Jane Austen’s Fiction in Manuscript
Jane Austen’s Fiction in Manuscript
Chapter 5 examines the novelist’s scribal practices through a study of her surviving manuscripts. It deconstructs the separation that has been assumed between her early fiction in manuscript and her later novels in print, demonstrating how elements of and impulses from the early writing survive into print. Austen presents a provocative case of a canonical and beloved novelist whose fiction manuscripts languished en route to print, as she laboured to conform to the demands of the print novel. The nature of Austen’s confrontation with print can be discerned by examining her later manuscripts – those written near the end of her life and at the height of her career in print. These manuscripts reveal the continued pleasure she took in her confidential manuscript writing and infer the challenges she faced in transitioning her fiction into print. A common thread running through this chapter and the previous two case-study chapters is the extensive accommodations made by authors to make their writing publishable. Nevertheless, by bringing into print culture some of the confidentiality more easily expressed by them in manuscript, these authors challenged the rigid conceptions of print propriety under which they wrote.
Keywords: Jane Austen, Confidential Manuscripts, Manuscript Revisions for Print, The Novel, Constructions of Print
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