Thanks to the Burney Centre at McGill University in Montreal, readers can now browse a virtual version of Jane Austen’s library. “Reading with Austen” allows users to page through antique books and even read marginalia. Rebecca Rego Barry at Lapham’s Quarterly dives into the new project, noting that “there are books of history, travel, religion, literature, and agriculture, as one would expect from a country-house library a couple of centuries in the making. There are surprises, too, mainly in the amount of contemporary fiction, which was largely disdained at the time. Even more noteworthy, perhaps, are the novels by women, such as Maria Edgeworth and Charlotte Turner Smith, that signal the family’s broad-minded reading practices.”
Image credit: Cassandra Austen
