New Exhibitions Celebrate Jane Austen's 250th Birthday
- Editor OGN Daily
- Jul 18
- 2 min read
Updated: 1 day ago
The Morgan Library in New York City is staging an exhibition and her home in England is also showcasing her life and works.
Whilst first-edition copies of Jane Austen’s completed novels have gone on display where the author spent years writing and revising at her family’s former cottage in the quintessentially English village of Chawton in Hampshire, about 50 miles from London, NYC is also showcasing the life of the revered writer and will feature original manuscripts, financial records and correspondence with family and friends.
None of the books she published in her lifetime - Sense and Sensibility, Pride and Prejudice, Mansfield Park and Emma - were attributed to Austen by name. Her works were published anonymously, not under a male pseudonym. Her novels, starting with Sense and Sensibility in 1811, were attributed to "By a Lady" or "By the author of Sense and Sensibility". This was a common practice for women writers at the time, as it was considered inappropriate for women to pursue professional writing careers or seek fame through published works.
Indeed, on her tombstone in Winchester Cathedral in England, no mention is made of her achievements as a novelist. Instead, the epitaph written by her brother James celebrates how “the benevolence of her heart, the sweetness of her temper and the extraordinary endowments of her mind obtained the regard of all who knew her, and the warmest love of her intimate connections.”
The richness of Austen’s life - as both a professional writer and as a woman of her time - is the subject of A Lively Mind: Jane Austen at 250, an exhibition at the Morgan Library and Museum in New York City, in celebration of the novelist’s 250th birthday. Objects on view include manuscripts of Austen’s works and nearly a third of her remaining letters - which makes it the largest collection of her letters anywhere in the world.
The exhibition highlights Austen’s reception in America, where an “appreciative audience” of readers “played a major role in securing her place as one of the great English novelists,” according to a statement. Many of the objects on display are taken from the massive Austen-related collection of Alberta H. Burke. Of particular note are scraps on which Austen tracked her own finances and the profits of her novels.
