‘There’s an aura about it’: 210-year-old first edition of Jane Austen’s Emma on display in Melbourne

Last year, when Janeites around the world marked the English author’s 250th birthday, the State Library of Victoria (SLV) made a major acquisition: three leather-bound volumes of a first edition of Jane Austen’s Emma, bought from antiquarian booksellers Maggs Bros at Melbourne’s Rare Book Fair.

“As soon as it came up, we were so excited, because its provenance is so extraordinary,” philanthropist Helen Sykes says.

Sykes, along with Krystyna Campbell-Pretty, is one of the founding donors of the library’s Women Writers Fund, which raised $100,000 to buy the 210-year-old book.

Published in 1816, this copy of Emma once belonged to Austen’s great-nephew, Edward Knatchbull-Hugessen. The triple-decker volumes are still in their contemporary tree-calf leather binding, with the title discreetly written on the spine and the author’s name nowhere to be seen.

The principal collection curator of historical books at the SLV, Dr Anna Welch, is also curator of the library’s World of the Book exhibition. She says Austen “published anonymously during her lifetime”.

It was only after Austen’s death in 1817 that her identity was revealed, in the preface to the double edition of Northanger Abbey and Persuasion. “Her brother, Henry, and sister, Cassandra, organised the publication of those last two novels,” Welch says. “That’s when Austen’s name appears in print as the author for the first time.”

Emma’s three volumes each have a special box, made for them by the library’s conservation team. When they’re not on display, they’re stored in a high-security area, which is temperature, light and humidity controlled.

“They’re small format volumes, about 15cm tall at the most,” Welch says. “The pages are delicate, you have to turn them carefully.”

While “everything in the library’s rare book collection can be read by anybody who comes into the library”, to read one of its rare books, you need to request access to one of the library’s special rooms. A staff member then guides you through how to handle the delicate object, including placing it on a small cushion and using weights to hold down the pages.

But no gloves are required. “For paper, clean dry hands are the best because that keeps you dexterous,” Welch says. “When you wear gloves you’re always a little bit clumsier.”

The Women Writers Fund, which was established in 2021 and has raised $750,000, has secured 250 books for the State Library of Victoria.

It allows the library “to acquire works by enormously capable, competent, trailblazing women”, Sykes says, and to redress the gender imbalance of the library’s collection, especially of its old and rare books.

While Austen is a highly collectible author today, her works were not a priority for the library’s founder Sir Redmond Barry, Welch says. “An author like Austen was really not on the radar of the library at that time,” she says, explaining the library prioritised classic English male authors such as Chaucer and Shakespeare.

“So the fund was established in response to that issue of overlooked women authors, both the very famous ones like Austen but also the lesser-known women authors.”

The rare first edition of Emma will be on display in the World of the Book exhibition, which will also display 126 books secured by the fund – such as a first edition of Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own, acquired for about £8,000 (A$15,414) five years ago.

There’s also a “Peacock edition” of Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, featuring black-and-white illustrations, and the first full-colour illustrations of Austen’s works in a travelling library set of Pride and Prejudice from 1897.

Australian female writers are already well covered within the collection, so the next acquisitions on the Women Writers Fund’s wishlist are first editions of Brontë novels. “Any sibling will do,” Sykes says.

“It’s already a wonderful library, but now this very rich repository of women’s work gives it a whole other strand to its bow.”

It’s not the only first edition of Emma held by an Australian institution; the State Library of South Australia holds one in its rare books collection, donated to the library in 2008, and the State Library of New South Wales has one too, which was acquired for an undisclosed amount in 2017.

“It matters because it’s the first expression of that work of literature, but also because there are changes between editions, both textural and of their binding, presentation and provenance,” Welch says. “There is an aura about a first edition that is a significant part of our reception of that author’s expression.”

The first edition of Jane Austen’s Emma will be on display in World of the Book, which reopens at the State Library of Victoria on 4 July.