Jane Austen

A year after her death in 1817, Jane Austen‘s brother, Henry Austen, said of her work, “Everything came finished from her pen.”

Au contraire, says an Oxford University professor who’s been preparing a large selection of Austen’s handwritten manuscript pages for an online archive of her work.

According to a report in the Independent by Richard Garner, Oxford prof Kathryn Sutherland says, “In reading the manuscripts it becomes clear that this delicate precision is missing. Austen’s unpublished manuscripts unpick her reputation for perfection in various ways: we see blots, crossings out, messiness, we see creation as it happens, and in Austen’s case, we discover a powerful, counter-grammatical way of writing. She broke most of the rules for writing good English. In particular, the high degree of polished punctuation and epigrammatic style we see in Emma and Persuasion is simply not there.”

Says Sutherland, “This suggests somebody else was heavily involved in the editing process between manuscript and printed book.”

A BBC News wire story says Sutherland “believes that person to be William Gifford, an editor who worked for Austen’s publisher John Murray II.”

Beyond the blots, however, neither report cites much in the way of proof. Was there no other stage of publishing she was involved in between first draft an finished book? And oh, the stuff of sexism here: a man had to save Jane Austen’s prose.

Meanwhile, Sutherland tells the BBC that the manuscripts also “reveal Austen to be an experimental and innovative writer, constantly trying new things” who was “even better at writing dialogue and conversation than the edited style of her published novels suggest.”

In other words, she wrote better than her mysterious editor?