In the spring of 1782, the novelist Fanny Burney wrote apologetically to postpone a visit from a friend, the memoirist Hester Thrale. “I am so very hard run for time,” complained Miss Burney, who was finishing “Cecilia,” about an heiress trying to marry for love. “I am really sick & tired of my task,” the letter went on. “I should long to throw the whole behind the fire.”
Mrs. Thrale wrote back comfortingly that in London, the scuttlebutt about early drafts of “Cecilia” was glowing. “The old Duchess of Portland,” Mrs. Thrale reported, “is reading it now for the 3d Time,” and at one salon, the reviews of “Cecilia” amounted to “the sweetest of Sayings.”
Scholars know how the literati traded thoughts across town that spring partly because one collector, Paula Peyraud, started gathering female Georgian writers’ correspondence, books and portraits in the 1960s. Ms. Peyraud allowed in just a few men’s works, including letters that Samuel Johnson and Horace Walpole wrote to the Burneys and Thrales.
On Wednesday, Bloomsbury Auctions in New York is selling 483 lots from the collection of Ms. Peyraud, a librarian in Chappaqua, N.Y., who died last year of cancer. She had built a subterranean gallery at her home to store and display the papers and paintings. “She had everything meticulously labeled and kept files and files of provenance notes,” said Tom Lamb, Bloomsbury’s international head of books and manuscripts. “Her family doesn’t know where the passion for this came from,” he added. “She was secretive, to be truthful. But she was very good at keeping institutions and scholars aware of what she had.”
Ms. Peyraud shopped mainly at bookstores and auction houses near New York and had an agent in Britain scouring for documents on her behalf. “She didn’t travel much — she put her money instead into what she was buying,” Mr. Lamb said. The market for artifacts of female Georgian writers was not competitive during her first decades of collecting, he added. “In the ’70s you’d see catalogs listing a lot from that era as just ‘Female Correspondence.’ ”
In contrast with Ms. Peyraud’s somewhat sedentary life, the collection reveals page-turning dramas and laments about European revolutions and wars. The poet Anna Seward pitied France as a “sanguinary & infatuated country” in an 1808 letter (which Bloomsbury estimates will fetch $2,000 to $3,000), and Mrs. Thrale told a friend, “Poor dear Italy is I’m afraid cruelly torne in Pieces” (her letter is part of a packet estimated to sell for $3,000 to $5,000). The Peyraud papers are also packed with gossip; in the margins of a 1789 set of newspaper reprints (estimated at $25,000 to $35,000), Mrs. Thrale wrote that the Prince of Wales “likes Corpulent Beauties best they say.” She added, “So the Girls stuff themselves with Eggs & Chocolate.”
At the Bloomsbury previews, which begin on Friday, a portrait ($30,000 to $50,000) of Mrs. Thrale at work on a manuscript is posted near a miniature ($12,000 to $18,000) of Miss Burney in a library. The Peyraud lots also contain a half-dozen paintings of anonymous women reading or writing, gazing at the portraitists while keeping a few fingers in the books to mark their places.
Jan Nicholson
In the spring of 1782, the novelist Fanny Burney wrote apologetically to postpone a visit from a friend, the memoirist Hester Thrale. “I am so very hard run for time,” complained Miss Burney, who was finishing “Cecilia,” about an heiress trying to marry for love. “I am really sick & tired of my task,” the letter went on. “I should long to throw the whole behind the fire.”
Mrs. Thrale wrote back comfortingly that in London, the scuttlebutt about early drafts of “Cecilia” was glowing. “The old Duchess of Portland,” Mrs. Thrale reported, “is reading it now for the 3d Time,” and at one salon, the reviews of “Cecilia” amounted to “the sweetest of Sayings.”
Scholars know how the literati traded thoughts across town that spring partly because one collector, Paula Peyraud, started gathering female Georgian writers’ correspondence, books and portraits in the 1960s. Ms. Peyraud allowed in just a few men’s works, including letters that Samuel Johnson and Horace Walpole wrote to the Burneys and Thrales.
On Wednesday, Bloomsbury Auctions in New York is selling 483 lots from the collection of Ms. Peyraud, a librarian in Chappaqua, N.Y., who died last year of cancer. She had built a subterranean gallery at her home to store and display the papers and paintings. “She had everything meticulously labeled and kept files and files of provenance notes,” said Tom Lamb, Bloomsbury’s international head of books and manuscripts. “Her family doesn’t know where the passion for this came from,” he added. “She was secretive, to be truthful. But she was very good at keeping institutions and scholars aware of what she had.”
Ms. Peyraud shopped mainly at bookstores and auction houses near New York and had an agent in Britain scouring for documents on her behalf. “She didn’t travel much — she put her money instead into what she was buying,” Mr. Lamb said. The market for artifacts of female Georgian writers was not competitive during her first decades of collecting, he added. “In the ’70s you’d see catalogs listing a lot from that era as just ‘Female Correspondence.’ ”
In contrast with Ms. Peyraud’s somewhat sedentary life, the collection reveals page-turning dramas and laments about European revolutions and wars. The poet Anna Seward pitied France as a “sanguinary & infatuated country” in an 1808 letter (which Bloomsbury estimates will fetch $2,000 to $3,000), and Mrs. Thrale told a friend, “Poor dear Italy is I’m afraid cruelly torne in Pieces” (her letter is part of a packet estimated to sell for $3,000 to $5,000). The Peyraud papers are also packed with gossip; in the margins of a 1789 set of newspaper reprints (estimated at $25,000 to $35,000), Mrs. Thrale wrote that the Prince of Wales “likes Corpulent Beauties best they say.” She added, “So the Girls stuff themselves with Eggs & Chocolate.”
At the Bloomsbury previews, which begin on Friday, a portrait ($30,000 to $50,000) of Mrs. Thrale at work on a manuscript is posted near a miniature ($12,000 to $18,000) of Miss Burney in a library. The Peyraud lots also contain a half-dozen paintings of anonymous women reading or writing, gazing at the portraitists while keeping a few fingers in the books to mark their places.