From woodcuts to Colin Firth: how Jane Austen’s stories have been pictured | Jane Austen

For the Twenty first-century Jane Austen fan, the pictures of Colin Firth’s Mr Darcy within the beloved BBC collection Delight and Prejudice or Anya Taylor-Pleasure’s big-screen portrayal of Emma stands out as the first to leap to thoughts.However an exhibition opening in Tub celebrates the numerous methods illustrators of Austen’s work and adapters of her novels have depicted a few of her most cherished characters.They embrace work by Hugh Thomson, who was tasked with offering 160 photographs for the primary absolutely illustrated version of Delight and Prejudice within the late Nineteenth century.There are sketches for Helen Jerome’s full of life 1936 theatre model of Delight and Prejudice, credited with turning Darcy right into a smouldering heart-throb, which can have led to Firth and the well-known sodden shirt scene.Additionally featured are extra restrained items by the wooden engraver and illustrator Joan Hassall, who produced elegant illustrations for the Folio Society’s collection of Austen novels within the Fifties and Nineteen Sixties.Delight and Prejudice frontispiece by Joan Hassall, wooden engraving, 1957. {Photograph}: The Holburne Museum, Jo Hounsome PhotographyThe exhibition on the Holburne Museum coincides with the launch of the Jane Austen pageant in Tub on Friday, a 10-day celebration that shall be much more vibrant given that it’s the 250th anniversary of the author’s start.Austen lived in Tub between 1801 and 1806 – certainly one of her addresses is simply throughout the highway from the Holburne – although one other exhibition happening on the opposite aspect of the town argues that, truly, she wasn’t very keen on the place.Hannah N Mills, the Holburne exhibition’s curator, mentioned sensible illustrations had helped make Austen one of many UK’s most celebrated and long-lasting authors.She mentioned: “In our trendy age it’s the movie and TV variations that affect our impressions of the characters. For Austen’s followers within the Nineteenth and twentieth centuries, it was the illustrations on the web page. We needed to take a look at how the illustrations married with the phrases.”Mills mentioned among the many photographs she was notably keen on was a Nineteenth-century Thomson pen-and-ink drawing of a scene from Mansfield Park that includes Fanny Worth and Edmund Bertram. “It’s simply so lovely and there’s such sentiment there.”Thomson was an Irish artist who had made his title within the Eighties illustrating Elizabeth Gaskell’s Cranford. He went on to turn out to be probably the most standard and profitable e-book illustrators of the Victorian period.Mills can also be eager on the woodcuts accomplished by Hassall for the Folio Society’s editions. “They’re iconic and always being reproduced. Early on, there have been a whole lot of male illustrators however as you progress in direction of the Twenty first century it’s extra feminine illustrators.”She mentioned she needed to characteristic costume sketches for the Jerome play partly as a result of it threw ahead to the fashionable incarnations of Darcy, the place he begins to turn out to be “portrayed as a heart-throb”.Bringing the present virtually bang updated is the sketchbook Coralie Bickford-Smith used to create a contemporary iteration: Penguin’s “clothbound basic” model of Sense and Sensibility. “I like what Penguin are doing with Coralie Bickford-Smith, taking motifs from the books and making lovely covers out of them. They’re for the fashionable age however nonetheless paying homage to the historical past.” Illustrating Austen, opens on 11 September 2025 and runs to 11 January 2026. For particulars go to holburne.org/occasions/illustrating-austen