In Jane Austen's handwriting

Physical copies of Jane Austen’s letters are rare commodities. Of the 160 letters whose text we have, seven are known only from copies made by relatives, and the whereabouts of another seventeen are unknown.

The vast majority of the remaining manuscript letters (144 physical objects, including duplicate drafts and letters that exist in separate sections) are held by public or private institutions, including the Morgan Library and Museum in New York City, the British Library, Jane Austen’s House museum, and various British and American universities. Few remain in private hands.

Which makes it all the more extraordinary that one of those few will be for sale next month, along with two other Austen-related items, in an online auction that Sotheby’s is calling “By A Lady.” Sotheby’s has advertised the sale, which runs from October 1-15, as a “cross-category auction” involving “exceptional works by women across literature, visual art, science, and philosophy,” but I’ve had no luck finding a listing of the non-Austen items. Maybe it’s one of those if-you-have-to-ask-you-can’t-afford-it things?

Austen wrote the letter that’s up for auction (#43 in Deirdre Le Faye’s standard edition of Austen’s correspondence) to her sister, Cassandra, on April 8-11, 1805, while Jane was at home in Bath and Cassandra was visiting their friend Martha Lloyd and her mother in Ibthorpe. It’s a long, chatty letter filled with details about Bath activities and acquaintances.

Any Janeite would be thrilled to touch, let alone own, such a treasure, and it gains additional interest from its recent provenance: Although Sotheby’s isn’t advertising the fact, Le Faye’s notes show that the current owner is Sandy Lerner, the Silicon Valley gazillionaire who rescued Chawton House from dereliction and turned it into an important research library and Austen pilgrimage site. (I chronicled Lerner’s work in a chapter of my book Among the Janeites.)

Also included in the “By A Lady” sale are another manuscript rarity--Austen's handwritten and signed “Lines on Maria Beckford,” a comic poem she composed around 1811; and the Emma first edition that Austen sent to fellow novelist Maria Edgeworth, whose work she admired. (Alas, Edgeworth’s correspondence shows that she didn’t much like Emma, though there’s no evidence that Austen ever learned this crushing fact.)

The Edgeworth Emma, only the first and third volumes of which survive, was passed down to collateral descendants, eventually ending up in the possession of a many-generations-removed nephew named David Butler, whose wife, Marilyn Butler, was a famous Austen scholar. (She wrote one of my favorite works of Austen criticism, Jane Austen and the War of Ideas.)

All this rarity and interesting provenance doesn’t come cheap, as you might expect. Sotheby’s is projecting prices of $100,000-$150,000 for the poem, $250,000-$350,000 for the first edition, and $300,000-$400,000 for the letter. So this is not an auction for your average Janeite. Here’s hoping that these treasures end up in the hands of an institution that can make them available to the rest of us.