Listen to co-curator Juliette Wells talk about collecting Austen artifacts in America.
A DRAMATIC GIFT
Only once did Alberta Burke speak publicly about her collection: at the July 1949 meeting of the Jane Austen Society in Chawton, when Jane Austen’s House was first opened to visitors. T. Edward Carpenter, who had spearheaded the acquisition of Chawton Cottage and its transformation into a museum, complained at the meeting that key relics, including memorial locks of hair belonging to Austen and her father, had recently left England after being bought by Americans. Burke, who had purchased those very objects, was offended by the implication that Americans were unworthy of owning Austen treasures. She stood up, identified herself, and declared that she would donate the two locks of hair to the new museum. She preserved press coverage of the occasion in her scrapbook.
Lock of Jane Austen’s hair, 1817
Jane Austen’s House, Chawton; CHWJA:JAH28
Alberta Burke was committed to keeping her Austen collection in North America, to benefit fellow American Austen devotees. After angrily donating the memorial locks of Jane’s and Rev. Austen’s hair to Jane Austen’s House in 1949, she resisted pressure from that museum’s founder to bequeath additional materials in her possession, choosing instead to divide her collection between the Morgan and Goucher College.
Thanks to Alberta Burke, the first public exhibition of Austen manuscripts, rare books, and contextual materials held anywhere in the world took place in November 1951 in a very unlikely location: Frostburg Teachers College in rural western Maryland (now known as Frostburg State University). A Goucher College classmate of Alberta Burke’s who taught history at Frostburg helped connect her friend with the organizers of a three-day “Jane Austen Festival,” which included music, dancing, and lectures. Alberta Burke generously loaned the greatest treasures of her Austen collection, along with explanatory cards she wrote to accompany each one. Many of the manuscripts and artworks on display in A Lively Mind were first exhibited in Frostburg.