Preparing the scholars of 2020:
How Goucher College is using the Burke Collection and the Peirce Center
To excite undergraduate students about research
In May 1948 Alberta Hirschheimer Burke purchased Lot 266 from Sotheby’s
catalog: a lock of Jane Austen’s hair. This particular act does not mark this native
Wisconsin, Goucher College graduate and ardent bibliophile as peculiar, but serves as
one example of her dedication and passion for cultivating and collecting all things
Austen. Translations, first editions, playbills, letters, magazine articles, book reviewseven strands of the famous author’s hair- nothing was out of reach for Mrs. Burke over
her 45 years of collecting. All of these items (minus the curl of hair- which lives here in
Chawton in Jane Austen’s House Museum) cover 125 linear feet of Goucher’s library. It
is not necessarily the size of Alberta’s Austen collection, which is most impressive, but
the depth.
Though Goucher College is home to many notable collections, it is the Alberta
and Henry Burke Papers and Jane Austen Research Collection that arguably draws the
most interest and attention. Since 1975 when the collection arrived, Goucher College has
aimed to not only preserve this treasure, but also to make it widely accessible. An
especially unique component of the collection is the Burke’s extensive correspondence
with scholars, booksellers, and other collectors as well as catalogs documenting their
purchases. Goucher has become a Mecca for all things Austen, housing the archives of
the Jane Austen Society of North America and the Winn Family Collection of Jane
Austen and Silver Fork materials. The miscellaneous and collateral material includes
translations, critical studies, works by Jane Austen's contemporaries, background
literature about her life and times, and audiovisual representations. Goucher even offers
a study-abroad program entitled “Connecting Jane Austen’s Work & World via her
Heroines”, where students walk the geography of Austen’s life throughout England.
Though large in scope, the collection has become easily available for those who wish to
use the Jane Austen materials and archives to enhance teaching, learning and scholarship
at the college.
At Goucher College, we have some new and exciting programs that supplement
our efforts to advance and cultivate use of the Austen Collection by all scholars. This past
year, we reprocessed the papers and became re-inspired by the value of the Burke’s
correspondence.
For example senior psychology major Kate Dannals used the letters between
British bibliographer David Gilson and Mrs. Burke to kick-start her research on Mrs.
Burke as a collector and bibliophile. In her paper Kate uncovers just how much Mrs.
Burke integrated Austen into her life. Letters, notebooks, photographs, even interviews
with Goucher librarian Nancy Magnuson, all served as telling evidence in mapping out
the story of Alberta’s life as a collector. In the end Kate transcribed 21 of the BurkeGilson letters and coded significant statements to end up with six biographical themes.
As the librarians continue to learn more about the collection, new research areas
open up for both undergraduates and visiting scholars.
In 2000, Goucher started the Burke scholar-in-residence program. Researchers are
invited to apply for a 5 day stay where they can use the materials in the Burke collection
and give a public lecture on their inquiries, insights and findings.
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In 2002 Mary Favret addressed the famous “everyday” quality of Jane Austen’s
novels, with the perspective that “everyday” for much of Austen’s life, took place in
wartime. In 2003 the program drew two scholars, thanks to the added support of the
Stella Yousem Jane Austen Foundation. The Yousem Fund also helped sponsor my
attendance at this conference. During her stay, Claudia Johnson continued research she
had started at Goucher during a previous trip, and presented her talk “Jane Austen’s
Body” which discussed Austen’s depiction in portrait, busts, and other visual media.
Peter Graham delved into Austen’s treatment of sibling relationships.
Next Rachel Brownstein used the archives to further investigate Austen’s vital
presence in the 21st century, both as a canonical author and a cultural icon. Devoney
Looser, author of British Women Writers and the Writings of History, 1670-1820,
delivered her lecture “Jane Austen, Jane Porter and Bath” in 2007. The research and
visibility these scholars provide serve a dual purpose: more works, studies and insights
will be made on Austen and her work, and more scholars, students and faculty will be
inspired to use the collections at Goucher.
Juliette Wells, professor of English at Manhattanville College, will be in
residence the week of February 15, 2010, and give a public lecture on February 17,
entitled "For the Love of Jane Austen." Juliette has also just been selected for the Jane
Austen Society of North America's International Visitor Program for research at Jane
Austen's House Museum in the summer of 2009.
In December 2008, Goucher was awarded a $198,000 “Cataloging Hidden
Collections” grant from the Council on Library and Information Resources for a project
titled “Mapping Special Collections for Research and Teaching at Goucher.” This one-
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year project will significantly increase scholarly access to Goucher’s special collections.
An important aspect of the project is training undergraduates in descriptive bibliography.
Uncovering and understanding these “hidden collections” is key to Goucher’s initiatives
to increase undergraduate original research and partnerships with faculty to incorporate
special collections into their curricula and teaching methods. Among many collections in
this project is the Burke Collection. Students are often making, discovering and finding
that many of the printed volumes have interesting provenance, handwritten notes, or other
unique attributes that are currently not in our online catalog, but would be of interest to
scholars.
Over the past several years, several students have chosen research topics that
specifically engage them with the Burke’s rare Austen materials. In 2001, seniors
Rebecca Letsome and Christopher King Gates, worked as a team to design the Jane
Austen Notebook website- having realized that the materials were deteriorating and
needed to be digitalized. In Mrs. Burke’s ten marble notebooks, there are over 2,800
entries, spanning from 1936 to 1975. The students decided the notebooks, which contain
letters, newspaper articles, and hand-written notes by Mrs. Burke, should be
photographed rather than scanned to prevent damage. Five additional freshmen joined in
the effort to finish the site, which is now a rich resource for materials that can now be
easily read without future damage to the original notebooks.
One exciting new development at Goucher, and very appropriate to this growth of
intellectual activity, is an expansion of physical space where researchers can be
comfortable exploring and spending time investigating their chosen materials. In just
four days, the library will begin its move into the new Goucher Athenaeum. This new,
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highly visible facility will include double the current special collections and archives
space, and will create a more inviting atmosphere for students to visit.
Special Collections & Archives in the new Athenaeum will house the Brooke
Peirce Center for Undergraduate Research in Special Collections & Archives, endowed
by generous bequests from Brooke and Carol Peirce. The Center will facilitate hands-on
learning in terms of exposing undergraduates to many new resources. Each spring the
Center will hold the Brooke Peirce Colloquium where students will have opportunity,
much like the Burke Scholars-in-Residence, to present their work in a public forum. The
Peirce Center will extend Austen’s reach to the public. Students can find internships,
research fellowships, engage in digitalization projects and create exhibits, while faculty
members can build innovative courses that incorporate rare and special materials into
their curricula.
A prime example of this goal can be seen in the class “Archeology of Text”,
taught by Dr. Arnold Sanders. This interdisciplinary English course introduces
undergrads to archival research techniques using Goucher’s rare book collection and
online digital archives.
I took “Archeology of Text” in the fall of 2007 during my senior year at Goucher.
For my final paper I knew I wanted to work hands-on with the Burke materials, and
found a topic thread in Mrs. Burke’s letters to David Gilson that I could research. I
analyzed the provenance of our first American edition of Emma, which belonged at one
point to WWI poet Siegfried Sassoon. By reading the Burke-Gilson letters, which began
in 1960 and concluded in 1968, and exploring the inscriptions inside the book itself, I
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was able to map the route of how this one copy of Emma traveled from Philadelphia in
1816 and ended up behind glass doors at Goucher College in 1975.
Students’ research in the Burke-Austen Collection also influences course
development in surprising ways. After using the autographed letters found in the first
American edition of Emma, Dr. Sander’s decided to develop a more extensive segment of
Early Modern and Modern handwriting for the next offering of English 241: Archeology
of Text. Combined with manuscript annotations from the Burke-Austen and other
collections, these handwriting examples will help student researchers to decipher other
enclosed letters, as well as manuscript additions of other Austen texts, which offer
valuable clues about ownership patterns and readers’ responses to Austen’s work.
For example, Cassie Brand, class of 2009, completed a project for a course in
which she used different editions of Jane Austen’s Emma to create fictional reader
response letters from different time periods. While looking at the first American edition
of Emma, an edition from the WWI era, and a modern edition with Gwyneth Paltrow on
the cover, she was inspired to create characters who would have read each of these
editions and imagine what their reactions would be. She modeled the handwriting of her
characters after the scripts found in Goucher’s collections.
Whether it be creative writing responses, academic papers or exploration of
specific novels, undergraduate at Goucher have started laying the foundation for the type
of research we wish to encourage and develop at the college. We hope that
undergraduates and experienced scholars alike will be drawn to Goucher College for the
unique quantity of our ephemeral materials and the quality of the collection as a whole.
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The college is thankful to Henry and Alberta Burke for their passionate involvement that
has enabled us to offer many distinctive resources.
Though we cannot offer a glimpse of Jane Austen’s hair at Goucher College, we
do know that for a short while in 1948, our graduate, Alberta Hirschheimer Burke, was in
possession of Jane Austen’s DNA. As we now know, DNA’s main function is long-term
storage of information, so that it is available for building and maintaining an organism.
We see the Austen collection at Goucher College working in a very similar way:
providing a plethora of archival information and resources for future generations of
scholars to build upon, maintaining and increasing the interest and passion for Austen
studies.
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