A Jane Austen exhibition at the Morgan Library & Museum is always cause for celebration. In the Morgan’s collection are fifty-one letters in Jane’s handwriting: the largest group in the world, just under a third of the one hundred and sixty-one that survive. The Morgan also holds three of Austen’s fiction manuscripts: her novella Lady Susan, the opening pages of her unfinished novel The Watsons, and her spoof Plan of a novel, according to hints from various quarters. Further manuscript pages in Jane’s and Cassandra Austen’s handwriting document the dates of composition of the six major novels, Jane’s personal expenditures in 1807, and the profits she earned from her novels in 1816.
The Morgan last featured its incomparable Austen holdings in the exhibition A Woman’s Wit: Jane Austen’s Life and Legacy, on view in 2009–10, which was not keyed to any anniversary. Drawing almost exclusively on the Morgan’s own collections, that show juxtaposed Austen’s writings with the satiric caricatures of Gillray, Rowlandson, and others.
The first conversation that led to A Lively Mind took place in 2018, when I mentioned the upcoming anniversary year to Christine Nelson, then Drue Heinz Curator of Literary and Historical Manuscripts at the Morgan. Having recently curated beautiful exhibitions on Charlotte Brontë and Emily Dickinson, Christine was excited to hear that 2025 would be a double anniversary: not only Austen’s 250th birthday but also the fiftieth anniversary of a landmark bequest of Austen manuscripts to the Morgan by the American Austen collector Alberta H. Burke of Baltimore, who died in 1975. (Burke’s bequest to the Morgan included period artworks and original illustrations, as well as eight letters in Jane’s handwriting, two in Cassandra’s, Jane’s page of 1807 expenses, and Cassandra’s initialed note on Jane’s dates of composition.) Christine invited me to work with her on an Austen show, and she encouraged me to begin thinking about which of my findings regarding Austen’s publication and reception in America—a subject that had never been the focus of an exhibition—would be most compelling to highlight in the Morgan’s galleries. Christine assured me that that we would be able to complement the museum’s own treasures with loans from outside institutions. We could certainly include rare books and other materials bequeathed by Alberta Burke to Goucher College, her alma mater, as well as annotated early copies of Austen’s novels and related artworks I had learned about through my research. After Christine moved on from the Morgan in 2021, Philip S. Palmer, Robert H. Taylor Curator and Department Head of Literary and Historical Manuscripts, generously shepherded the planning process until Dale Stinchcomb joined the Morgan’s staff as Drue Heinz Curator in late February 2024.
In what follows, I’ll move through A Lively Mind section by section, calling attention to notable loans and to objects publicly exhibited for the first time, the presence of which resulted in the truly once-in-a-lifetime experience of A Lively Mind.1 To understand this overview more fully, you may wish to have the text of the show handy for reference.2 Those who know Austen’s novels intimately will recognize that she used variations of the phrase “a lively mind” several times. But you don’t need to be well versed in Austen to understand that our title encompasses Jane Austen’s intelligence and imagination, as well as those of her readers from her lifetime till now. Like all elements of the show, the title is intended to make sense to every visitor, regardless of prior experience with Austen.
Entering the exhibition: A writer’s world
Outside the gallery entrance hung a large photograph of the patchwork coverlet designed and stitched circa 1810 by Jane Austen, her sister, Cassandra, and their widowed mother. This intricate, colorful image prompted viewers to think about women’s imagination and artistry, in and beyond literary composition. Jane Austen, we know, enjoyed many forms of creative expression, from sewing and needlework to piano playing to writing. What’s more, her family relationships were essential to her throughout her life—an idea underscored by the collaborative effort that resulted in the coverlet. When giving tours, I observed that collaboration is crucial to any exhibition, too, mentioning artisan-made book mounts as one example of custom production that’s easy to overlook.
Through the doorway into the gallery beckoned a scene evoking Austen’s act of writing during her happy, productive years at Chawton Cottage, now known as Jane Austen’s House. That museum, a marquee lender to A Lively Mind, authorized the Morgan to commission an exact hand-made reproduction of the twelve-sided writing table believed to have been the one on which Austen composed her novels. The reproduction table was placed under a window, much as the original appears in the dining room of the cottage. A period chair on loan from the Winterthur Museum, Garden, & Library completed the tableau, which was further enhanced by the green “Chawton Leaf” wallpaper recreated by the firm Hamilton Weston for Jane Austen’s House (used by permission). The Morgan’s conservation staff produced facsimiles of two Austen letters for placement on the table. These were very helpful as visual aids in explaining how she wrote and folded her letters.
Austen began a letter with a rectangular sheet of paper, with the long sides at the top and bottom. She folded that sheet in two, like a greeting card, and wrote her first page on the front. She then opened the sheet and wrote her second page on the left and her third on the right. Closing the folded sheet, she rotated it ninety degrees to write the recipient’s address, which would appear on the top surface of the letter once she had folded and tucked it into a little packet. If she had more to say, as she often did, she wrote as much as she could fit in around the edges of that fourth page. If she still wasn’t finished and wanted to spare her recipient the cost of an additional sheet, she returned to the first page, rotated it ninety degrees, and wrote perpendicularly across her original lines.3
Since we couldn’t possibly exhibit all fifty-one letters owned by the Morgan, we selected ones with revealing quotations or mentions of books, exhibitions, fashion, and other subjects that we could illustrate with a companion object or artwork. The first letter on view featured Austen’s memorable remark, highly relevant to a New York City summer: “What dreadful Hot weather we have!—It keeps one in a continual state of Inelegance.” Across from it was the letter in which she mentions approvingly of a new acquaintance that she “admires Camilla, & drinks no cream in her Tea.” Nearby, a volume of Frances Burney’s novel Camilla was open to the page of subscribers including the name “Miss J. Austen, Steventon”: vivid proof of Austen’s appreciation of Burney, as well as one of only a few known instances of Jane Austen’s name in print during her lifetime. Those who didn’t already know that Austen’s name never appeared on her title pages would shortly see this for themselves in our array of first-edition copies. We presented one volume of each Austen novel open to the title page, with another volume showing a passage that related either to the concept of a lively mind or to how Austen changed the novel by focusing on the everyday experiences of women.
“Youthful ambitions”
The first section of the show introduced Austen’s talent and aspirations for publication in her teenage years in the village of Steventon, as well as her father’s encouragement of her. On loan from Jane Austen’s House were pen-and-ink silhouettes of the Rev. and Mrs. George Austen, which I decided to display so that he was looking at the back of her head, rather than vice versa. Volume the Second of Austen’s teenage writings (or juvenilia), the first of two major loans from the British Library, was open to the table of contents, headed by her handwritten thanks to her father, in Latin, for the gift of the book. Sharing the same exhibit case was Austen’s hand-copied compilation of keyboard compositions from Jane Austen’s House. Few of the manuscripts by renowned composers that the Morgan owns are as legible as Austen’s exceptionally neat, careful musical notation.
Two manuscript books from the Austen and Leigh families provided context for the young Austen’s literary ambitions. From Austen’s father’s family came a sumptuous account book of a wealthy lady’s expenditures on her household and her children: evidence of a life quite distant from Austen’s own. Newly acquired by the Morgan and on display for the first time was a manuscript compilation of poems by relations of Austen’s mother, the Leighs. Many members of the Austen family wrote. What set Jane apart was her determination to see her works in print.
Adding some color to this portion of the show was a pair of portrait profiles and overlays created by Princess Charlotte Augusta, the eldest granddaughter of King George III, representing different historical periods and styles of dress. I was pleased to mirror Austen’s emphasis on women’s experiences by introducing the king through his granddaughter and pleased too to irreverently present the masculine profile overlaid by very feminine pink adornments.
Austen’s work in her early twenties on the forerunners of Pride and Prejudice and Sense and Sensibility was evident from the note on composition written by Cassandra. We displayed this small sheet next to the unsigned, even smaller note, also in the Morgan’s collection, which may or may not have been written by Jane. I’m inclined to think that it was (“Genius and Ingenuity”).4 Jane and Cassandra’s glee at Steventon during these heady early years of novel-writing was recounted in a reminiscence by their niece Anna Austen Lefroy, which her great-nephew Augustus Austen-Leigh transcribed for the benefit of the American biographer Oscar Fay Adams. Copies of Adams’s The Story of Jane Austen’s Life appeared later in the exhibition.
Displayed diagonally across from each other were pages of Lady Susan and The Watsons, vividly demonstrating the difference between a fair copy and a working draft. Lady Susan is the only complete manuscript of Austen’s fiction (aside from her teenage writings) to survive, while The Watsons is the only fiction manuscript to have been divided into sections. (Most of the remainder is in the Bodleian Library at Oxford University; four leaves are missing.) To call attention to the epistolary style and the narrator’s “Conclusion” in Lady Susan, we requested that the first three pages and the last three pages be framed together. Facsimiles of the second and second-to-last pages were created to enable this display, since Austen wrote on both sides of most sheets of this manuscript. The many crossings-out and emendations on the pages of The Watsons give the lie to Henry Austen’s declaration in his 1817 “Biographical Notice of the Author” that “[e]very thing came finished from her pen,” a claim that reveals his anxiety about presenting Austen as a purposeful, hard-working writer.
A printed map of Bath, bequeathed by Alberta Burke to the Morgan, oriented viewers to the Austen family’s years in that city, beginning in 1801. So too did another of Burke’s possessions: the Rev. Austen’s copy of Warner’s Excursions from Bath, bearing both his and Jane’s signatures, which Burke gave to Jane Austen’s House. I requested it for A Lively Mind so that my effort to reunite Alberta Burke’s collection could be as complete as possible.
Austen’s disappointment in her effort to publish a novel during her Bath years was conveyed by the only surviving scrap of the manuscript of it: a little rectangle of paper that reads, in its entirety, “Susan. a Novel in Two volumes.” We paired this with the tiny page on which Austen carefully recorded her personal expenses in 1807, while living in Southampton. Hanging nearby was a watercolor showing that city’s port, formerly owned by Alberta Burke, who believed it to have been the work of J. M. W. Turner. It has since been de-attributed.
“Proud professional”
The second section of A Lively Mind ushered readers into a long room that alternated copies of first editions of Austen’s novels with loan items from Jane Austen’s House that brought to life her productive years in the household of creative women at Chawton Cottage. A lovely replica of Cassandra’s portrait of Fanny Knight accompanied the two-volume set of Cowper’s poems that Austen inscribed to this favorite niece. Manuscript recollections by another niece, Caroline Austen, highlighted Austen’s daily practice of music-making. Martha Lloyd’s Household Book brought attention to the fourth resident of Chawton Cottage and to her daily work of supervising the kitchen.
The richly illustrated book Microcosm of London helped readers envision the art exhibitions and theater performances that Austen attended while visiting London. Two of Humphry Repton’s “Red Books” exemplified the concept of improving one’s estate. Alberta Burke owned the Microcosm and several of Repton’s publications, which she bequeathed to Goucher. Displaying the Morgan’s copies of these works thus allowed viewers to share Burke’s experience of visualizing Austen’s world by means of period sources, without adding to the already long list of loans requested from Goucher.
Austen’s enjoyment of fashion we conveyed through volumes well known to Burke, as well as through the author’s letters and personal possessions. Plates from Heideloff’s Gallery of Fashion showed the poppy-red color known as “coquelicot” that Austen referred to in a 1798 letter. Her keen interest in the details of clothing was evident in the charming design of a pattern of lace that she drew in a 1799 letter to Cassandra. Fabric swatches from Ackermann’s Repository—Burke’s own copy, on loan from Goucher—included the cotton version of the oak-leaf pattern that, in woven silk, could be seen across the room on Hilary Davidson’s hand-sewn replica of the pelisse said to have been owned and worn by Austen. (Due to a last-minute change in the pages of the Repository on display, the label text for that volume made no mention of the connection between the two oak-leaf-patterned fabrics.)
While Davidson’s replica pelisse has been on view in Jane Austen’s House and was brought to the 2018 and 2024 JASNA AGMs, this was its first appearance in a museum gallery. We wanted it to be visible as viewers first entered, so Pure + Applied, the exhibition design team, placed it behind the window that overlooked the replica writing table on the other side of the wall. Two of Davidson’s Fashion Institute of Technology (FIT) master’s students, Parker Ahmad and Flora Keene, constructed the first-ever mannequin form specially designed for this garment’s unusual dimensions. Davidson, Ahmad, and Keene worked together to install the pelisse on the form, carefully draping, supporting, and pinning the fabric so that visitors could fully appreciate Austen’s stature and personal elegance. Further enhancing visitors’ understanding of how the garment was constructed and worn was a new video devised by Davidson and her FIT colleague Larissa Shirley King.
In a corner near the pelisse was a possession of Austen’s beloved by her fans: the turquoise ring set in gold that Jane Austen’s House acquired in 2012. A spacious display case and targeted, brilliant lighting showed this elegant piece of jewelry, which had never been displayed outside England, to its best advantage. The story of how Kelly Clarkson bought the ring at auction—and then graciously relinquished it when an export ban was placed—led into the show’s next sections, on Austen in North America.
Before visitors walked through the doorway that led them away from England, they encountered evidence of Austen’s confidence in her chosen literary style, her concern with what her first readers thought of her novels, and her pride in her earnings. We requested a double-sided frame for Plan of a novel so that viewers could, if they wished, read this hilarious narrative in its entirety. Our second loan from the British Library was Opinions of Emma, the manuscript on which Austen kept track of relatives’ and friends’ responses to this novel, as she had earlier done for Mansfield Park. Nearby, framed, was hung the small piece of paper on which Austen began keeping track of the profits of her novels in 1816. The cramped lines of writing and empty space on the sheet poignantly testify to her confidence that she would have many more years of income to record. She did not, of course, due to the illness that began afflicting her in that same year. Her courage and fortitude during her last months of life were plain to see in two letters—one written to her friend Anne Sharp, and the other the delightful backwards-spelled letter that she created to amuse her niece Cassy Esten Austen.
The lifelong love and, indeed, partnership between the Austen sisters was movingly evident in the long, grief-stricken letter Cassandra wrote to Fanny Knight describing Jane’s last days, hours, and death. Many viewers were in tears while reading Cassandra’s eloquent tribute to Jane: “She was the sun of my life, the gilder of every pleasure, the soother of every sorrow, I had not a thought concealed from her, & it is as if I had lost a part of myself.” Seeing this original document makes plain that Cassandra began with the anticipation of writing a relatively brief letter to her niece, then realized that she had more and more to say. On the first and second pages, Cassandra left wide spaces between her handwritten lines, before writing more closely on the subsequent pages. She even continued onto a half-sheet to add a fifth page, knowing that Fanny, the daughter of wealthy Edward (Austen) Knight, could easily afford the additional postage. The label for this letter completed my effort throughout the show to direct visitors’ attention to the bond between Jane and Cassandra, rather than focusing on whether Jane was ever in love with a man or received a proposal of marriage. I made sure, too, to word carefully my statement that Cassandra is “thought to have destroyed” many of Jane’s letters, since—despite widespread popular belief—the evidence that she did so is scanty.
Complementing Cassandra’s heartfelt letter was a full-sized light projection, onto the floor of the gallery, of the text of Austen’s gravestone in Winchester Cathedral, which notoriously makes no mention of her authorship. Here, as in Henry Austen’s “Biographical Notice”—displayed nearby—the Austen family’s ambivalence about Jane’s fame is obvious. A Hampshire clergyman’s unmarried daughter, however good a Christian, would not have merited such commemoration unless she had distinguished herself in some way. Yet contemporary visitors to the cathedral would have understood why this woman was buried there only if they already knew of her novels.
“Early readers in North America”
How, and due to whom, Austen’s international fame gradually increased were the central subjects of the next section. Visitors learned of the unauthorized reprint of Emma issued in 1816 by the Philadelphia publisher Mathew Carey (Wells, Reading Austen in America). Four of the six surviving copies of that edition were on view, reunited for the first time since their publication. The New York Society Library’s dilapidated copy, formerly owned by a Rhode Island circulating library, was especially conserved to stabilize it for display. The faint penciled annotations on the last page of that copy brought laughs from many. It was delightful to feature these tart judgments of Emma’s characters from an anonymous American reader right around the corner from the “Opinions” collected by Austen herself. It was delightful, too, to showcase a crucial annotation in the copy owned by Jeremiah Smith of New Hampshire, who believed he was correcting a printing error when he changed the word imaginist to imaginast.
Four charming artworks enhanced the stories of the original owners of the other two copies of the first American edition of Emma. Hung above the copy signed by E. I. du Pont, founder of the DuPont chemical company, was an 1813 portrait by Rembrandt Peale of the businessman’s second-eldest daughter, Evelina. Wearing a white dress and holding a book, Evelina looks like an American version of a Bennet sister. A tiny drawing by E. I.’s youngest daughter, Sophie, showed the du Pont sisters comfortably reading together. Across the room, two entrancing watercolors of people attending a ball in Halifax, c. 1819, which had never previously been exhibited, accompanied the beautifully bound copy of the 1816 Philadelphia Emma owned by Scotswoman Christian Broun Ramsay, Countess of Dalhousie.5
Had Austen’s works never been reprinted after her death, the modest fame she enjoyed during her lifetime would have dwindled, and only her devoted family would have recalled her writings. Thanks to Mathew Carey’s son Henry and his business partners, who printed the first complete U.S. edition of Austen’s novels in the early 1830s, a new generation of Americans came to appreciate them. On loan from Goucher was a selection of volumes from that edition, including the intriguingly titled Elizabeth Bennet, or Pride and Prejudice. Above them on the wall was a large-format quotation from Alberta Burke, who unlike most collectors prized first American as well as first English editions of Austen: “I satisfied one of my many heart’s-desires last week, when, after years of yearning I got a 1st Am. ed of P&P. called Elizabeth Bennet” (to Averil G. Hassall, 16 March 1962).
I next told the story of the Quincy family of Massachusetts, huge Austen fans who contacted the author’s surviving brother, Francis, in the 1850s to express their enthusiasm—and to politely request an autograph. Francis was so gratified to learn that discerning Americans were reading his sister’s works decades after her death that he sent an entire letter written by Jane to Martha Lloyd in 1800. (Martha became Francis’s second wife in 1828.) Both these letters, Francis’s and Martha’s, were loaned by the Massachusetts Historical Society for their first-ever public display. Though Francis’s handwriting is exceptionally readable, we transcribed his little-known description of Jane’s temperament and character to ensure that everyone would be able to understand it. That description includes a passage reiterating our exhibition’s theme:
Of the liveliness of her imagination and playfulness of her fancy, as also of the truthfulness of her description of character and deep knowledge of the human mind, there are sufficient evidence in her works; and it has been a matter of surprise to those who knew her best, how she could at a very early age and with apparently limited means of observation, have been capable of nicely discriminating and pourtraying such varieties of the human character as are introduced in her works. (to Eliza Susan Quincy, 31 January 1852)
Continuing the theme of fans seeking autographs, we presented an item acquired by JASNA member Edith Lank (1926–2023) of Rochester, NY: a Jane Austen signature collected by the English novelist Catherine Hutton. While Edith personally shared this treasured manuscript with many fellow Janeites who visited her, it had not previously been included in any Austen show. Also from Edith’s collection, we featured the first volume of Lord Brabourne’s edition of Austen’s letters, annotated by descendants Fanny Caroline Lefroy and Louisa Lefroy Bellas.6 I directed visitors’ attention to the hidden life of George Austen, Jane’s disabled brother, by displaying the handwritten list of family members that omits his name.
A group of Austen portraits by late-nineteenth-century artists allowed visitors to judge for themselves how the features visible in Cassandra’s watercolor sketch—present in reproduction—were reworked to appeal to contemporary tastes. Obviously inspired by the much-reproduced engraving by William Home Lizars of James Andrews’ version of Cassandra’s portrait is the Morgan’s own watercolor-on-ivory miniature by an anonymous artist—“fan art” before that term was coined. From my own collection, I contributed an exceptionally unappealing woodcut by M. Lamont Brown showing Austen complete with visible nipples (see A New Jane Austen). I also loaned two issues of Harper’s Bazar from 1900 in which William Dean Howells wrote accessibly and authoritatively about Austen’s novels in essays illustrated by the leading commercial artists of the day. A double portrait of Howells and his younger daughter, Mildred, plus a pen-and-ink drawing by Mildred (a trained artist), fleshed out our presentation of these influential advocates for Austen.
“Alberta H. Burke, collector and benefactor”
The final section of A Lively Mind celebrated Alberta Burke as a collector and benefactor to the Morgan and to Goucher. The section text that I wrote acknowledged the German Jewish heritage of her family, the Hirshheimers of La Crosse, Wisconsin, as well as the original surname, Berkowitz, of the Baltimore-born man she married: estate lawyer and bibliophile Henry Burke, who in 1979 became one of the co-founders of JASNA.
Pages from a photograph album documenting the Burkes’ first travels to England in the mid-1930s attested to their literary pilgrimages to Winchester and Bath, while cards from Alberta’s catalogue of her collection and her minutely annotated copy of Geoffrey Keynes’s Jane Austen: A Bibliography demonstrated her erudition. Correspondence concerning Burke’s purchase of Cassandra’s letter describing Jane’s last days and death revealed the very moderate price Burke paid. On loan from Jane Austen’s House was the framed lock of Jane’s hair that Burke bought at auction and donated, out of pique, to the museum upon its opening in 1949 (Everybody’s Jane). Press coverage of that donation, which Burke pasted into one of her scrapbooks, provided a glimpse of the twentieth-century ephemera that she prized and preserved.7
Artworks from Burke’s collection were well represented in this section of the gallery. Of five pen-and-ink illustrations to Sense and Sensibility by Chris Hammond, one was matted to show the artist’s own working notations on the empty parts of the paper. The three prints comprising James Gillray’s Progress of the Toilet, a sympathetic portrayal of the effort of getting fashionably dressed in 1810, reinforced the interest in fashion that Burke had in common with Austen. Publicly exhibited for the first time was the jaunty black-and-pink sketch of Austen made by Burke’s dear friend Averil Hassall in 1950.8
Coda: Imagining Austen today
A two-part conclusion brought Austen into the present day, with strong visual effect. First was a striking array of twenty-four twentieth-century translations of Pride and Prejudice from Burke’s extensive collection, positioned on custom-built shelves flanking the doorway through which visitors exited. The anachronistic cover illustrations appealed to everyone, and we hoped that those with knowledge of languages beyond English would enjoy seeing how translators rendered this title. As a bonus, a nearby case held Raison et sensibilité, Isabelle de Montolieu’s own copy of her 1815 translation of Sense and Sensibility, recently acquired by the Morgan.
Viewers also beheld Amy Sherald’s imposing, thought-provoking painting A single man in possession of a good fortune, which depicts a handsome, self-possessed young Black man dressed in colorful clothing. Sherald’s Mr. Bingley, as I think of him—though one could make a case too for Mr. Darcy—has done enormous service for me in starting conversations with my students, many of whom are people of color, about how we imagine the worlds that Austen lived in and that she represented in her novels.9 While A single man had been exhibited by Sherald’s gallery, Hauser & Wirth, we were honored that A Lively Mind was the first show to present it in an Austen context. I was delighted to discover that Sherald’s fine-looking Mr. Bingley (or Mr. Darcy) could be seen too in a wall mural overlooking the High Line during the summer months of 2025. The artist brought together four of her portraits of Black men in that new artwork, designed to accompany Amy Sherald: American Sublime, on view at the Whitney Museum of American Art.
Like Austen’s novels, A Lively Mind could be experienced on many levels. Iconic artifacts on loan from Jane Austen’s House and design elements evoking that building created the effect, as many visitors commented, of stepping into England. Eye-catching objects and artworks invited attention from viewers of all ages, while less visually prepossessing items, including manuscripts, rewarded close scrutiny. As we anticipated, A Lively Mind had broad appeal, attracting 119,005 visitors to the Morgan during its run. (That number comprises daily ticket-buyers as well as attendees of after-hours programs.) All of them had the opportunity to discover for themselves evidence of Austen’s courage and persistence as a writer, her family’s support of her extraordinary talents, and how her works have mattered to readers from her lifetime till today. I hope that many of our viewers turn, or return, to Austen’s novels with a fresh appreciation of her very lively mind.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Telling the story of Jane Austen’s life, authorship, and legacy in A Lively Mind was made possible thanks to the generosity of the following lenders: Jane Austen’s House; the British Library; Goucher College Special Collections & Archives; the New York Society Library; Winterthur Museum, Garden, & Library; Hagley Museum and Library; the Massachusetts Historical Society; the American Antiquarian Society; the National Portrait Gallery; the Smithsonian Institution; Houghton Library, Harvard University; Dartmouth Libraries; the Nova Scotia Museum; Lizbeth and George Krupp; and the Edith Lank family.
My co-curator Dale Stinchcomb, Drue Heinz Curator of Literary and Historical Manuscripts, was a joy to work with. I am grateful too to the following Morgan staff members who contributed their expertise to the exhibition: Elizabeth Abbarno, Director of Exhibition and Collection Management; Colin B. Bailey, Katharine J. Rayner Director; Michael Caines, Senior Preparator; Alex Félix, Exhibition Coordinator; Michael Ferut, Associate Editor of Publications; Maria Fredericks, Sherman Fairchild Head of Conservation; Walsh Hansen, Head of Exhibitions Preparation; Yvette Mugnano, Director of Visitor Services; Philip S. Palmer, Robert H. Taylor Curator and Department Head, Literary and Historical Manuscripts; Marilyn Palmeri, Director of Imaging and Rights; Eva Soos, Manager of Imaging and Rights; Rebecca Pollak, Associate Paper Conservator; Kate Robinson, Exhibitions Registrar; Carl Schrecongost, Supervising A/V Technician; Ian Umlauf, Exhibition Preparator.
Staff at the Goucher College Library took care of preparing more than forty items for loan to the Morgan, a significant effort indeed: Beatriz Hardy, Associate Vice President for the Library & Learning Commons; Kristen Welzenbach, Curator of Special Collections and Archives; Melissa Straw, Director of Conservation and Preservation; Deborah Harner, Community Engagement & College Archivist; Arnold Sanders, Emeritus Professor of English.
A Lively Mind benefited from the work of design firm Pure + Applied: Paul Carlos, Urshula Barbour, Tanmayi Deshmukh, and Giedre G. Kavalyauskas.
Finally, I add my personal thanks to Meg Levin, whose generosity made possible my participation in public programs, including tours for our fellow JASNA members, and to Rodney Yoder, who stepped up again and again to support our family during the years I was working on A Lively Mind.
NOTES
1Research discoveries that I made during the planning process of A Lively Mind are described in three articles. “Revisiting Mrs. Bingley’s Portrait: The 1813 Exhibition in Spring Gardens and the Case Against Mrs Q” overturns the long-held assumption about which artwork Austen acclaimed as the perfect likeness of Jane Bennet Bingley (Yoder et al.). “Genius and Ingenuity: A Literary Detective Investigates Austen Artifacts” identifies portraits by Lady Dalhousie and puts forth a hypothesis concerning the two manuscript notes on Austen’s dates of composition. “Reading Jane Austen in America” answers the question of who ignited William Dean Howells’s interest in Austen’s novels. I wrote about the show in the cover article for the May/June 2025 issue of Jane Austen’s Regency World and for the fall 2025 issue of JASNA News. I talked about the show on JASNA’s “Austen Chat” podcast (Wood) and with Alison Stewart on WNYC. On the podcast The Week in Art, I discussed the miniature portrait of Austen by an anonymous nineteenth-century artist that the Morgan chose as the signature image of the show (Luke). YouTuber Rajiv Surendra recorded an extended conversation with me about the letters in the exhibition.
2The complete text of A Lively Mind can be downloaded as a PDF from the Morgan’s website: click on “Download large print labels, 3.78 MB.” The webpage also includes a link to an audio guide, as well as a video introduction, photographs of the gallery, and images of many objects.
3A facsimile of one of Austen’s “crossed” letters, owned by the Morgan, is reproduced on the cover of Persuasions. Jane Austen letters in the Morgan’s collection are available in digital facsimile at https://www.themorgan.org/collection/jane-austen/letters.
4The explanatory label to Cassandra’s note, like all items originally owned by Alberta Burke, was marked with an “AB” icon, at my request, to highlight that provenance.
5For a digital facsimile of the 1816 Philadelphia Emma, see http://emmainamerica.org. For an explanation of why I attributed these unsigned watercolors to Lady Dalhousie and how I identified two figures in them as the countess’s portraits of herself and her husband, see “Genius and Ingenuity.”
6For a description of the volumes and a transcription of the annotations, see Lank.
7Burke’s notebooks are available in digital facsimile at https://janeausten.goucher.edu/alberta-burke-notebooks/.
8For more on the relationship between Burke and Hassall, as well as an image of the sketch, see my essay “The Artist and the Austen Collector.”
9I’m enormously grateful to Dale Stinchcomb for ascertaining the owners of this artwork and convincing them to part with it temporarily. For the centrality of Sherald’s portrait to my teaching, see my essay “‘Pride and Prejudice, Here and Now.’” See also the essay by Sherald about her other Austen-inspired portrait, There is no charm equal to tenderness of heart, in JASNA’s series Unexpectedly Austen.
