As all self-respecting Jane Austen scholars, readers, and ardent admirers of the numerous film adaptations well know, the 250th anniversary of the novelist’s birth draws near on December 16. The Morgan Library & Museum in New York City is commemorating the occasion with a landmark exhibition of her personal and professional objects, aptly titled “A Lively Mind: Jane Austen at 250.” The showcase, which opened on June 6 and runs through September 14, also marks the 50th anniversary of the late American collector Alberta H. Burke’s donation of Austen manuscripts to the library in 1975. Additional artifacts bequeathed by Burke to Goucher College in Baltimore are on loan for the show, along with items from Austen’s home in Chawton, England, and from a dozen institutional and private collections.
Threading the Needle
Juliette Wells, professor of literary studies at Goucher, said the goal is “to engage visitors of all ages and walks of life and backgrounds”—regardless of prior knowledge—“in what I have always felt is the inspiring story of Jane Austen’s authorial career.” The Morgan owns approximately one-third (51) of her surviving letters, which were previously displayed in 2009–2010. Wells emphasized that this new exhibit, which she co-curated with Dale Stinchcomb, curator of literary and historical manuscripts at the Morgan, represents a once-in-a-lifetime reunion of treasured items across multiple collections.
The entrance to the gallery features an image of a patchwork coverlet designed and hand-stitched by Jane, her sister Cassandra, and their widowed mother shortly after they moved to Chawton Cottage in Hampshire in July 1809, around the time that Jane was finishing Sense and Sensibility. During a guided tour on June 8, Wells told members of the Jane Austen Society of North America that Chawton “truly was the home of their own, where Jane was able to unpack her manuscripts and to revise them with fresh eyes and with the support of a household of creative women.”
The coverlet is one example of how Wells and her colleagues at the Morgan chose to “foreground women’s creativity, collaboration, and artistry outside of literature,” she said, noting that Austen was proud of the many things she did and made with her hands, in addition to her writing. Also on display is a volume of sheet music painstakingly copied in the author’s hand, revealing how much she enjoyed playing the piano. A record of her personal expenditures from 1807 even includes an item about a pianoforte that she rented for the family with her own funds.
Further weaving themes of text and textile, and “to evoke Jane Austen’s personal style as well as her literary style,” Wells said, fashion plates illustrate some of the London trends described in Jane’s letters to her sister Cassandra during a visit to the city. The exhibit also contains a reconstruction by Hilary Davidson, author of Dress in the Age of Jane Austen (Yale University Press, 2019), of Austen’s brown silk pelisse, and her actual tiny turquoise ring set in gold, on loan from Chawton. Wells’s own replica ring could be seen as she pointed out other gems in the exhibit.
A Woman of Letters
Museumgoers enter to a reconstruction of the Austens’ dining room, covered in Chawton leaf wallpaper, a bright arsenic green. It’s a reminder that the writer’s vibrant home life and artistic life were bound together. The first two sections of the exhibit explore Austen’s evolution from “Ambitious Youth” to “Proud Professional.” Austen grew and thrived in a family of readers. At their childhood home, the Steventon rectory, she and her sister Cassandra had unfettered access to their father Rev. George Austen’s impressive library of an estimated 500 books—a rare freedom for women of the Regency era. “He wasn’t trying to censor them or protect their ‘fragile innocence,’ ” Wells said.
Her father’s encouragement also took the form of two gifts: a portable writing desk, enabling Jane to continue her work while traveling, and three bound blank books in which she transcribed her teenage writing. The second volume of that set is on view (a loan from the British Library), complete with a dedication in Latin, “ex dono mei patris” (“gift of my father”), and a table of contents. That single page illuminates the keen extent to which a young Austen aspired to publication.
The Morgan owns the only complete fair copy of an Austen manuscript—that of her epistolary novel Lady Susan. The three opening and three closing pages are displayed near rough pages from her unfinished novel The Watsons, bearing her revisions. “That’s a portrait of her creative process and mind at work,” Wells said. First editions of Sense & Sensibility and Pride and Prejudice, opened to the title pages, trace the evolution of her byline; the former is signed “By a Lady” and the latter “By the Author of Pride and Prejudice.” It wasn’t until after her death that her authorship was known beyond her family and immediate friends. In addition to charting her journey from drafts to publication, the exhibit presents “tangible evidence that she kept track of her earnings and was proud of it,” Wells noted. “But it wasn’t enough to live on.”
Each of the novels on display is opened to a passage that celebrates the intellect and imagination of women—a deliberate move by Wells and her colleagues to honor the theme of “a lively mind.” Female friendship and self-determination are at the heart of the exhibit, just as they are at the center of Austen’s fictional and real-life narratives. Jane’s letters to Cassandra, full of her inimitable wit, tell the story of “two sisters who were lifelong confidants,” Wells said, adding that Cassandra was the first reader of all her novels. She too had a facility with words, as seen in a heartrending letter to their niece, written two days after Jane’s death. “Central to the exhibit, it’s a very moving testimony to the sisters’ mutual love,” Wells said. “In no sense did we want to portray Austen as less than or lacking” because she did not marry or have children.
“One Cannot Have Too Large a Party”
The final portion of the exhibit focuses on “Early Readers in North America” and donations by collector Alberta H. Burke. Unbeknownst to Austen, unauthorized editions of her novel Emma were circulating in the U.S. during her lifetime. (Wells stressed that they were not pirated, since there was no copyright law at the time.) Four copies are on view of the 1816 edition released by Philadelphia publisher Mathew Carey. One of the owners, Jeremiah Smith, appears to have taken some pleasure in marking the spelling errors in his copy. (He went so far as to “correct” a word that Austen herself coined, from “imaginist” to “imaginast.”) Also worth a close look is the marginalia in a copy on loan from the New York Society Library, which had a previous life in a circulating library in Rhode Island. The final page includes caustic one-word descriptions of the main characters.
Although Carey took out advertisements featuring snippets of praise for Emma—the equivalent of today’s blurbs—the edition, which had a 500-copy print run, wasn’t a big seller. Around 1832, his son Henry was the first to publish the “Big Six” Austen novels for an American readership. “It’s because publishers took a risk on her books after her death that they were able to reach future generations,” Wells said. She explores the author’s U.S. publication history in greater depth in her books A New Jane Austen: How Americans Brought Us the World’s Greatest Novelist (Bloomsbury Academic, 2023) and Reading Austen in America (Bloomsbury, 2017).
Gesturing toward the afterlife of Austen’s creative output, the exhibit concludes with strong visuals. Two bookcases display 24 translations of Pride and Prejudice from Burke’s collection, with what Wells referred to as an amusing array of “historically uninformed cover art.” And hanging on a nearby wall is a 2019 painting by Amy Sherald, the portraitist of former First Lady Michelle Obama. Titled “A single man in possession of a good fortune,” the painting depicts a contemporary young Black man who gazes directly at the viewer in a relaxed and confident pose. Wells said she begins her Austen courses at Goucher by sharing an image of this portrait and asking her students what they think the title means, before reading the opening line of Pride and Prejudice. The exercise launches discussions about who Austen, and the larger Western canon, is for. Thanks to gender and race-bending adaptations across media, she said, the audience for Austen’s stories is wider and more inclusive than ever.
As she wrapped up her tour, Wells told guests, “This exhibit was the work of many hands and many lively minds. It was a joy to work on, and we hope it’s as much of a joy to all who visit.” Those who wish to delve further into Jane Austen’s life and literary legacy at 250 can always hit the books; 2025 is shaping up to be a banner year for Austen-related publications, including Wells’s Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition of Mansfield Park in September, as well as a plethora of adaptations and retellings for readers of all ages.
