Jane Austen’s travelling writing desk, often described as the eighteenth-century equivalent of a laptop, is usually on display at the British Library in London. But this year, it’s living up to the “travelling” part of its name.
As blog readers will recall, the desk, a nineteenth-birthday present from Austen’s father, has been on display in Southampton, England, since November, returning to that city for the first time since Austen moved out in 1809. And once the Southampton exhibit closes on February 23, the desk is off to even more distant climes.
A fabulous-sounding exhibition of portraits and texts, “Writers Revealed: Treasures from the British Library and the National Portrait Gallery, London,” will be on display from April 12 to August 3 at a public art gallery in the eastern Australian city of Surfers Paradise. (Yes, that is the actual name of the city. Gotta love the Aussies.)
As far as I can tell, the Australian venue, HOTA (Home of the Arts), is the only place in the world that this exhibit can be seen, although a companion volume—possibly an exhibition catalog?--is slated for publication in April.
The exhibit, which includes more than seventy pieces of art and more than one hundred texts, displays portraits of writers alongside artifacts related to their work: manuscripts, illustrations, letters, first editions, and . . . one travelling writing desk. Represented are more than two dozen writers, from Shakespeare to Zadie Smith, Lord Byron to Beatrix Potter, William Blake to Kazuo Ishiguro—a varsity lineup from a literary tradition with a very, very deep bench.
A published report promises that among the items on display will be "illustrated letters from Tolkien to his grandson, Lewis Carroll's diary entry about Alice in Wonderland, and Virginia Woolf's handwritten Mrs. Dalloway manuscript." The same report features, although it does not discuss, Cassandra Austen’s famous portrait of her sister, so I assume that's included as well.
The most famous Austen portrait and one of the most evocative Austen artifacts--together in the same place? Yes, I too am researching the price of plane tickets to Australia.
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