Female novelists of the 19th and 18th centuries traveled different routes to find readership for their work. Some used male or deliberately ambiguous pseudonyms; others published anonymously before claiming their creations. Through early editions and manuscripts of Frances Burney, Mary Shelley, Jane Austen, Charlotte Brontë, and George Elliot, we will explore the ingenuity these immortal writers used to bring their masterpieces before the public.
Beginning with his early works published under pseudonym “Boz” (he later impishly signed his letters “The Inimitable Boz”), Charles Dickens was a literary phenomenon in the 19th century, and his ubiquity continues with legions of readers all over the world.
Join us for this rare peek into some of the most personal and emotional writing in our collections. From the aching yearnings of poet John Keats to the dying wishes of a Civil War solider, the Rosenbach is home to a variety of love letters. Spend an hour getting up-close and personal with a variety of treasures, including correspondence from Marlene Dietrich to Mercedes De Acosta and handwritten pages from James Joyce’s Ulysses.
Lovers abound in the works of Shakespeare. His characters struggle and play and persist, and sometimes die, in pursuit of love. In this brand new Hands-On Tour, we’ll explore his myriad visions of love in early editions of his poems and plays from our collection. Come love with Will.
The young widow who kept her husband’s heart in her desk, the author of the first post-apocalyptic novel and the immortal Frankenstein, Mary Shelley was so much more than a goth pin-up!
Mathematician and cleric Charles Lutwidge Dodgson published children’s books under the pen name Lewis Carroll. This tour will explore both the man and the author, drawing on letters from Dodgson to his publishers, original drawings by John Tenniel (the illustrator of the Alice books) photographs of children taken by Carroll, and, of course, copies of his books.
Mathematician and cleric Charles Lutwidge Dodgson published children’s books under the pen name Lewis Carroll. This tour will explore both the man and the author, drawing on letters from Dodgson to his publishers, original drawings by John Tenniel (the illustrator of the Alice books) photographs of children taken by Carroll, and, of course, copies of his books.
Bold, cautious, resolved, ambivalent, and sometimes all of the above, gay men of the 19th century strove for authentic identities in art, literature, and love. In this Hands-on Tour, we’ll look at the rise and fall of Oscar Wilde, follow John Addington Symonds path from self-acceptance to advocacy, fraternize with Walt Whitman and Herman Melville, and see the first use of the word homosexual in an English publication.
The game is afoot to ferret out the realm of detective and spy literature at the Rosenbach. Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to explore early mystery stories, examine an original cypher belonging to a female Civil War spy, and exercise your sleuthing skills to detect a forgery.
In June of 1816, Mary Godwin, Percy Shelley and Mary’s stepsister, Claire Clairmont joined Lord Byron and his doctor John Polidori at a rented villa on Lake Geneva. Eighteen-year-old Mary had eloped with the already married poet Percy the year before, and Byron had fled England in disgrace. Cold, stormy weather kept the young people cloistered for long nights of ghost stories and scientific speculation. From this alembic of romance, scandal, science, and horror, Mary dreamed up Frankenstein and Polidori began the first vampire story in English fiction. Explore the creation of these immortal monsters with first editions and manuscripts born by the shores of Lake Geneva at the Rosenbach’s Villa Diodati Hands-on Tour.