The celebration of the 250th anniversary of Jane Austen’s birth won’t officially kick off until next year, but that isn’t stopping the English city of Southampton from getting a head start on the festivities.
On November 15, the city where Austen spent nearly three years of her adult life will open a two-pronged Austen exhibition. If you’re a fan of contemporary art, you may be interested in “No Notion of Loving By Halves,” British sculptor Jocelyn McGregor’s multimedia and performance-based exploration of female friendships in Northanger Abbey.
But let’s face it: If you’re a Janeite, you’re probably going to be more interested in the chance to see Jane Austen’s portable mahogany writing desk. This priceless treasure, a nineteenth-birthday gift to Austen from her father, belongs to the British Library in London; the new loan marks the desk’s first time back in Southampton since 1809, when Austen moved to her final home in Chawton.
The writing desk, which folds up for travel, has a sloped surface for writing and space underneath for storing valuable documents, such as the manuscripts of immortal works of fiction. After Austen’s death in 1817, the desk—sometimes described as an eighteenth-century equivalent of a laptop computer--was passed down in the family of her oldest brother, James. In 1999, James Austen’s great-great-granddaughter Joan Austen-Leigh, a Canadian who was one of the co-founders of the Jane Austen Society of North America, donated it to the library.
In Southampton, the Austen programs—in keeping with the Northanger Abbey theme, the desk exhibition is officially called “In Training for a Heroine”--can be seen through February 23 at God’s House Tower, an arts venue housed in an eight-hundred-year-old building that has functioned, over the centuries, as a fort, a prison, and a museum. (Don’t you love Britain? They have really old stuff there.)
Both parts of the program are free, but timed-entry tickets are required. Could it be that they expect a crowd?
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