Want to read a book printed in 1816, when James Madison was president, Jane Austen was alive, Indiana became a state, and Argentina declared independence from Spain? Now you can, thanks to the Goucher College Library and the magic of crowdfunding.
The library just reached a milestone in its Emma In America celebration— the digitizing of the first volume of a rare American first edition of Austen’s Emma.
Goucher’s copy of the “Philadelphia” Emma is one of only six known copies in the world and one of the best preserved. Visit the “Emma in America” site 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. “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.”
In celebrating the bicentennial of the publication, the Emma in America site features an easily readable and searchable digital facsimile of the extremely rare 1816 edition published in Philadelphia. Volume I of this two-volume edition is available now; the second volume will be added in 2016.
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. As part of the 200th anniversary of Emma’s publication, the library is hosting a series of events during the 2015-16 academic year.