Jane Austen at 250: an icon universally acknowledged

‘You will be glad to hear that every copy of Sense and Sensibility is sold and that it has brought me £140 beside the copyright,’ Jane Austen wrote to her brother in 1813. ‘If,’ she added, ‘that should ever be of any value.’ Austen had no way of anticipating the abiding appreciation and popularity of her oeuvre (nor the irony of doubting the value of her first novel’s copyright). And yet it’s tempting to imagine that she had some inkling. ‘It was an uphill battle to get her work into print,’ says Heather Weintraub, Specialist in Books, Manuscripts and Archives at Christie’s. ‘But she knew she was good. She believed in her work.’

As museums and institutions around the globe celebrate the 250th anniversary of the English author’s birth, a superlative collection of first and second editions of Austen’s novels will appear in Christie’s Fine Printed Books and Manuscripts including Americana, an online auction from 2 to 16 October. Compiled with ardent dedication by a single collector, ‘this grouping is possibly the best complete collection of first editions by Jane Austen that we’ve seen come to auction,’ Weintraub notes.

Few writers in the English language have achieved the cultural and artistic legacy Austen claims today. Film and television adaptations tally somewhere in the hundreds (and counting — new versions of Pride and Prejudice and Sense and Sensibility are in production); her Chawton home is a popular museum; in 2013, the Bank of England replaced Charles Darwin’s face with an image of Austen on the £10 note. She is surely one of the only writers to have inspired the pens of both literary theorists and fan fiction writers alike. Her iconic status has, in short, attained mythic proportions; yet nowhere is her legacy more palpably experienced than in the medium in which it first emerged: the books themselves.

The exquisitely preserved 1813 first edition of Austen's most famous novel, Pride and Prejudice, is the highlight of the auction. ‘This first edition is what we believe to be the earliest datable copy of the novel, insofar as ownership inscriptions in other copies are dated,’ says Weintraub. The inscription is made to one Maurice Fitzgerald, a likely acquaintance of Mary Wilkins, who appeared frequently in Austen’s letters. The book is an extraordinary example of what Weintraub describes as ‘immediate ownership — for the person who was reading it when it first came out to be someone within the real-life orbit of Austen is remarkable. It's great to have any record of who was reading it when it was first published, and while she was actively writing.’

Another highlight is a first edition of Sense and Sensibility, the Cortlandt Bishop-Doris Benz copy, in a contemporary binding. For the completist, exceptional editions of Mansfield Park, Emma, Northanger Abby and Persuasion are all represented in the collection.

First and second editions of Austen’s titles are not infrequently available, but the sets featured in the auction are amongst the most desirable copies of first editions presented together in one auction. Important details — such as the original half title page and contemporary binding — make these editions invaluable for the Austen cognoscenti, preserving how they looked to readers in the 19th century.

The collection presents a means of approaching not only of the Austen’s legacy but, in a sense, the author herself. ‘Seeing all of it together — the paper, the type, the words, such as the opening lines of Pride and Prejudice,’ Weintraub adds, ‘the whole thing is exactly what you want a Jane Austen first edition to be.’