Burne-Jones, Georgiana Macdonald, Lady. ALS to Mrs. Lewes, George Eliot 1868 Sept. 19
About the Berg Collection The Berg Collection contains some 35,000 printed volumes, pamphlets, and broadsides, and 2,000 linear feet of literary archives and manuscripts, representing the work of more than 400 authors. Printed books in English date from William Caxton’s 1480 edition of the Chronicles of England to the present day, and the manuscripts encompass an almost equally lengthy period. The collection’s earliest manuscript, dating from around 1605 and named for its early owners, the Dukes of Westmoreland, contains one of the most authoritative versions of John Donne’s Holy Sonnets, Paradoxes, and other works of prose and poetry, and is written in the hand of his close friend Rowland Woodward. Spanning the Age of Johnson, the Romantics, and the early Victorians are the papers of the novelist, diarist, and dramatist Frances (“Fanny”) Burney (1752–1840). The Romantics are represented by numerous manuscript materials (such as, poems, notebooks, and correspondence) of Coleridge, Sir Walter Scott, Leigh Hunt, and Robert Southey, and less numerous but no less noteworthy, manuscripts and letters by Burns, Wordsworth, Byron, Shelley, and Keats. But the Berg’s most extensive manuscript holdings date from the period 1820–1970. Of the British and Irish, a short list would include Alfred Lord Tennyson, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, William Makepeace Thackeray, Charles Dickens (including the 1867 diary of his second tour of America, most of his periodical contributions, and several collections of drawings and plates by his illustrators), Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Lewis Carroll, Algernon Charles Swinburne, Thomas Hardy, Robert Louis Stevenson, George Gissing, George Moore, Bernard Shaw, Joseph Conrad, Arnold Bennett, Rudyard Kipling, W. B. Yeats, Lady Gregory, A. E. (George William Russell), Sean O’Casey (comprising the remnants of his fire-ravaged papers), James Stephens, H. G. Wells, Sir Edward Marsh, John Masefield, Hugh Walpole, Siegfried Sassoon, Rupert Brooke, Isaac Rosenberg, Vita Sackville-West, Robert Graves, Christopher Isherwood, and Stephen Spender. The Berg also contains the world’s largest manuscript holdings of Virginia Woolf and W. H. Auden. American authors represented by significant and/or extensive manuscript holdings include Washington Irving, Nathaniel Hawthorne and his family, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Walt Whitman, Mark Twain, James Russell Lowell, Henry James, Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot (including the typescript/manuscript of The Waste Land, with Pound’s emendations), Randall Jarrell, Marianne Moore, Muriel Rukeyser, Adrienne Rich, Louis Zukofsky, Allen Ginsberg, Saul Bellow, Julia Alvarez, Clark Coolidge. Also present are the archives of Vladimir Nabokov, Jack Kerouac, May Sarton, Laura Riding Jackson, Alfred Kazin, Kenneth Koch, Paul Auster, Philip Levine, Terry Southern, and Bruce Jay Friedman. Institutional papers found in the Berg include those of the Abbey Theatre, the publishers A. P. Watt & Son and James B. Pinker & Son, The Dial, and the Gotham Book Mart.