An apt romance-related association copy of the two-volume Winchester edition of Jane Austen’s Sense and Sensibility, from the library of the “colourful” American fin de siècle romance novelist and garden designer, Irène Osgood of Guilsborough Hall, Northampton; and, following her death, from the staff library of the British finance house United Dominions Trust (founded 1919).

Richmond, Virginia-born, Irène Osgood (1869-1922; formerly Nannie Belote) was a popular and prolific novelist, poet, playwright and publisher, as well as an innovative gardener and enthusiastic country sportswoman. A girl and woman of self-transformation who possessed “natural charm and imperiousness” in abundance (a contemporary considered her “one of the most fascinating women I have ever met”), and who didn’t shy from drama, by her late teens the “Southern belle Nannie Irene Belote [had] aggrandized and ennobled herself to Nonie Irène de Belote,” and eloped with the wealthy Colorado coal tycoon, John Cleveland Osgood, becoming his first wife in 1887 (American Aristocracy, 2025). John Osgood established the Cleveland Publishing Company, New York to issue his wife’s writing, and published her first and most well-known novel The Shadow of Desire in 1893. This first outing was fairly well received, except by The Spectator, whose critic was troubled by its suggestive title and the show of female desire, observing: “One married woman is infatuated by [the male protagonist]. Another not only allows him to kiss her, but in the madness of the moment, ‘gives back kisses hot & fast’”.

The Osgoods divorced in 1899 and with her “more than favorable” settlement Osgood bought the Northamptonshire country estate, Guilsborough Hall, “one of the most beautiful houses in the Midlands”. As well as assembling an enviable library (which included the Winchester Edition of Austen’s novels (later disbanded), shelved, apparently, in the Lounge Hall Book Case), Osgood developed and designed Guilsborough’s gardens, winning “the admiration of all the authorities on artistic gardening”. She created “a ‘hanging Italian garden’ on the roof, planted up as a white garden, predating [Vita Sackville-West’s] famous white garden at Sissinghurst in Kent by more than twenty years” (Lyon, 2017).

Osgood remarried twice, her second marriage was short-lived (Capt. Charles Pigott Harvey died unexpectedly), while her third, in 1908 (two years after the publication of this edition of Sense and Sensibility) to Robert Harborough Sherard, the impoverished great-grandson of William Wordsworth and first biographer and friend of Oscar Wilde, proved unhappy, violent and disruptive. They divorced in 1915, following a headline-making trial on both sides of the Atlantic.

While neither their novels nor their lives (indeed, the more critical accounts of Osgood cast her as Willoughby-esque in character and aspiration) share much in common, both Austen and Osgood were dedicated to their writing and each worked concertedly to see and keep their work in print. Both women required the help of male relatives to navigate the gendered publishing cultures of their eras, and both felt the need to conceal themselves at particular times, with Austen publishing her novels anonymously and Osgood anonymously founding her own publishing house, John Richmond Limited, to circumvent accusations of literary fraud by Sherard during their divorce proceedings.

A wonderful association copy of Sense and Sensibility, uniting two quite different R/romantic novelists.

Anon (2025) ‘Irene Osgood (1869-1922)’, American Aristocracy; Neil Lyon (2018) ‘Useless Anachronisms?’ A Study of the Country Houses and Landed Estates of Northamptonshire Since 1880 (Northampton: Northamptonshire Record Society).