With Austenian Wit and Charm, the Morgan Brings the Iconic Novelist to Life
When I first read Northanger Abbey, my favorite Austen work, I didn’t get up for hours. Just like the novel’s skittish but compassionate protagonist Catherine Morland, I struggled to negotiate the line between literature and life as the work utterly consumed me. Catherine mistook an ordinary laundry list for an uncanny, indicative roll of papers; I imagined a ghostly spirit might emerge from a creaking drawer or that the icemaker’s distant rattle was the cry of some nefarious force. As a bolt of lightning illuminated the Northanger sky, I imagined a storm brewing outside the window of my own suddenly icy room. Gothic cliches, yes, but ones that Austen deftly, singularly and simultaneously satirized and embraced.
Austen coined the term “imaginist” in a different work, Emma, to refer to the eponymous character’s tendency to create romantic schemes. Seeing the nonce word on label text in “A Lively Mind: Jane Austen at 250” at the Morgan Library & Museum, I find it an apt, meta reference to Austen herself, her characters and the readers in whom she incites creative imagination.
The curators of “A Lively Mind” are certainly imaginists, too, enlivening Austen in inventive ways. The title, curator Dale Stinchcomb told Observer, is a nod to variations of a phrase that appears in several of Austen’s novels. Here, you’ll find reams of material sacred to Janeites from both the Morgan’s own collection of Austen correspondence and first editions and from artifacts loaned by her cottage museum in Chawton. Contemporary artistic manifestations of Austen’s legacy feature, too, including an Amy Sherald painting and an array of Austen translations and editions.
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Co-curator Juliette Wells, an Austen scholar at Goucher College, first read Emma as a junior in high school and was immediately intrigued. She began developing Austen expertise in college—where she searched for courses whose syllabi bore the name—amidst the 1990s “amazing flowering” of Austen television and film adaptations. In the years since, Wells has honed her own niche: research into Austen’s early American readers.
She discussed the show’s potential with the Morgan in 2018, but the serious preparation—checklist drafts, planning meetings, research visits—only transpired in the last three years. Ultimately, “A Lively Mind” was timed to dually celebrate Austen’s 250th birthday and the bequest of American collector Alberta Burke’s significant collection of Jane Austen manuscripts to the museum.
But enough 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 imitate the feel of a cozy Georgian abode. Green and yellow leaf and vine patterns ornament the wall, replicating Austen’s own wallpaper—“channeling Chawton,” as Stinchcomb said.
Exhibition designers from Pure + Applied worked with the curators to build a visual identity for the space—an “oasis,” Wells called it. “We knew that we would be in a high-ceilinged gallery area with super dark wood doors and moulding and everything. And I thought all of that could be really helpful for getting across that Jane Austen’s work is not only enjoyable and delightful but also has literary importance.”
As to how someone who existed two centuries ago can come alive, it’s a challenge the exhibit contends with and answers through several methods. To the curators, enlivening the author doesn’t necessarily mean closing gaps in the understanding of Austen’s biography; instead, they pointedly let those gaps exist and breathe.
“We have pieces of a patchwork that don’t fit together without holes to make a pattern,” Wells explained. “For me, that pattern has always emphasized Austen’s ambition from an early age, her very professional attitude towards her writing and how important it was that she had the support of her family.”
Austen didn’t belong to a literary milieu or have scholarly mentors. Instead, her family—especially her beloved sister, Cassandra—made up the bulk of her partners and sounding boards. One way she gains vitality in “A Lively Mind” is through her witty letters to Cassandra. Stinchcomb likened reading these to “overhearing a conversation.” In one of the letters, she writes that, to bring letter-writing as close as possible to in-person talking, “I have been talking to you almost as fast as I could the whole of this letter.” The result is apparent in her rushed-looking hand: its consistent rightward slant, the drooping stems of her “ds” and the hovering dots on her “is.” One of the letters is nearly illegible, with overlapping, crosshatched lines of writing.
Cassandra Austen is filled with overlapping lines of text." width="970" height="615" data-caption='This 1808 letter from Jane Austen to her beloved sister Cassandra is part of a significant epistolary corpus that tracks intimate correspondence between sisters and literary partners. <span class="lazyload media-credit">Courtesy of The Morgan Library & Museum</span>'>But my favorite letter of all is an April 1811 epistle from Austen to Cassandra. Before my eye fell upon a particularly distinctive remark or a loopy consonant on the page—in fact, before they drew towards anything that was there—it was what wasn’t there that captured my attention: a thin slit of page had been cut, and I imagine a grief-stricken, shears-in-hand Cassandra, exacting a jagged rectangle to censor her sister’s legacy. While we can never know quite what Austen spat out in her quick cursive hand that Cassandra—or perhaps someone else—felt compelled to lift, the label postulates it was an “uncharitable remark about a relative.” Stinchcomb and Wells also suggested that the excised remark could have described a personal illness or bodily symptom of Austen’s. “Someone like Cassandra might have thought, ‘Oh, that’s kind of personal and TMI,’” Wells said.
Beyond her handwriting, the closest we get to Austen is through something tactile that was once attached to her body: strands of hair. In a small brass frame, a beige lock curls in a loop. Seeing the hair is mesmerizing—a spiritual experience for a Janeite.
For visuals, we can turn to her sister’s unfinished watercolor portrait, which depicts a bonnet-covered Austen with her arms crossed before her. Most of the portrait is suggested by the preliminary graphite outline, but Cassandra had begun coloring the face. Brown tendrils of hair snake out of the bonnet and sprout across Austen’s forehead. It’s not a particularly artful portrait, but it might be our best window into Austen’s appearance: thin lips, brown eyes and a long, straight nose.
In Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray, painter Basil Hallward worries that the titular portrait reveals, rather than the sitter, his own passions. I wonder if the sentiment applies to Cassandra, who portrays Austen to seem especially meditative and deep-thinking. It is well-known that Cassandra was Austen’s devotee, writing, upon Austen’s death, that the author was “the sun of [her] life.”
If Cassandra confided pieces of herself in her work, her sister was no different. Though Austen’s œuvre is by no means autobiographical, I noticed certain fascinating overlaps between the artifacts that afforded us insight into her personal life and her work. In one revelatory letter to Cassandra, she expressed a fondness for a new acquaintance because she “admires Camilla,” a book by Frances Burney that she mentions, along with other Burney novels, in Northanger Abbey. Another example: Jane Austen’s favorite poet, William Cowper, whose book she gifted to a niece, is featured twice in Mansfield Park, quoted by the book’s heroine. “She makes imaginative use of all that material,” Wells said. “So we wanted not to draw a really simple or simplistic connection and say, ‘Here are our sources of inspiration,’ but rather, foreground the concepts of imagination and creativity from the beginning, and then let visitors figure out for themselves, ‘How does an author’s imagination work?’”
While the Morgan’s 2008 “A Woman’s Wit” exhibition showed much of the library’s own Austen collection, “A Lively Mind” pairs the Morgan’s trove with loaned materials from outside organizations to further illuminate Austen’s afterlife in America—a sector of Austen scholarship that has been historically undervalued. “We wanted to tell a much fuller story about Austen’s American readers that the Morgan’s collection couldn’t tell on its own,” Stinchcomb said.
Wells, in particular, was thrilled to be able to display four of six surviving copies of an 1816 unauthorized Philadelphia Emma reprint. “Each of these four copies has something special and unique about it,” she said, mentioning ownership signatures, bookplates and handwritten annotations and corrections. These editions—not exactly pirated, Wells clarifies, since no international copyright law was in place—likely circulated in North America without Austen’s knowledge.
Perhaps the grandest travesty is that Jane Austen was never fairly compensated for her work during her lifetime—neither in public recognition nor in money. Austen received only £110 for the copyright to Pride and Prejudice, her bestselling title, and none of the book’s revenues. That was at least better than the case of Susan, Austen’s first work accepted for publication, for which she received a mere £10. The publisher, Crosby & Co., refused to publish the work, so Austen’s brother Henry eventually bought it back, and Austen revised the novel into Northanger Abbey. Austen’s legacy has since grown to match her prodigious talent, but via “A Lively Mind” the author has new stories to tell. Even if you don’t fancy yourself a Janeite now, you might change your mind after your visit.
“A Lively Mind: Jane Austen at 250” is at the Morgan Library & Museum through September 14, 2025.