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Jane Austen is 250 today. Katherine Mansfield wrote ‘every admirer of the novels’ feels they are the author’s ‘secret friend’. Yet Austen remains unknowable. After her death, her family erased personal traces, recreating her as a retiring spinster aunt. Their portrait was untrue; but what is true?
In this talk, Professor Kathryn Sutherland considers objects that bring us closer to this most enigmatic of English writers: dancing slippers, a music book, a muslin shawl, a wallpaper fragment, a London front door, a theatre bill, Mr Darcy’s shirt. These objects tell their own stories; but glimpsed aslant, Austen’s life becomes a moment in their lives.
Professor Kathryn Sutherland is a Senior Research Fellow at St Anne’s College, Oxford. She is the author of Jane Austen in 41 Objects, published by Bodleian Library Publishing. Her other recent publications include Why Modern Manuscripts Matter (OUP, 2022), a study of the politics, the commerce, and the aesthetics of literary heritage culture; and an edition of Jane Austen’s manuscript fiction, Lady Susan, The Watsons, and Sanditon (OUP, 2021). She is a patron of Jane Austen’s House in Chawton, a trustee of Friends of the Nations’ Libraries, and a trustee of the British Library Collections Trust.
