Famous style of Jane Austen may not be hers after all

PhysOrg ^ | Monday, October 25, 2010 | Oxford University

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The polished prose of Emma and Persuasion was the product of an interventionist editor, an Oxford University academic has found.

Professor Kathryn Sutherland of the Faculty of English Language and Literature made the discovery while studying a collection of 1,100 original handwritten pages of Austen's unpublished writings for the Jane Austen Fiction Manuscripts Digital Edition.

The project, led by Professor Sutherland in collaboration with the Bodleian Libraries, King's College London and the British Library with funding from the Arts and Humanities Research Council has reunited in a free-to-access online archive all Jane Austen's handwritten fiction manuscripts for the very first time since 1845 when they were scattered by the terms of her sister Cassandra's will...

"But in reading the manuscripts it quickly 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 Austen's unpublished manuscripts unpick her reputation for perfection in various ways: we see blots, crossings out, messiness; we see creation as it happens; and in Austen's case,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."

Professor Sutherland adds: "This suggests somebody else was heavily involved in the editing process between manuscript and printed book; and letters between Austen's publisher John Murray II and his talent scout and editor William Gifford, acknowledging the untidiness of Austen's style and how Gifford will correct it, seem to identify Gifford as the culprit."

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:’) My pleasure.

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There’s nothing in there about intelligence.

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The refutation is to her undeserved reputation of having written everything attributed to her in the same form as it was published.