It is a truth universally acknowledged that this year marks Jane Austen's 250th birthday

Boston Globe

16-07-2025

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Jane Austen, letter to her sister, Cassandra, 1808.
The Morgan Library & Museum/The Morgan Library & Museum, MA
'A Lively Mind' is a show of considerable charm and no less considerable substance. It's like its subject that way. The Morgan has a special place in the world of Austeniana. It owns nearly a third of her surviving letters, the largest collection extant. Fifteen of those letters are in the show. In the most delightful one, she writes to her niece with every word spelled backward. Imagine doing that in an email; good luck with trying to get around spell check.
There are almost 140 other items. They include silhouette portraits of Austen's parents and several portraits of her. None of those, alas, was drawn from life. (The only one that is,
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Jane Austen, "Opinions of Emma," circa 1816.
Images
British Library archive/Bridgeman Images
Part of what makes Austen's novels so satisfying is the fullness of the world she presents. There's a comparable fullness here: of a life led in literature, of course, but also actual life. It's hard to get more actual than a lock of Austen's hair or a gold-and-turquoise ring that belonged to her. Wallpaper from two rooms in the Austen family home, in Chawton, have been reproduced for the show:
Amy Sherald, "A Single Man in Possession of a Good Fortune," 2019
© Amy Sherald. Courtesy of the artist and Hauser & Wirth. Photo: Joseph Hyde
It is a truth universally acknowledged that the most famous words Austen wrote are the opening sentence of 'Pride and Prejudice': 'It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife.' In a nifty bit of updating, 'A Lively Mind' concludes with an
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Henry Herschel Hay Cameron, "Mrs. Julia Margaret Cameron," 1870.
© The Royal Photographic Society Collection at the V&A/© Victoria and Albert Museum, L
Julia Margaret Cameron was born in what is now Kolkata, in 1815, two years before Austen's death. Austen's Bath and Southampton and Chawton were very far away, and geography is the least of it. Lest we forget, though, an Antiguan sugar plantation is the source of Sir Thomas Bertram's wealth in Austen's 'Mansfield Park.'
Julia Margaret Cameron, "The Mountain Nymph Sweet Liberty," 1866.
© The Royal Photographic Society Collection at the V&A
In 1848, Cameron, her husband, and their children moved to England. She was 48 when she got her first camera. Over the next 11 years she would become one of the foremost photographers of the 19th century. 'Arresting Beauty: Julia Margaret Cameron' takes its title from her saying of her new-found art, 'I longed to arrest all beauty that came before me, and at length the longing has been satisfied.'
Organized by London's Victoria & Albert Museum, the show runs at the Morgan through Sept. 14. It includes 80 photographs, usefully organized by theme; three pages from a brief autobiographical manuscript (a QR code lets viewers call up on their phone the remaining 18 pages); and a mighty object befitting the Victorian confidence evident in Cameron's images: her first camera lens, a gift from her husband.
Julia Margaret Cameron, "The Whisper of the Muse," 1865.
© The Royal Photographic Society Collection at the V&A
An unusual, sometimes bewildering tension defines the work. There's the ravishing specificity of this still-new medium, photography. So many of the faces in Cameron's images have an immediacy that can make them seem almost like our contemporaries. Consider the way the young woman in 'The Mountain Nymph Sweet Liberty' stares at the viewer. The there and then of that moment when Cameron photographed her becomes our here and our now. Yet consider how earnestly bogus the title is. That title is indicative of Cameron's general fondness for staged tableaux and how she took inspiration from Renaissance painting and literature, including Shakespeare, the Bible, Browning, and Tennyson. 'Fancy Subjects for Pictorial Effect' she once called such photographs. She was being more candid than she perhaps realized.
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Julia Margaret Cameron, "Julia Jackson," 1867.
© The Royal Photographic Society Collection at the V&A/© Victoria and Albert Museum, L
Tennyson was a neighbor. He was among the cultural luminaries Cameron photographed. The man posed in the middle of one of those fancy subjects, 'The Whisper of the Muse,' is the painter G.F. Watts. Charles Darwin said of the portrait Cameron took of him: ''I like this photograph very much better than any other which has been taken of me.' As Henry Wadsworth Longfellow was about to sit for her, Tennyson warned, 'you will have to do whatever she tells you. I will come back soon and see what is left of you.'
The most striking instance of how Cameron's work could both be of its time and look ahead was also literary, if not in any way she could have intended. It's a portrait of her niece Julia Jackson. If Jackson's beauty looks so familiar it's because of how much the older of her two daughters, Virginia Woolf, resembles her.
Last year was the centenary of the Morgan's becoming a public institution. In observance of the anniversary, various gifts were made to the collection. 'A Celebration: Acquisitions in Honor of the Morgan's Centennial,' a ponderously straightforward name for a wholly engaging show, consists of a selection of those items.
John Coltrane, fragments and drafts for incomplete compositions, circa 1945-55.
© Jowcol Music, LLC. Used By Permission/All Rights Reserved. Photography by Janny Chiu
Among the 110 works — drawings, photographs, prints, manuscripts, books, and book bindings — many are associated with names that would have been familiar to the banker J.P. Morgan, who founded the library, and his namesake son, who expanded it: Leonardo, Parmigianino, Watteau. There are also names that definitely would not have been: John Coltrane, Jasper Johns, Rosamond Purcell (the first member of Somerville's Brickbottom Artists Association to enter the Morgan collection?), and the late John O'Reilly, from Worcester.
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You can well imagine the first group of names moving the Morgans to reach for a checkbook. That that's in no way true of the second group speaks to how the institution has grown and evolved over the last century. Rich as 'A Celebration' is, and it is very rich, its range attests even more to what makes the Morgan so worth celebrating.
A LIVELY MIND: JANE AUSTEN AT 250
ARRESTING BEAUTY: JULIA MARGARET CAMERON
A CELEBRATION: Acquisitions in Honor of the Morgan's Centennial
At Morgan Library & Museum, 225 Madison Ave., New York, through Sept. 14 (Austen and Cameron) and Aug. 17. 212-685-0008,
Mark Feeney can be reached at