Jane Austen on the Cheap – The 2025 Kenneth W. Rendell Endowed Lecture

Date: 4 June 2025
Time: 5:30 p.m. ET
Location: UVA Special Collections (Auditorium) or Zoom
Lecturer: Janine Barchas - Chancellor’s Council Centennial Professor in the Book Arts, University of Texas at Austin

You are invited to attend this lecture in person or virtually via Zoom. Register for the livestream here.
(RSVPs to attend in person are not required.)

In the latter half of the nineteenth century, cheap and shoddy reprintings of Jane Austen’s novels performed the heavy lifting of bringing her work and reputation before the general public. Inexpensive reprints and early paperbacks of Austen were sold at Victorian railway stations for one or two shillings, traded for soap wrappers, awarded as book prizes in schools, and targeted to Britain’s working classes. At just pennies a copy, Austen’s novels were also squeezed into tight columns on thin paper. Few of these hard-lived books survive. Yet such scrappy everyday versions of her novels made a substantial difference to Austen’s early readership. These were the books bought and read by ordinary people. And these are the books that, owing to their low status and production values, remain uncollected by academic libraries and largely unremarked by scholars. About 15 years ago, Janine Barchas began hunting for these lost books of Jane Austen. This is the story of how private collectors, eBay, and some lucky breaks came to the rescue.