a secret draw where Austen stored her most treasured possessions – her letters and manuscripts.

In Training for a Heroine tells the story of Jane Austen as a young, ambitious writer at the beginning of her career, the travelling writing desk symbolising a world of opportunity and possibility. Extracts from Austen’s letters provide us with an insight into her life and her time in Southampton where she lived briefly in 1783 and from 1806-1809.

Jane Austen’s travelling writing desk, on loan from the British Library, is at the heart of a year-long celebration of Jane Austen’s 250th birthday in Southampton, and across the world.

This exhibition is part of the Jane Austen at GHT programme, which also includes a new contemporary art commission, No Notion of Loving by Halves by Jocelyn McGregor.

No Notion of Loving by Halves Commissioned by ‘a space’ arts, No Notion of Loving by Halves by Jocelyn McGregor is a site-specific multi-media installation and programme of live performances that take a deep dive into Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey and explore the intriguing and intense relationships the heroine, Catherine, develops with other female characters in the novel.

These relationships often lurch from familial and supportive to conspiratorial; from formal and funny to distant and heated; and can be ragingly competitive, passionate in both love and hate. They are complex, nuanced and fundamentally Gothic.

No Notion of Loving by Halves is a contemporary exploration of how these fictional relationships reflect Austen’s reality, the relationships developed between Gothic women authors through their works of fiction and how much these relationships still resonate in the work of many artists and authors today.

About the artist:

Jocelyn McGregor is a multi-disciplinary artist based in North West England. She holds a BFA in Fine Art from the Ruskin School of Fine Art and an MFA in Sculpture at the Slade School of Fine Art. Awards include a Henry Moore Foundation Grant (2023), Sculpture in the City: Aldgate Square Commission 2022-23, the British Council SWAP UK/Ukraine Residency 2019-20 and Bloomberg New Contemporaries in 2018 (touring South London Gallery & Liverpool Biennale). Exhibitions include ‘DREDGED’ (solo) in partnership with Lakeland Arts and Arts&Heritage, Windermere Jetty Museum, Cumbria (2023-24); ‘Lapsus Calami’ curated by Eddie Peake, Marlborough London (2023-24); ‘Mantle’ (solo), Castlefield Gallery, Manchester, UK (2022); ‘Trespassers Will be Detected?’, Dnipro Centre for Contemporary Culture, Ukraine (2020); and ‘A Fieldguide to Getting Lost’, T.A.F, Athens, Greece, 2018.