After I first learn Northanger Abbey, my favourite Austen work, I didn’t stand up for hours. Similar to the novel’s skittish however compassionate protagonist Catherine Morland, I struggled to barter the road between literature and life because the work totally consumed me. Catherine mistook an odd laundry record for an uncanny, indicative roll of papers; I imagined a ghostly spirit may emerge from a creaking drawer or that the icemaker’s distant rattle was the cry of some nefarious drive. As a bolt of lightning illuminated the Northanger sky, I imagined a storm brewing exterior the window of my very own out of the blue icy room. Gothic cliches, sure, however ones that Austen deftly, singularly and concurrently satirized and embraced.
Austen coined the time period “imaginist” in a distinct work, Emma, to seek advice from the eponymous character’s tendency to create romantic schemes. Seeing the nonce phrase on label textual content in “A Vigorous Thoughts: Jane Austen at 250” on the Morgan Library & Museum, I discover it an apt, meta reference to Austen herself, her characters and the readers in whom she incites inventive creativeness.
The curators of “A Vigorous Thoughts” are actually imaginists, too, enlivening Austen in creative methods. The title, curator Dale Stinchcomb informed Observer, is a nod to variations of a phrase that seems in a number of of Austen’s novels. Right here, you’ll discover reams of fabric sacred to Janeites from each the Morgan’s personal assortment of Austen correspondence and first editions and from artifacts loaned by her cottage museum in Chawton. Up to date inventive manifestations of Austen’s legacy characteristic, too, together with an Amy Sherald portray and an array of Austen translations and editions.
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Co-curator Juliette Wells, an Austen scholar at Goucher Faculty, first learn Emma as a junior in highschool and was instantly intrigued. She started growing Austen experience in school—the place she looked for programs whose syllabi bore the identify—amidst the Nineties “superb flowering” of Austen tv and movie diversifications. Within the years since, Wells has honed her personal area of interest: analysis into Austen’s early American readers.
She mentioned the present’s potential with the Morgan in 2018, however the severe preparation—guidelines drafts, planning conferences, analysis visits—solely transpired within the final three years. Finally, “A Vigorous Thoughts” was timed to dually rejoice Austen’s 250th birthday and the bequest of American collector Alberta Burke’s important assortment of Jane Austen manuscripts to the museum.
However sufficient of an introduction—let’s enter the exhibition. The Morgan Stanley West Gallery is bisected by a dark-wood partial wall incised with a window to mimic the texture of a comfortable Georgian abode. Inexperienced and yellow leaf and vine patterns decoration the wall, replicating Austen’s personal wallpaper—“channeling Chawton,” as Stinchcomb mentioned.
Exhibition designers from Pure + Utilized labored with the curators to construct a visible id for the area—an “oasis,” Wells referred to as it. “We knew that we’d be in a high-ceilinged gallery space with tremendous darkish wooden doorways and moulding and every thing. And I assumed all of that could possibly be actually useful for getting throughout that Jane Austen’s work just isn’t solely fulfilling and pleasant but in addition has literary significance.”
As to how somebody who existed two centuries in the past can come alive, it’s a problem the exhibit contends with and solutions by means of a number of strategies. To the curators, enlivening the creator doesn’t essentially imply closing gaps within the understanding of Austen’s biography; as a substitute, they pointedly let these gaps exist and breathe.
“We now have items of a patchwork that don’t match collectively with out holes to make a sample,” Wells defined. “For me, that sample has at all times emphasised Austen’s ambition from an early age, her very skilled angle in the direction of her writing and the way necessary it was that she had the help of her household.”
Austen didn’t belong to a literary milieu or have scholarly mentors. As a substitute, her household—particularly her beloved sister, Cassandra—made up the majority of her companions and sounding boards. A technique she features vitality in “A Vigorous Thoughts” is thru her witty letters to Cassandra. Stinchcomb likened studying these to “overhearing a dialog.” In one of many letters, she writes that, to deliver letter-writing as shut as doable to in-person speaking, “I’ve been speaking to you virtually as quick as I may the entire of this letter.” The result’s obvious in her rushed-looking hand: its constant rightward slant, the drooping stems of her “ds” and the hovering dots on her “is.” One of many letters is almost illegible, with overlapping, crosshatched strains of writing.
However my favourite letter of all is an April 1811 epistle from Austen to Cassandra. Earlier than my eye fell upon a very distinctive comment or a crazy consonant on the web page—actually, earlier than they drew in the direction of something that was there—it was what wasn’t there that captured my consideration: a skinny slit of web page had been reduce, and I think about a grief-stricken, shears-in-hand Cassandra, exacting a jagged rectangle to censor her sister’s legacy. Whereas we are able to by no means know fairly what Austen spat out in her fast cursive hand that Cassandra—or maybe another person—felt compelled to elevate, the label postulates it was an “uncharitable comment a few relative.” Stinchcomb and Wells additionally advised that the excised comment may have described a private sickness or bodily symptom of Austen’s. “Somebody like Cassandra may need thought, ‘Oh, that’s form of private and TMI,’” Wells mentioned.
Past her handwriting, the closest we get to Austen is thru one thing tactile that was as soon as connected to her physique: strands of hair. In a small brass body, a beige lock curls in a loop. Seeing the hair is mesmerizing—a non secular expertise for a Janeite.
For visuals, we are able to flip to her sister’s unfinished watercolor portrait, which depicts a bonnet-covered Austen together with her arms crossed earlier than her. Many of the portrait is recommended by the preliminary graphite define, however Cassandra had begun coloring the face. Brown tendrils of hair snake out of the bonnet and sprout throughout Austen’s brow. It’s not a very clever portrait, but it surely could be our greatest window into Austen’s look: skinny lips, brown eyes and an extended, straight nostril.
In Oscar Wilde’s The Image of Dorian Grey, painter Basil Hallward worries that the titular portrait reveals, moderately than the sitter, his personal passions. I’m wondering if the sentiment applies to Cassandra, who portrays Austen to look particularly meditative and deep-thinking. It’s well-known that Cassandra was Austen’s devotee, writing, upon Austen’s dying, that the creator was “the solar of [her] life.”
If Cassandra confided items of herself in her work, her sister was no completely different. Although Austen’s œuvre is not at all autobiographical, I seen sure fascinating overlaps between the artifacts that afforded us perception into her private life and her work. In a single revelatory letter to Cassandra, she expressed a keenness for a brand new acquaintance as a result of she “admires Camilla,” a e-book by Frances Burney that she mentions, together with different Burney novels, in Northanger Abbey. One other instance: Jane Austen’s favourite poet, William Cowper, whose e-book she gifted to a niece, is featured twice in Mansfield Park, quoted by the e-book’s heroine. “She makes imaginative use of all that materials,” Wells mentioned. “So we needed not to attract a very easy or simplistic connection and say, ‘Listed here are our sources of inspiration,’ however moderately, foreground the ideas of creativeness and creativity from the start, after which let guests work out for themselves, ‘How does an creator’s creativeness work?’”
Whereas the Morgan’s 2008 “A Girl’s Wit” exhibition confirmed a lot of the library’s personal Austen assortment, “A Vigorous Thoughts” pairs the Morgan’s trove with loaned supplies from exterior organizations to additional illuminate Austen’s afterlife in America—a sector of Austen scholarship that has been traditionally undervalued. “We needed to inform a a lot fuller story about Austen’s American readers that the Morgan’s assortment couldn’t inform by itself,” Stinchcomb mentioned.
Wells, particularly, was thrilled to have the ability to show 4 of six surviving copies of an 1816 unauthorized Philadelphia Emma reprint. “Every of those 4 copies has one thing particular and distinctive about it,” she mentioned, mentioning possession signatures, bookplates and handwritten annotations and corrections. These editions—not precisely pirated, Wells clarifies, since no worldwide copyright regulation was in place—probably circulated in North America with out Austen’s data.
Maybe the grandest travesty is that Jane Austen was by no means pretty compensated for her work throughout her lifetime—neither in public recognition nor in cash. Austen acquired solely £110 for the copyright to Satisfaction and Prejudice, her bestselling title, and not one of the e-book’s revenues. That was at the very least higher than the case of Susan, Austen’s first work accepted for publication, for which she acquired a mere £10. The writer, Crosby & Co., refused to publish the work, so Austen’s brother Henry finally purchased it again, and Austen revised the novel into Northanger Abbey. Austen’s legacy has since grown to match her prodigious expertise, however through “A Vigorous Thoughts” the creator has new tales to inform. Even for those who don’t fancy your self a Janeite now, you may change your thoughts after your go to.
“A Vigorous Thoughts: Jane Austen at 250” is on the Morgan Library & Museum by means of September 14, 2025.
