Vladimir Nabokov with butterfly book, photographed for Life magazine

First edition of Edgar Allan Poe’s Tamerlane and Other Poems

Handwritten page from Jane Austen’s Winchester Races.

Photograph by Robert Kato

Jane Austen (1775–1817)
“Winchester Races”
July 15, 1817
Henry W. and Albert A. Berg Collection of English and American Literature

“Winchester Races”

Jane Austen composed these comic verses—her last creative output—three days before her death. Symptoms of her illness (possibly Hodgkin’s disease) manifested as early as January 1813, around the time of the publication of Pride and Prejudice. After four years of quietly and intermittently battling her sickness, she moved to Winchester to be closer to good medical care. The doctors acknowledged her case was “desperate,” but on July 15 (St. Swithin’s Day), she showed some improvement and dictated this poem—about the Winchester horse races being rained out by Saint Swithin—to her sister, Cassandra.

Holding Division: Henry W. and Albert A. Berg Collection of English and American Literature

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