For the 21st-century Jane Austen fan, the images of Colin Firth’s Mr Darcy in the beloved BBC series Pride and Prejudice or Anya Taylor-Joy’s big-screen portrayal of Emma may be the first to leap to mind.
But an exhibition opening in Bath celebrates the varied ways illustrators of Austen’s work and adapters of her novels have depicted some of her most cherished characters.
They include work by Hugh Thomson, who was tasked with providing 160 images for the first fully illustrated edition of Pride and Prejudice in the late 19th century.
There are sketches for Helen Jerome’s lively 1936 theatre version of Pride and Prejudice, credited with turning Darcy into a smouldering heart-throb, which may have led to Firth and the famous sodden shirt scene.
Also featured are more restrained pieces by the wood engraver and illustrator Joan Hassall, who produced elegant illustrations for the Folio Society’s series of Austen novels in the 1950s and 1960s.
Pride and Prejudice frontispiece by Joan Hassall, wood engraving, 1957. Photograph: The Holburne Museum, Jo Hounsome Photography
The exhibition at the Holburne Museum coincides with the launch of the Jane Austen festival in Bath on Friday, a 10-day celebration that will be even more vibrant given that it is the 250th anniversary of the writer’s birth.
Austen lived in Bath between 1801 and 1806 – one of her addresses is just across the road from the Holburne – though another exhibition taking place on the other side of the city argues that, actually, she wasn’t very fond of the place.
Hannah N Mills, the Holburne exhibition’s curator, said brilliant illustrations had helped make Austen one of the UK’s most celebrated and long-lasting authors.
She said: “In our modern age it is the film and TV adaptations that influence our impressions of the characters. For Austen’s fans in the 19th and 20th centuries, it was the illustrations on the page. We wanted to look at how the illustrations married with the words.”
Mills said among the images she was particularly fond of was a 19th-century Thomson pen-and-ink drawing of a scene from Mansfield Park featuring Fanny Price and Edmund Bertram. “It’s just so beautiful and there’s such sentiment there.”
Thomson was an Irish artist who had made his name in the 1880s illustrating Elizabeth Gaskell’s Cranford. He went on to become one of the most popular and successful book illustrators of the Victorian era.
Mills is also keen on the woodcuts done by Hassall for the Folio Society’s editions. “They are iconic and constantly being reproduced. Early on, there were a lot of male illustrators but as you move towards the 21st century it’s more female illustrators.”
She said she wanted to feature costume sketches for the Jerome play partly because it threw forward to the modern incarnations of Darcy, where he starts to become “portrayed as a heart-throb”.
Bringing the show almost bang up to date is the sketchbook Coralie Bickford-Smith used to create a modern iteration: Penguin’s “clothbound classic” version of Sense and Sensibility. “I love what Penguin are doing with Coralie Bickford-Smith, taking motifs from the books and making beautiful covers out of them. They are for the modern age but still harking back to the history.”
Illustrating Austen, opens on 11 September 2025 and runs to 11 January 2026. For details visit holburne.org/events/illustrating-austen
