Jane Austen's Illustrators Celebrated in New Anniversary Exhibition

Illustrating Austen at the The Holburne Museum in Bath will showcase the artwork featured in Jane Austen novels over the last 150 years.

The exhibition will include illustrations, illustrated editions, original sketchbooks, printing blocks, and complete works, bringing together for the first time some of the earliest illustrations of familiar characters with their modern iterations, from the 19th century through to the current work of Coralie Bickford-Smith for Penguin cloth-bound classics. 

Austen lived just across the road from the Holburne Museum at 4 Sydney Place from 1801 to 1804), and Bath had a profound effect on her work, particularly in her social commentary on the city in Persuasion and Northanger Abbey. However, it was not until 1894 that the first complete illustrated edition of a Jane Austen novel was published, the ‘Peacock  Edition’ of Pride and Prejudice by Hugh Thomson. 

Exhibition highlights include:

• a drawing of Marianne Dashwood lamenting the breakdown of her relationship with John Willoughby by William Cubitt Cooke, from 1892
• a wood engraving by Joan Hassell depicting a Pride and Prejudice frontispiece featuring Elizabeth Bennet and Mr Darcy, from 1957
• pen and ink drawings by Henry Matthew Brock, Charles Edmund Brock and Hugh Thomson, illustrating Fanny Price and Edmund Bertram from Mansfield Park, and Louisa Musgrove and Captain Frederick Wentworth from Persuasion

“Jane Austen’s characters and stories are beloved by many, and in our modern age it is the film and television adaptations that often influence our impressions of the characters," said exhibition curator Hannah N Mills. "For Austen’s fans in the 19th and 20th centuries  it was the illustrations on the page that brought the characters to life visually."

Illustrating Austen runs September 11 through January 11, 2026.