Listen to co-curator Juliette Wells talk about a storied copy of Emma and its owner.

A STORIED COPY
The first owner of this copy signed her name, C. B. Dalhousie, vertically on the title page and placed her book label on the inside front cover. A later owner, curious about her identity, jotted notes in pencil: “Countess of D. wife of the 9th Earl (1770–1838), who was Governor of Canada, Nova Scotia, etc. 1814–1828.” The volumes’ third and fourth owners, the American collectors Frank J. Hogan and Alberta H. Burke, added their bookplates.
Born Christian Broun, Lady Dalhousie (1786–1839) accompanied her husband, George Ramsay, to his government postings in North America and India. An avid reader and the mother of three sons, she is best remembered as an expert collector of botanical specimens.
Jane Austen (1775–1817)
Emma, 2 vols.
Philadelphia: M. Carey, 1816
Goucher College Special Collections & Archives, Rare Book Collection
Christian Ramsay, Countess of Dalhousie, is best remembered as a botanical collector, but her personal papers reveal that she was an avid, wide-ranging reader. In her diaries, she jotted down the titles of what she was reading on a given day. She read Austen’s Persuasion in June 1818 and Northanger Abbey in September of that year. Pride and Prejudice and Mansfield Park she read in June 1820. Unfortunately, her diaries do not include the date on which she read Emma, although she did record her copy on a list of books she prepared in anticipation of moving with her husband from Halifax, Nova Scotia, to Quebec City in June 1820. Based on the extent of that list, Lady Dalhousie deserves recognition as a notable woman book collector in British North America.
The beautiful binding of Lady Dalhousie’s copy of Emma shows that she invested in the care of her books. Several additional books bearing the countess’s signature and bookplate remain at her family home, Colstoun House, outside Edinburgh. After a destructive fire in 1907, the most valuable books in that house’s library were sold. The noted World War I poet Siegfried Sassoon bought this copy of Emma from a bookseller in the southern English city of Salisbury.