December 2025 marks the 250th anniversary of Jane Austen (1775-1817), the classic English novelist whose works are studied in every college and university across the United Kingdom.
In our country, Jane Austen became known only in 1961, when the publishing house "Foreign Literature" released the novel Pride and Prejudice. A copy can be found in the RUDN University library, and inside, on its endpaper, is the author's only lifetime portrait, drawn in her youth by her sister Cassandra.
The library also holds the first collected works of Jane Austen (1989) — a complete compilation of Russian translations of her six novels, featuring the author's silhouette on the cover — as well as a modern English-language edition of Pride and Prejudice (2019), which includes a portrait of the writer painted by James Andrews (1801–1876) based on a sketch by Cassandra.
Jane Austen's novels contain almost no portraits of her characters, nor detailed descriptions in general; instead, her characters speak frequently and expressively. Actress and director Rosina Filippi (1866–1930) compiled a selection of domestic scenes from Jane Austen's major works, supplementing them with costume descriptions. The first edition of her book Duologues and Scenes from the Novels of Jane Austen (1895), intended for amateur theatre, is kept in the collection of the "Rare Book" Museum.
A specialized graduate course based on Jane Austen's texts was conducted at Oxford: "Economics, Law, and Literature on Marriage, 1720–2020." Users of the RUDN Electronic Library System can find these materials in the EBSCO electronic collection https://mega.rudn.ru/MegaPro/Web(Kohm, Lynne Marie. Law and Economics in Jane Austen).
