Mrs Birchs Classic Literary Collection Volume 7

The strong female characters in books like Pride and Prejudice and Emma are as resonant today as when Austen first pressed her pen to paper.

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Though her bibliography totals just six novels alongside some unfinished novels and other works in all, Austen's books and her insightful quotes have been subject to hundreds of years of analysis and—for the Austen die-hards—numerous re-readings. For more on the writer's life, influences, and curious editing habits, take a look at our compendium of all things Austen below.

The second-youngest in a brood of eight kids, Austen developed a love for the written word partially as a result of George's vast home library. When she wasn't reading, Austen was supplied with writing tools by George to nurture her interests along.

Later, George would send his daughters to a boarding school to further their education. When Austen penned First Impressions , the book that would become Pride and Prejudice , in , a proud George took it to a London publisher named Thomas Cadell for review. Cadell rejected it unread. It's not clear if Jane was even aware that George approached Cadell on her behalf. Much later, in , her brother Henry would act as her literary agent, selling Sense and Sensibility to London publisher Thomas Egerton.

From Sense and Sensibility through Emma , Austen's published works never bore her name. If she was interrupted while writing, she would quickly conceal her papers to avoid being asked about her work. Austen was first identified in print following her death in ; her brother Henry wrote a eulogy to accompany the posthumous publications of Persuasion and Northanger Abbey.

Many of Austen's characters carry great agency in their lives, and Austen scholars enjoy pointing to the fact that Austen herself bucked convention when it came to affairs of the heart. The year after her family's move to the city of Bath in , Austen received a proposal of marriage from Harris Bigg-Wither, a financially prosperous childhood friend. Austen accepted but quickly had second thoughts. Though his money would have provided for her and her family and, at the time, she was 27 and unpublished, meaning she had no outside income and was fast approaching Georgian-era spinster status , Austen decided that a union motivated on her part by economics wasn't worthwhile.

She turned the proposal down the following day and later cautioned her niece about marrying for any reason other than love. Because so little of Austen's writing outside of her novels survives—her sister, Cassandra, purportedly destroyed much of her correspondence in an effort to keep some of Austen's scathing opinions away from polite society—it can be hard to assign motivations or emotions to some of her major milestones in life.

But one thing appears clear: When her family moved to Bath and subsequently kept relocating following her father's death in , Austen's writing habits were severely disrupted. Once prolific—she completed three of her novels by —a lack of a routine kept her from producing work for roughly 10 years. It wasn't until she felt her home life was stable after moving into property owned by her brother, Edward, that Austen resumed her career. Austen had none of the advancements that would go on to make a writer's life easier, like typewriters, computers, or Starbucks.

In at least one case, her manuscript edits were accomplished using the time-consuming and prickly method of straight pins. For an unfinished novel titled The Watsons , Austen took the pins and used them to fasten revisions to the pages of areas that were in need of correction or rewrites. The practice dates back to the 17th century. In Austen's time, beer was the drink of choice, and like the rest of her family, Austen could brew her own beer.

Her specialty was spruce beer, which was made with molasses for a slightly sweeter taste. Austen was also a fan of making mead—she once lamented to her sister, "there is no honey this year. Bad news for us. We must husband our present stock of mead, and I am sorry to perceive that our twenty gallons is very nearly out. I cannot comprehend how the fourteen gallons could last so long. Austen lived to see only four of her six novels published. She died on July 18, at the age of 41 following complaints of symptoms that medical historians have long felt pointed to Addison's disease or Hodgkin's lymphoma.

In , the British Library floated a different theory—that Austen was poisoned by arsenic in her drinking water due to a polluted supply or possibly accidental ingestion due to mismanaged medication. The Library put forth the idea based on Austen's notoriously poor eyesight which they say may have been the result of cataracts as well as her written complaint of skin discoloration. Both can be indicative of arsenic exposure. Critics of the theory say the evidence is scant and that there is equal reason to believe a disease was the cause of her death.

As Matthew Birkhold of Electric Lit points out, judges seem to have a bit of a preoccupation with the works of Austen. Birkhold found 27 instances of a judge's written ruling invoking the name or words of the author, joining a rather exclusive club of female writers who tend to pop up in judicial decisions. Harper Lee and Mary Shelley round out the top three. According to Birkhold, jurists often use Austen as a kind of shorthand to explain matters involving relationships or class distinctions.

Half of the decisions used the opening line from Pride and Prejudice: Others invoke characters like Fitzwilliam Darcy to compare or contrast the litigant's romantic situation. In most cases, the intent is clear, with authors realizing that their readers consider Austen's name synonymous with literary—and hopefully judicial—wisdom. Subscribe to our Newsletter! Austen's dad did everything he could to help her succeed. Her works were published anonymously. She backed out of a marriage of convenience.

She took a decade off. She used straight pins to edit her manuscripts. She was an accomplished home brewer. Some believe Austen's death was a result of being poisoned. She's been cited in at least 27 written court decisions. Midcentury American writer Shirley Jackson has long been known for her spooky short story " The Lottery ," which caused widespread controversy when it came out in The New Yorker in and continues to appear in short story anthologies today. Her equally haunted novels are less widely read.

But now that her novel The Haunting of Hill House has been turned into a hit Netflix series, her work is on its way to a critical and popular revival more than 50 years after her death. A well-reviewed biography as well as new releases of some of her short stories and previously unpublished writings in the last few years have no doubt helped. Many modern writers cite her as an inspiration. Shirley Jackson has a number of fans among modern writers. Shirley Jackson was her family's chief breadwinner. A literary critic who taught literature at Bennington College, it was his job that brought the couple to the small Vermont city, where Jackson often chafed at being placed in the role of faculty wife.

She claimed to be a witch. In keeping with the haunted themes in her writing, Jackson studied the history of witchcraft and the occult, and often told people she was a witch—though that may have been in part a publicity tactic. A Rather Haunted Life: Knopf, with whom her husband was involved in a dispute. Reviewers found those stories irresistible, extrapolating freely from her interest in witchcraft to her writing, which often takes a turn into the uncanny. She often joked with her editors about bringing about victories for her favorite baseball team, the Brooklyn Dodgers, through her magical abilities.

Her interest was definitely real, though. She started studying witchcraft while writing a paper as a student at the University of Rochester, and later took up tarot reading. In the late decades of the nineteenth century, German book collecting was encouraged by Yale officers and faculty who had received their graduate education in Germany. Alfred Lawrence Ripley, , for example, who taught German at Yale after studying in Berlin and Bonn, took particular interest in the Library during his thirty-four years as a Fellow of the Yale Corporation. Given this atmosphere, it is not surprising that Yale sought out William A.

The collection was acquired for Yale, and Speck served as its curator for the rest of his life, adding books and manuscripts with funds provided largely by the University. By the time he died in , the Speck Collection had tripled in size to embrace some twenty thousand books and as many prints, manuscripts, broadsides, and miscellaneous materials. For the next three decades, the Speck Collection was overseen by Carl F. By establishing the Library's interest in German literature, the Speck Collection served as a beacon that attracted other materials. The Kohut Heine Collection came in Eight years later Thomas Mann founded a collection of his books and manuscripts at Yale, and in the s and s other authors and collectors exiled from Germany enriched the Library's collections.

In , Yale acquired the Faber du Faur library of seventeenth-century literature, Faber serving as curator for the next twenty-two years and he in turn facilitated the acquisition of the papers of the publisher Kurt Wolff.

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Hermann Broch, who died in New Haven in , bequeathed his papers to the German Literature Collection, and in a collection of Rilke's printed works was added. German manuscripts, books, and pamphlets of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries are found in abundance in the general collection at the Beinecke Library.

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He began to form his library while he was a book dealer, and his collecting gained impetus during the preparation of the auction catalogue for the Victor Manheimer Collection in , a project on which he collaborated with the poet Karl Wolfskehl. Faber came to the United States in , going first to Harvard.

Five years later Yale negotiated the acquisition of his book collection, offering Faber a curatorial position and a faculty appointment, both of which he held until his death in During his years at Yale, Curt von Faber du Faur augmented the collection in areas where his original holdings were relatively sparse--Catholic writing, Pietism, Jesuit drama, and Rosicrucianism.

Many of these later additions were made through purchases from the library of the German scholar Richard Alewyn and through exchange with Professor Harold Jantz, whose collection is now at Duke University. To suggest the scope of the Faber du Faur Collection, a few items might be mentioned here. There is an unusual group of song texts in the Italian style, by poets who were precursors of Martin Opitz's reform of German poetics. Kuhlmann was a poet and religious fanatic who was burned at the stake in Moscow in as an enemy of religion and the state; one of his earlier projects had been a trip to Constantinople to convert the Sultan.

Most of the volumes in Faber's original collection are remarkably well preserved--the result of a watchful bookdealer substituting better copies as they came into his hands. Almost all of the twenty-five hundred titles listed in this bibliography are commercially available on microfilm from Primary Source Microfilm, a Gale imprint formerly Research Publications, Inc. The collection is being augmented as aggressively as the market allows. While Faber du Faur's main collecting interest was the Baroque period, he nevertheless brought to Yale an outstanding group of eighteenth-century books, many of them illustrated editions.

This core has been supplemented over the years by purchase and with transfers from Sterling Library. In addition to Lavater's printed works, there are several substantial manuscripts and an intriguing collection of fragmentary manuscripts and physiognomic drawings, ostensibly castoffs from Lavater's workshop, where he was in the habit of producing handmade books for his friends. Many of the Lavater relics in the collection came to Yale in the s from family descendants, Waldemar C.

Hirschfeld Yale certificate in architecture, and his brother Robert Lavater Hirschfeld, both then of Meriden, Connecticut. The Hirschfelds also donated an oil portrait of Lavater by a little-known painter named Ilg, a portrait of the eighteenth-century satirist Gottlieb Wilhelm Rabener by Anton Graff, and a drawing of Mrs.

Lavater's hands by Heinrich Fussli.

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An extensive collection of printed works by Gotthold Ephraim Lessing came from three sources. Lessing titles held in the Speck Collection and those brought to Yale by Faber du Faur were supplemented in by books and pamphlets by and about Lessing.

Schott, dated from Philadelphia in Voss Schrifften , Berlin, — Despite his fascination with Goethe, Speck trained as a pharmacist and worked in the family business in Haverstraw, New York. Every spare moment and penny, however, was devoted to Goethe. His collecting had two main thrusts: On the other hand, Goethe the man and personality fascinated William Speck: He even brought back pressed flowers from Goethe's garden and taught a course in Yale College about Goethe's personality and physical appearance.

The resulting collection has at its core an extensive gathering of Goethe's works. Every collected edition issued up to the year of Goethe's death is present, as is a full array of later, bibliographically significant sets. All of the Goethe first editions are held at Yale, along with almost all variants and later printings through the mid nineteenth century. There are extensive groups of translations of Goethe's works, into both familiar and exotic languages.

COLLECTIONS

Illustrated editions have been collected, as well as fine press books. Some of Goethe's works have been collected in special detail. Faust , the principal example, is treated separately in this article. Many pre-Goethe versions of the beast epic Reynard the Fox are present.

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The German Literature Collection includes, as well, a growing number of literary annuals and almanacs from Goethe's time. These volumes were originally collected because they contain suites of illustrations, contributions by Goethe, and first printings of works by other canonical authors. They have gained interest in recent years because they offer a cross-section of the literary tastes of the time, and because they preserve the work of women writers.

Many include sheet music, while some contain fashion plates and ballroom dance diagrams. Goethe's life is thoroughly documented in biographies, editions of conversations and correspondence, maps, and prints; contemporary reaction to Goethe and his works may also be studied in detail. Materials relating to Goethe's associates--his relatives, his friends, his amours, the personalities of the Weimar court--have been collected in depth. The Speck Collection manuscripts include a few poems and quotations in Goethe's hand, three original drawings by him, and a number of letters, some of them written by secretaries.

The Speck manuscript collection is strongest, though, in materials reflecting the British reception of Goethe. There are, for instance, autograph poems that Goethe wrote for the Carlyles and letters from Thomas Carlyle to Goethe's friend and secretary, Johann Peter Eckermann, after Goethe's death. Many of the materials in the Speck Collection are listed in Carl F. In pre-Depression days, this catalogue was ambitiously planned as a four-volume work, modeled on the three-volume catalogue of Anton Kippenberg's Goethe collection, issued by the Insel Verlag in The second Speck volume was, of course, to have described Faust materials, the third volume would have listed biographical material on Goethe, while the fourth volume was to have brought addenda and a much-needed index.

The illustrations and facsimiles for all four volumes were printed in Germany in the s, but plans were never brought to fruition. Illustrated editions of Faust from both the nineteenth and the twentieth centuries are well represented. The Speck Collection contains many printed and manuscript scores, most of them from the nineteenth century, based on texts by Goethe or inspired by his works.

Breitkopf in and said to contain the first appearance in print of a poem by Goethe are highpoints of a large collection of printed songs, scores, operas, and libretti related to Goethe. Twentieth-century music has not yet been collected. This group of about one hundred letters from the papers of Karl Gottfried Theodor Winkler provides a portrait of intellectual life in the age of Goethe.

Most of the letters in the collection were written to Winkler, but there is also correspondence exchanged by Wieland, Lavater, and Eliza von der Recke, famous in her time for her part in the exposure of Cagliostro. These letters came to Yale in as the gift of Mrs. Hamill, a niece of Winkler's granddaughter. The Speck Collection includes several vertical files of material that varies widely in value and rarity. Pamphlets, mostly material about Goethe, are classed and catalogued as printed books. In addition there are files of illustrations, chiefly to works by Goethe; portraits of Goethe and his contemporaries; and views of places associated with Goethe.

These files were built strictly as subject collections, and material of the most ephemeral character stands side by side with such items as Piranesi's views of Rome. Goethe's travels are documented by a small map collection. Playbills and programs relating to productions of Goethe's plays date from approximately to Files of Goethe postcards and of Goethe in advertising date primarily from the early decades of the twentieth century.

Much of this material was gathered by a private collector in Berlin, Karl Berg, and was purchased from his widow in The Speck Collection also contains a number of significant art works, such as the Oswald May portraits of Goethe and Wieland that hang in the Beinecke reading room, a bronze bust of Goethe by Christian Daniel Rauch, an engraving of the young Goethe by Johann Heinrich Lips, and an anonymous silhouette of the poet from A collection of about one hundred and fifty coins, medals, and medallions with likenesses of Goethe includes all but one struck during the poet's lifetime.