A New Exhibition Explores Jane Austen’s Life & Legacy Through Her Personal Letters

In the 12 months 2025, listening to the title Jane Austen may conjure photographs of Keira Knightley as Elizabeth Bennet in Pride and Prejudice, Alicia Silverstone as a modernized Emma in Clueless, or the hours you most probably spent in highschool English examining the sisters of Sense and Sensibility. But Austen is greater than a teenage literature usual or an IP treasure trove, and the Morgan Library and Museum’s new exhibition, A Lively Mind: Jane Austen at 250, units out to turn out that truth. Through letters, paperwork, or even a few of Austen’s private results, the display paints a complete image of the storied creator—at the eve of her 250th birthday—in addition to those that supported her ambitions, each all the way through her existence and following her early loss of life.

“If you were marched through Pride and Prejudice in 10th grade and that was not the right time in your life, you are retaining an idea of Jane Austen that does not serve you,” says Juliette Wells, professor of literary research at Goucher College in Baltimore and cocurator of the exhibition. Her purpose with A Lively Mind is to have interaction each and every customer, “regardless of their prior knowledge” or critiques on Austen, and to painting her as a witty, well-rounded younger lady, one that even Pride and Prejudice’s Caroline Bingley could be compelled to name “accomplished.”

The display already has a minimum of one convert: Wells’s co-curator, Dale Stinchcomb, the Drue Heinz curator of literary and historic manuscripts on the Morgan. Stinchcomb entered the sector of Austen “with fresh eyes”; her humor caught with him right through the curation procedure. That aspect of the creator is on show right through the 51 letters inside the display, most commonly despatched between Austen and her older sister, Cassandra. Through those letters and different artifacts, audience are ready to track Austen’s existence, from her teenage years, when she first started writing, to her lasting legacy, which has transcended the years.

The exhibition starts via atmosphere the scene with partitions coated in leaf-patterned paper, a sport of the similar design that after coated Austen’s house. Set most commonly chronologically, a spotlight of the gathering seems early on, within the type of a e-book stuffed with Austen’s teenage writings. The clean, pre-bound e-book used to be a present from the creator’s father, George—and a dear one at that. “This is tangible evidence that Jane Austen’s father supported her writing, supported her ambitions,” says Wells.

That’s a big theme of A Lively Mind—the neighborhood, which aided Austen and fostered her creativity. Later, following George’s loss of life, Jane, Cassandra, their mom, and a pal, Martha Lloyd, moved right into a space in Chawton, England. There, Austen started to write down in earnest. One artifact on view illustrates existence within the cottage, the place Austen performed piano within the morning ahead of making breakfast for her housemates. “That was her only contribution,” says Stinchcomb. “The folks in the household made sure she could carve out time for her writing.”

Elsewhere, a mortgage from The British Library shows more than one critiques on a draft of Emma. Living in a small village in East Hampshire, Austen had no literary circle with writerly contemporaries. Instead, she created her personal workshop within the confines of her international. The record is a recording of her pals’ and circle of relatives’s responses to the brand new paintings, with many evaluating it to her earlier novels. One circle of relatives pal, Mrs. J. Bridges, prefers Emma “to all the others,” whilst Cassandra ranks it above Pride and Prejudice, however beneath Mansfield Park.

Of direction, Austen’s writings didn’t at all times stay in Chawton. Eventually, the creator revealed six novels, with a 7th, Lady Susan, launched over fifty years after her loss of life in 1871. Many first editions of those books are on show within the exhibition, as are 4 unauthorized copies of Emma, revealed in Philadelphia in 1816. It used to be this printing which helped introduce Austen’s paintings to the U.S., a subject Wells explores in her 2017 e-book, Reading Austen in America. In doing analysis for the e-book, Wells tracked down the six surviving Philadelphia copies and studied the house owners. “Each one bears the marks of its readers,” says Wells. They constitute those that supported Austen with out the creator’s wisdom, and helped unfold the phrase of her skill to an entire new continent of fanatics.

Alberta Burke falls beneath a identical class, and the exhibition ends with an exploration of the American student and philanthropist, who spent a lot of her grownup existence gathering books, manuscripts, and paperwork in the case of Austen. Burke, who kicked the bucket in 1975, in the end donated her intensive assemblage to the Morgan, in addition to her alma mater, Goucher, in some ways making this exhibition conceivable.

Before exiting the display, guests will see a last, anachronistic addition: A 2019 portray via Amy Sherald titled in a connection with Pride and Prejudice: A Single Man in Possession of a Good Fortune. From the very get started, Wells knew she sought after to incorporate the portray as a part of the exhibition, and the paintings’s house owners generously lent it to the Morgan to be used.

“I love the way it connects with the world of Austen fandom, which is increasingly inclusive, global, and reinforced by adaptations that show us a world of Austen that is not the white world that one might have imagined in past generations,” Wells says. It’s the easiest technique to cap off the exhibition, to move the viewer again into the prevailing day—the place Austen is simply as influential, even 250 years after she first entered the sector.

A Lively Mind: Jane Austen at 250 is on show on the Morgan Library & Museum from June 6 to September 14, 2025.