Jane Austen and the Idea of a Home

Believed to be Jane Austen's profile.

Thanks to Tea at Trianon, I found this blog, Jane's Austen's World, which opens a door to all kinds of information on Jane Austen, her writings, and her world. In my first exploration, I particularly enjoyed this post on Jane Austen's Description a House and a Home and also this article, "Jane Austen's Idea of Home," which encapsulates what I think many homemakers strive for: "What Jane Austen suggests is that physical facilities will be charming only when there is a correspondence between outward beauty and the inner life."

"It Was Very Hard"

Mrs. Florence Thompson with three of her five children.

Through this photograph taken by Dorothea Lange, this migrant woman and her children became an image that was synonymous with the worst suffering of the Depression years. In 1960, Lange spoke about her experience in taking the photograph:

I saw and approached the hungry and desperate mother, as if drawn by a magnet. I do not remember how I explained my presence or my camera to her, but I do remember she asked me no questions. I made five exposures, working closer and closer from the same direction. I did not ask her name or her history. She told me her age, that she was thirty-two. She said that they had been living on frozen vegetables from the surrounding fields, and birds that the children killed. She had just sold the tires from her car to buy food. There she sat in that lean-to tent with her children huddled around her, and seemed to know that my pictures might help her, and so she helped me. There was a sort of equality about it.

When she took the photo, Lange was working for the Resettlement Administration, which became the Farm Security Administration, documenting the conditions of the poorest in the depression years--the homeless, the migrant workers, those on the move. Her photos were sent out to the country's newspapers for their free use.

You can listen to an interview with Florence Thompson and read her short biography here, along with other interviews of some people who had been photographed by Lange during those years. You can also see more of Dorothea Lange's depression photographs here on Shorpy.

"There But for the Grace of God Go I"

Photos by Dorothea Lange via Shorpy.


The Whitfield family's kitchen, North Carolina, 1939. Mr. Whitfield was a sharecropper.

When I saw this kitchen on Shorpy, I was impressed with how clean and neat it was. I did a survey of kitchens in photographs on Shorpy, and although this was among the poorer kitchens, it was also probably the cleanest, including among tenement kitchens photographed. I do not believe that Ms. Lange photographed by appointment but photographed what she found. There is not much in this kitchen. A table, an oil cloth, a wood stove, a butter churner, a basin, a few pots, rags. But what is there is clearly where it is supposed to be, and everything, including the floor, looks like it is regularly wiped down. In fact, there is Mrs. Whitfield doing some wiping right there.


So, compared with many of the other kitchens you can view on Shorpy, many of which belong to poor people, this kitchen stood out. I think, "There but for the grace of God, go I," and ask myself, if I were the wife of a poor sharecropper with multiple children, how clean would my kitchen be? Would I be able to keep my house neat and clean? Would I be able to resist the temptation of despair? Would I be able to keep my life on the straight and narrow? These are questions I cannot answer for myself. But Mrs. Whitfield has answered those questions on the side of hope and courage.

Mrs. Whitfield tends to her youngest.

Maude Callen (1898-1990)

Mrs. Maude Callen.

"In the most special way, she is probably the greatest person I have been privileged to know: combining a marvelous wisdom and compassion, a strength of true humility and true pride, all given direction through knowledge and purpose in a sheer beautiful balance."
-- W. Eugene Smith, photograher


Taking the trek to see a patient.

Children take away food that Mrs. Callen had brought them.


Mrs. Callen helps a blind man in the store.


When Smith's story on Mrs. Callen appeared in Life magazine, contributions to her work poured in. With that money, $227,000 in all, Mrs. Callen and her husband built a clinic.

Maude Callen Part 1
Maude Callen Part 2
Maude Callen Part 3
Maude Callen Part 4
Maude Callen Part 5

"My Walden"

See My Year 1955 today for a beautiful reflection on the home.

Maude Callen Part 5: "In the Desperate Need of the Countryside"

Mrs. Callen helps bring someone into the clinic she had set up in her home.


Mrs. Callen in a temporary clinic in the church.

From Let Truth Be the Prejudice: W. Eugene Smith: His Life and Photographs:

The midwife, Maude Callen, was orphaned at seven and raised by an uncle in Tallahassee, Floria, who was a doctor. She married and went to South Carolina, where, at the request of the Episcopalian Church, she became a missionary nurse--converting the country people of rural Berkeley County into what the missionaries called 'iodine Christians' Mrs. Callen moved into a neglected area and set up a clinic in her own home. The image most people had when they saw the full story in Life was that Maude Callen was a heroine sprung up like Joan of Arc, from deep among her oppressed people; but she was a middle-class black girl, raised by an uncle of professional standing, who was shocked to find such ignorance and such needless suffering. Later, she was trained in obstetrics at Tuskegee; but in the desperate need in the countryside, and with a 'quiet passive aggressiveness,' she actually practiced medicine and established the first V.D. clinic and the first pre-natal clinic in the county. But her money was scant, her equipment meager, the pressure of work immense. Yet should would find time to intercede for her patients with the County Relief, and even with the Sheriff himself.

Mrs. Callen visiting the home of this crippled child. She interceded with the County Relief people to get the child placed in a summer camp for handicapped children.


Mrs. Callen talks to the sister of a tuberculosis patient on how he needs to be moved to a county sanitarium.

Mrs. Callen examines the throat glands of a sick boy.

Maude Callen Part 1
Maude Callen Part 2
Maude Callen Part 3
Maude Callen Part 4

Maude Callen Part 4: A Baby That Died

Mrs. Callen rushes a fevered baby to the hospital.

As related in Let the Truth Be the Prejudice: W. Eugene Smith: His Life and Photographs:

A mother had brought a seven-month-old child just before supper to Maude Callen's house; the baby had a fever of 104 degrees, and Smith went with Mrs. Callen as she drove the 27 miles to the nearest hospital--which was white. The baby, whose temperature was now 105 degrees, need an immediate transfusion. The two blacks who were present, Mrs. Callen the baby's mother, were the wrong blood type; the right type was available, but it was forbidden to use white blood for a black child; a 'visitor from the North' (he didn't say so in his own account of the incident, but from later evidence one knows it was Smith himself) knew his own blood type, which was identical with the child's. The whtie nurses audibly disapproved. In any case, the child died. Both Mrs. Callen and Smith were 'damnably angry.'"

Maude Callen Part 1
Maude Callen Part 2
Maude Callen Part 3