The Pierpont Morgan Library announces its upcoming Austen exhibit:
A Woman’s Wit: Jane Austen’s Life and Legacy
November 6, 2009,
through March 14, 2010
| [Jane Austen, Lady Susan, autograph manuscript, written ca. 1794–95 and transcribed in fair copy soon after 1805. The Morgan Library & Museum, Purchased in 1947; MA 1226.] |
“This exhibition explores the life, work, and legacy of Jane Austen (1775–1817), regarded as one of the greatest English novelists. Over the past two decades, numerous successful motion picture and television adaptations of Austen’s novels have led to a resurgence of interest in her life and work. Providing a close-up portrait of Austen, this exhibition achieves tangible intimacy with the author through the presentation of her manuscripts and personal letters, which the Morgan has not exhibited in a generation.
The Morgan’s collection of Austen’s manuscripts and letters is the largest of any institution in the world and includes the darkly satiric Lady Susan, the only surviving complete manuscript of any of Austen’s novels. The exhibition also includes first and early illustrated editions of Austen’s novels as well as contemporary drawings and prints depicting people, places, and events of biographical significance. In addition to the literary influences that inspired and informed Austen’s works will be responses by later writers as diverse as Auden, Kipling, Nabokov, Scott, Yeats, and Woolf. A specially commissioned film of interviews with contemporary authors and actors commenting on Austen’s work and influence will also be shown in the gallery.”
[See the Library website here]
The Morgan Library & Museum
225 Madison Avenue at 36th Street
New York, NY 10016
Tel: (212) 685-0008
Posted by Deb
Jane Austen in Vermont 
Oh how I wish I lived on the east coast.
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And you have the Huntington on the west coast don’t forget! [though still a trip for you!] – just hope I can get to NYCity to see this – so near and yet so far!
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Jane Austen is surely the wittiest, most entertaining, and best satirical writer of both our time and hers. Her novels shed insight into the minds, wants, and ambitions of humanity. Central to her plots are the virtues of humanity: intelligence, kindness, charity,humility, and faithfulness, as well as the vices: faithlessness, dishonesty, pride, prejudice (Ha!) and negligence. Her novels are not merely a form of entertainment, they are in truth a portrayal of human nature, and a testament to the good in many.
Her protagonists are endearing, faults and all. Surely if Elizabeth Bennett was devoid of all faults, she would be infuriating and inane. Jane Austen was aware that in creating the faults of her protagonists, she was in truth creating the most believable, wondrous, relatable characters in all of literature.
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Hello Grazie, Thanks for visiting and for sharing your thoughts on Austen – very well said – she WAS a truthteller, wasn’t she? – and created great stories and characters in the process…
Happy New Year to you!
deb
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Happy New Year!!! Thanks for responding!!!
Grazie
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