Visitors to the Morgan Library & Museum’s new exhibition, “A Lively Mind: Jane Austen at 250,” will notice that it is full of interesting personal items connected to the author. These include her turquoise and gold ring, briefly owned by the American pop star Kelly Clarkson and here on loan from Austen’s house in Hampshire, England; a hand-sewn replica of a silk pelisse coat Austen is said to have worn; and a reproduction of the modest desk on which she wrote her six extraordinary novels, masterpieces of early-19th century English literature.
But the show, which marks the 250th anniversary of Austen’s birth, persuasively puts much of its focus on her work — what she did and how and why she did it. Providing a vigorous counterargument to the image of Austen as a retiring spinster who wrote as a kind of amusing pastime, the show uses letters, manuscripts and more to trace the trajectory of her career and illustrate how seriously she took her vocation.
It’s thrilling to be presented with the evidence. Here, for instance, is a tiny scrap of paper on which Austen listed the “profits from my novels.” Here’s one of three books in which she copied out some of her teenage writings — proof that she channeled her imagination into fiction, and considered how it might look in books, even as a girl. And here’s a heavily emended page — full of crossed-out lines and inserted words — from an unfinished novel (posthumously published as “The Watsons”) showing Austen to be a diligent rewriter as well as a writer.
“We wanted to get the working copy in front of people because some of the myths about Austen’s authorship that were promulgated after her death by family members included that she didn’t care about fame, she didn’t care about profit, and she didn’t work hard,” said Juliette Wells, professor of literary studies at Goucher College and a co-curator, along with Dale Stinchcomb, of the exhibition.
It shows how Austen’s family supported her work and “examines how it was possible for Austen to publish her now-beloved novels when women generally were not permitted to become writers,” Stinchcomb, the Morgan’s curator of literary and historical manuscripts, said.
The show, one of a plethora of Austen-centered events in this exciting semi-quincentennial year, also commemorates the 50th anniversary of the bequest of Austen’s manuscripts to the Morgan by Alberta H. Burke of Baltimore, one of the great American collectors of Austen materials.
Austen lived quietly, far from literary circles, and died in 1817 at just age 41. She didn’t survive to see her own great success. Authorship of the four books she published in her lifetime — “Sense and Sensibility,” “Pride and Prejudice,” “Mansfield Park” and “Emma” — was attributed not to her, but to “A Lady.”
But there’s plenty here to show that she and her family fought to get her books published, and cared how they were perceived. One delightful document sets out various friends’ and relatives’ “opinions of ‘Emma,’” as Austen wrote at the top. It’s like a 19th century entry in Goodreads, if the readers’ critiques came exclusively from the writer’s intimate circle.
Thus we see that Austen’s sister-in-law “liked and admired” the book “very much indeed,” though she preferred “Pride and Prejudice.” We see that Austen’s niece Fanny Knight declared Mr. Knightley, the title character’s love interest, “delightful” but “could not bear Emma herself,” and that a lady named Miss Bigg found that there “was too much of Mr. Elton & H. Smith” in the book, a reference to two secondary characters, the vicar and Emma’s friend Harriet.
Austen was a prodigious letter-writer, but many of her letters are thought to have been posthumously destroyed by her sister Cassandra, possibly to preserve her sister’s privacy. (No one is sure.) Fewer than 200 remain, and 51 of those are owned by the Morgan, many purchased by J.P. Morgan himself in the early 20th century.
Her letters are spirited, gossipy, irreverent and witty. “What dreadful Hot weather we have!” she wrote to Cassandra in 1796. “It keeps one in a continual state of Inelegance.” In another letter, she expressed her approval of an acquaintance by saying that “she admires Camilla” — a reference to a novel by Fanny Burney, whose work Austen adored — “& drinks no cream in her Tea.”
In a third, she provides Cassandra with a Monty Python-esque arboreal report — “I will not say that your Mulberry trees are dead, but I am afraid they are not alive” — and comments on a recent naval battle in which she had no personal connection to the victims. “How horrible it is to have so many killed!” she writes. “And what a blessing it is that one cares for none of them!”
The exhibition illustrates, too, how Austen’s own sensibility — bold and forthright — was reflected in her fiction. Each of the first edition volumes of her six novels is open to a passage that bears either on the notion of “a lively mind” or on an important authorial point.
For “Northanger Abbey,” for example, it’s the famous section in which Austen, speaking directly to the reader, offers a vigorous defense of novels and declares that they provide “more extensive and unaffected pleasure” than other sorts of books. In “Persuasion,” it’s Anne Elliot’s heartfelt response — as good an argument for Austen’s reasons for writing as anything in her work — when a man of her acquaintance reminds her that women’s “inconstancy” is a perennial literary theme.
That’s because “men have had every advantage of us in telling their own story,” Anne responds. “Education has been theirs in so much higher a degree; the pen has been in their hands.”
Other notable things to look for: A video showing how Austen’s silk pelisse coat was constructed and how it moves when worn. A projection of the inscription on Austen’s gravestone, in Winchester Cathedral, which (rather bizarrely) praises the author’s “charity, devotion, faith and purity” and “the extraordinary endowments of her mind” but doesn’t mention that she wrote any books. A playful letter from Jane to her 8-year-old niece, Cassy, with every word spelled backward.
Also displayed: Four of the six known surviving first-edition copies of “Emma” published in the United States, including one belonging to Jeremiah Smith of New Hampshire, an Austen-phile who served at various times as the state’s governor and as its chief judge. He had a habit of making corrections in pen in his books, and here has, amusingly, changed “imaginist” — a word Austen invented to describe Emma’s imaginative powers — to “imaginast,” another fake word.
It’s exhilarating to see Austen the famous writer emerging from all this material, but equally moving to find how beloved she was as a person. I found myself lingering over a letter from Cassandra, her closest companion through her life and final illness, to their niece Fanny a few days after Jane’s death. She was a beautiful writer, too.
“She was the sun of my life, the gilder of every pleasure, the soother of every sorrow,” Cassandra wrote. “It is as if I had lost a part of myself.”
