Veena Iyer showed up early and waited outside the archives room of the Goucher College library with the giddiness of a fangirl.
She had trekked from the Midwest to spend the weekend in Baltimore, among 950 or so devotees celebrating the 19th-century English novelist Jane Austen. With a lineup of country dances, book talks, paper quilling and cosplay in Spencer jackets, the conference sold out.
Iyer stayed one more day because she had snagged a golden ticket to the Goucher archives. By chance, the little college in Towson has come to hold the largest Austen collection in the world outside of England.
“Getting tickets to this conference is like getting tickets to Taylor Swift,” said Iyer, a Minnesota state court judge. “This is the backstage pass.”
Jane Austen is having a moment.
December brings the 250th birthday of the grande dame of the romance plot. Celebrations are planned around the world. The auction house Sotheby’s marked the event with a lot of Austen first editions, including a storied copy of “Emma” that fetched $279,000. And the Jane Austen Society of North America, the world’s largest Austen society, brought its conference back to Baltimore for the first time since the 1980s.
With “Austenmania” reaching a fever pitch ahead of the Dec. 16 birthday, Goucher College has become a place of pilgrimage.
Tours of the archives at the campus of 1,500 undergraduate and graduate students continue to sell out. On the morning that Iyer came, the waitlist stretched to almost 100 people.
The doors opened onto treasures: rare first editions of Austen novels, letters and vintage translations into languages such as Slavic and Farsi, even a gag gift of lacy black underwear signed “XOXO” by the roguish Mr. Willoughby of “Sense and Sensibility.”
Iyer gushed over a 1894 edition of “Pride and Prejudice,” the cover embellished with gold peacock feathers.
“Oh my God,” she said, “this is like insanely famous!”
Such Austen obsession stretches back more than a century. By the late 1800s, the English literary critic George Saintsbury had labeled enthusiasts “Janeites.” Rudyard Kipling recognized them with his 1924 short story “The Janeites,” about battered British World War I veterans who bonded over Austen’s novels. And history’s most famous Janeite was Alberta Burke, the woman behind Goucher’s treasured collection.
While an English student at Goucher in the 1920s, she considered Kipling her favorite author before she read “The Janeites,” according to the Goucher magazine.
“When I read it I resolved to investigate an author of whom my favorite thought so highly, and I’ve been entrapped ever since,” Alberta Burke wrote to a friend.
She had married Johns Hopkins University alumnus and lawyer Henry Burke, and they settled in Baltimore. By the 1930s, the Burkes were making collecting trips to England for Austen early editions and manuscripts along with 19th-century books about landscape design, architecture and other pursuits of the Regency era.
“She decided that her adult project, her passion project for her whole life, would be becoming an expert in Austen and collecting Austen,” Goucher Professor Juliette Wells said on the Austen society podcast.
Alberta Burke died childless in 1975. She left her 12 Austen manuscripts to the Morgan Library & Museum in New York. She left the rest of her collection to her alma mater. That bounty includes more than 1,000 books and 43 boxes along with curious marble notebooks that she filled with Austen ephemera: newspaper articles, playbills, magazine cartoons and seemingly every mention of the novelist in popular culture.
That made Goucher holder of the largest Austen collection in the world apart from a museum at the novelist’s old home in Chawton, England.
The Burke collection includes an 1816 Philadelphia printing of “Emma,” the only edition published in America during Austen’s life. Six copies are known to survive.
The morning of Iyer’s tour, Janeites lingered over these rare books. Another tour group waited to enter, but the women didn’t want to leave. One asked, “Are you accepting applications?”
Sacramento librarian Stephenee Bennett Borelli counts among her own prized possessions a copy of the 1894 “Pride and Prejudice” peacock edition. She squirrels away her savings to buy rare editions online and tell her husband exactly after the bills are paid.
“This was very important for me. I’m a book collector as well, so I understand the madness,” she said, “the need to gather and collect.”
One particular attendee caused a stir: Caroline Jane Knight, the last of Austen’s descendants to live on the family estate in the English countryside. Knight was floored by the pristine condition of a first-edition “Pride and Prejudice.”
“It’s amazing to see collections like this overseas,” she said, “because, of course, we all think of Jane Austen in England.”
The daughter of a clergyman, Austen was born in 1775 and grew up in the English countryside. One of her brothers inherited a fortune from distant relatives, and in her 30s she moved into a cottage on the grounds of his estate. In quick succession, she published her four most celebrated novels, “Sense and Sensibility,” “Pride and Prejudice,” “Mansfield Park” and “Emma.” Then she died of illness at 41.
She never married. Her last two novels, “Persuasion” and “Northanger Abbey,” were published posthumously.
It has astonished generations of readers that a writer with little formal schooling working alone managed to create some of the most enduring female characters of English literature. Her protagonists are witty and piercing social commentators who buck expectations and hold fast to their authenticity, same as modern women of any time or place.
São Paulo State University Professor Natalia Barcellos came to visit the Goucher archives from Brazil, where she teaches Austen to literature students.
“They can still recognize themselves in this 200-year-old work,” she said.
Meanwhile, modern adaptations of Austen plots in movies such as “Clueless” ushered in a new generation of fans. Count singer and actress Kelly Clarkson among them. She bought Austen’s turquoise ring at auction for more than $200,000. The movies keep coming — this year’s “Jane Austen Wrecked My Life” — and there’s a universe of fan fiction dishing up one dreamy Mr. Darcy after another.
“Suddenly, you could be a fan of Austen having never read anything,” said Wells, the Goucher professor.
Goucher threw Austen a birthday soiree in September with tea, trivia, scholar talks, dinner and dancing. The Johns Hopkins University will celebrate with a weekend in November of lectures, quill carving, more tea and more dancing. Everything sold out.
The Chesapeake Shakespeare Company performed “Persuasion” in October. Baltimore Center Stage is running “Pride and Prejudice” through Nov. 10. That’s not to mention all the Austen-themed garden parties and teas. Not in two centuries have the bonnet and empire waist been so popular.
Though readers come to Austen for romance, they find novels that explore social expectations, family relationships and the economic plight of women — relevant topics in America today, said Mary Mintz, president of the Jane Austen Society of North America.
“Many of us came through those struggles in the 1960s and 1970s, and we’re aware that women as recently as our mothers and grandmothers didn’t have the privileges that we have today,” she said.
The society was incorporated in Maryland in 1981 by Alberta Burke’s husband. More than a fan club, it celebrates Austen scholarship with 6,000 members from Canada to Mexico, the largest Austen society in the world.
Organizers brought the annual conference back to Baltimore for the birthday year. They sold about 950 tickets, the most ever.
“It’s going down in history,” Mintz said. “I went to the ”Guinness Book of World Records" just to check.”
In their return to Baltimore, women from Sacramento to Syracuse browsed slate pencils and shards of colorful china found in an archeological dig of Austen’s childhood home. The hotel emporium sold them peacock-feather pens and lace gloves. They practiced calligraphy and exchanged calling cards. For the first time in years, they made it until midnight at the ball.
“My husband says, ‘What can you keep talking about year after year? She only wrote six books,” said Deb Barnum, an antiquarian bookseller from South Carolina.
Just consider one lecture from years past that explored the placement of a single comma in “Mansfield Park.”
“It’s a network of insanity,” Barnum said, proudly.
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