Reading Austen in America by Juliette Wells

In a sense, pop culture already kicked off an Emma retrospective when we celebrated 20 years of Clueless, the beloved adaptation. As a result, the novel’s 200th anniversary season will last all of this fall and into 2016, ending a year from now with the Jane Austen Society of North America’s Emma-themed conference in Washington, DC.

With Betty-Bright Low, Hinsley co-authored a book of Sophie’s caricature drawings and private writings, which established the cultural context in which the sisters read.Jane Austen’s Emma was published at the very end of 1815. It was beginning to seem that way. Max Moeller, Hagley’s curator of Published Collections, pointed me to an unpublished article by Ewald Rink on the du Pont book collection. Via one of Rink’s references, I found a 1976 master’s thesis by Jacqueline Hinsley on the reading tastes of E. I.’s youngest daughter to one of her nieces), in some of these books.ĭid the absence of these marks of ownership in the copy of Emma suggest that the du Pont sisters did not care for it? I.’s eldest daughter Victorine du Pont Bauduy), and a dedication from “Sophie” to “Victorine E. To learn more, I visited Hagley’s rare book collection to examine other novels from the period bearing du Pont family signatures. I found the name of “V. postage stamp adhered to a page and a 24-page catalogue of Carey’s publications from October 1816 bound into the back-there is little to suggest how or even if any du Pont read this copy of Emma. While there are a couple of features distinguishing this copy from others-a three-cent U.S.

I.’s signatures on the title pages of both volumes and the name “Du Pont” written on the facing flyleaf. du Pont doing with a copy of the only Austen novel published in the United States during the author’s lifetime?ĭid he or anyone else in his family read it, and, if so, what did they think? The copy itself holds no obvious clues. My search began by tracking down copies of a rare edition of Emma, printed in two volumes in 1816 by Matthew Carey, a Philadelphia publisher and the leading American printer of the day. Only four copies were known to Austen bibliographer David Gilson, but my research turned up two others: one at Dartmouth, and the other at at the Winterthur Library once owned by E. Jane Austen’s Emma, first published in the United States over 200 years ago, remains a beloved classic to this day. It was this novel that brought me to Hagley in a quest to uncover how nineteenth-century Americans read and understood Austen’s work.

Reading Austen in America by Juliette Wells