Just over 11 years and £10m ago, American millionaire Sandy Lerner bought a house in Hampshire in which she had never set foot, intrigued by its illustrious past and disastrous present.
"I bought it sight unseen, despite the advice of people who had actually seen it. I had no idea what 400 years of disrepair can do to an English house," she said.
Yesterday Chawton House, as pristine as when Jane Austen was a regular visitor from her own home 10 minutes' walk away, was launched as an international study centre for early women's writing in English.
To celebrate the occasion, a manuscript in Jane Austen's handwriting, her dramatisation of Samuel Richardson's novel Sir Charles Grandison (seven volumes boiled down to a slender playscript suitable for Austen family amateur theatricals), went on display for the first time in Britain. It is one gem in Ms Lerner's remarkable library of women authors from 1660 to 1830 that will be housed in the centre.
Ms Lerner, a Californian computing tycoon, first saw the house she had bought in 1992, and was aghast.
Her architect, Mark Webber, recalled: "You could hear various forms of wildlife scrabbling away behind the panels. When the panels came off, it was like a secondhand car that looks OK from the outside but that's rotten with rust inside."
The house had dry rot, wet rot, death watch beetle, jand woodworm. Leaded windows were dropping out of their decaying stone frames, and brick walls were on the point of collapse from water seeping from roof valleys and gutters.
In Georgian times, Chawton House was a handsome Elizabethan manor that marked a transformation in the fortunes of Jane Austen's family, in a plot twist which would make the most romantic novelist blush for shame. Her father was a country rector with a large family, taking in pupil borders to make ends meet. Then Jane's elder brother, Edward, was introduced to Thomas Knight, his father's second cousin, and his new wife, and they took the boy along on the rest of their honeymoon. Several years later, as they could not have children, they adopted him.
On Knight's death in 1809 Edward adopted his surname to inherit three estates, thousands of acres, three Norman churches, several large houses, the entire village of Chawton - and Chawton House. He bought and refurbished a much smaller house in the village for his widowed mother and two spinster sisters.
There, on a small table in a room with a creaking door left unoiled to warn her of intruders, Jane Austen revised three novels and wrote from scratch three more to make her one of the best loved authors in English literature. The house is now the Jane Austen House museum.
Chawton House was built in 1588, possible on top of remains of a royal manor that Henry III visited. It remained in the Knight family until Ms Lerner bought it, but it was rarely permanently inhabited. She has the remainder of a 125 year lease on the house. "This is all yours really, one day it will come back to your family," she told Edward's descendant. He reacted with alarm. "No thanks - you keep it."
· Chawton House Library and Study Centre will be open to scholars, free, on successful application for a reader's ticket. The full texts of rare books from the collection are being published on the trust's website. Phone 01420 541010, www.chawton.org
