The Goucher College Library is proud to announce a milestone in its “Emma In America” bicentennial celebration: an open-access digital facsimile of the extremely rare first U.S. edition of Jane Austen’s Emma.
Goucher’s copy of the 1816 Philadelphia Emma is one of only six known copies in the world and one of the best preserved. Visit the “Emma In America” site, at emmainamerica.org, to learn how this little-known edition came to be in the first place, as well as how it came to Goucher, thanks to the generosity of the distinguished Austen collector and alumna Alberta Hirshheimer Burke ’28.
“The 1816 Philadelphia Emma was the first work of Austen’s printed in the U.S. and the only American edition of any of her novels produced during her lifetime,” said Goucher professor and Austen scholar Juliette Wells, who edited a 200th-anniversary annotated edition of Emma for Penguin Classics, released this year. “While the first London edition of Emma has long been available in digitized versions, this is the first opportunity that readers around the world will have to see the pages of the first American Emma.”
Easily readable and searchable, volume I of this two-volume edition is available now; volume II will be added in 2016 to commemorate the first publication of Emma, in London.
The site will be further enhanced in the coming years with interactive features linking elements of Emma to other materials from Alberta Burke’s Austen collection. To help them reach the next stage, visit the project’s crowd-funding site.
As part of the 200th anniversary of Emma’s publication, the library is hosting a series of events during the 2015-16 academic year. On November 3, author Alexander McCall Smith will appear in conversation with Wells in Kraushaar Auditorium. McCall Smith wrote Emma: A Modern Retelling and is well-known for his best-selling No. 1 Ladies Detective Agency series.