A new home for Goucher College’s Jane Austen Collection
Goucher College will break ground today for a new multi-use facility to be called The Athenaeum, which will house, among other things, the library’s special collections, including the Jane Austen Collection. The plans for the new building are pretty impressive! The Athenaeum will open in autumn 2009.
Since AustenBlog has many new visitors, we take this opportunity to direct our Gentle Readers to Alberta Burke’s notebooks, which Goucher College has scanned and placed online for the enjoyment of all Janeites. The notebooks are sort of the analog predecessor of AustenBlog. Don’t miss all the little tidbits about the 1930s Helen Jerome Broadway production of P&P and the filming of P&P 1940 (girlfriend tried to score a shooting script)! Be warned, a Janeite can spend hours and hours just clicking away here. The notebooks are a small part of Mrs. Burke’s lifetime collection of Austeniana, which includes first editions, letters, and other items, all of which were donated to Goucher, her alma mater, upon her death in 1975. Mrs. Burke’s husband, Henry Burke, was one of the founders of JASNA.
April 27th, 2007 at 11:29 am
The original Alberta Burke link has been offline for some time, so I’m glad to see it’s working again. Her notebooks are quite a treasure trove.
April 27th, 2007 at 11:35 am
What an impressive collection!
April 27th, 2007 at 7:09 pm
Be warned, a Janeite can spend hours and hours just clicking away here.
I earnestly read your warning, and still I wasted over an hour of precious homework time clicking away!
April 28th, 2007 at 11:43 am
It’s simply great! Thank Heaven Internet is here to show us things like these!!
April 30th, 2007 at 11:47 pm
I sincerely admire Alberta Burke. What a true Janeite labor of love. She is an example of fanaticism at its finest. And a look back at life before computers! The old kind of cut and paste!