Time to exhibit

As we approach the last third of this Austen 250 year, the torrent of anniversary-related events shows no sign of abating—especially in Britain, ground zero for the celebrations. Case in point: three ongoing or soon-to-open Austen-themed exhibits.

* The influence of the seaside on Austen’s life and work is the subject of “Jane Austen: Down to the Sea,” an exhibit at the Dorset Museum & Art Gallery in Dorchester, on the south coast of England.

The show, which closes on September 14, includes “local Regency guidebooks, postcards, evening dresses, paintings and games highlighting how people spent their time on holiday by the sea,” according to the museum’s website. (Photos of a few items can be seen here.) Visitors can also try on Regency clothing, step inside a reconstruction of a bathing machine, and see a first edition of Persuasion, the most naval of Austen’s novels.

* It’s not exactly news that Austen’s stories about gentry families barely mention the working people whose labor underpinned gentry life. “Beyond the Bonnets: Working Women in Jane Austen’s Novels,” an exhibit on display at The Arc, an arts and community space in Winchester, aims to fill in some of that omitted detail.

The show, which closes on November 2, uses letters, extracts from Austen novels, and such domestic objects as an apron and a comb to reconstruct “the precarious lives of real Georgian women navigating limited opportunities and rights through their roles in domestic service, trade, education, and childcare,” according to The Arc’s website.

Working women—nannies, maids, and proprietors of inns, shops, and circulating libraries—"enable the lives of the heroines and heroes,” exhibit curator Kathleen Palmer told the Guardian. “The bustling towns and stately homes wouldn’t function without these women.”

* For many Janeites, there’s no such thing as owning too many editions of Austen’s novels—especially when the new acquisitions feature beautiful covers or unusual illustrations. Those people are surely the target audience for “Illustrating Austen,” which opens September 11 for a four-month run at the Holburne Museum in Bath.

The exhibit includes sketches, printing blocks, and completed illustrations dating from the late nineteenth century to the present, featuring the work of such artists as Hugh Thomson, Joan Hassall, and Coralie Bickford-Smith.

“In our modern age, it is the film and television adaptations that often influence our impressions of the characters," exhibition curator Hannah N. Mills told Fine Books & Collections magazine. "For Austen’s fans in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, it was the illustrations on the page that brought the characters to life visually."