They are just straight lines down the margins of a book, but the peculiar magic of celebrity marginalia means that those 15 lines may turn out to be the world’s most valuable pencil markings. They appear in a copy of Isaac D’Israeli’s Curiosities of Literature, an eccentric assemblage of anecdotes and musings that once belonged to Jane Austen. The book, by the father of the future prime minister Benjamin Disraeli, will be auctioned at Sotheby’s next week at an estimated price of up to $150,000.
A lot of speculation is involved in this valuation, starting with whether the markings were actually made by Austen herself. Given that she was just 16 when it was published, she probably read it in her teens when her literary project was forming. So it is interesting to see passages picked out such as a French scholar’s view of “English ladies”, as “fond of their ease and good living … [and] in raptures to marry a Parson”. Parsons, it noted, had “fat livings”, so were free to pick the most beautiful of them.
