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Stew and Stupidity
Oct. 23rd, 2010 01:19 pmThe headlines are bold and breathless: Jane Austen's famous prose may not be hers after all. Scandalous!! ...or not. The suggestion is that Austen's spelling, punctuation, paragraphy and (to a degree) diction may have been cleaned up by her editor, William Gifford. In other words, that "Austenian" style may be partly the result of an editor doing exactly what an editor is supposed to do.
A headline-hungry professor has broken this non-story after extensive study of handwritten, unpublished manuscripts from throughout Austen's career. It turns out that the handwritten drafts are... wait for it... less refined than the printed version! Poorly spelled! Full of spelling and grammatical errors! There are even (horrors!) blots and crossings-out. Seriously, these articles are written as though they expect Austenians, en masse, to drop their fans and spill their tea. The Telegraph, in particular, makes much of the fact that Austen's surviving manuscripts are written without paragraph breaks, including the dialogue passages. It seems obvious to me that she must have done this to save paper, since dialogue with paragraph breaks leaves much more white space.
In any case, if even I (who am no devotee of Austen's) can see what bollocks this is, then surely the spurious nature of this "revelation" must be readily apparent to one and all. Meanwhile, I'm raising a glass to the unsung Mr Gifford, on behalf of editors everywhere.
A headline-hungry professor has broken this non-story after extensive study of handwritten, unpublished manuscripts from throughout Austen's career. It turns out that the handwritten drafts are... wait for it... less refined than the printed version! Poorly spelled! Full of spelling and grammatical errors! There are even (horrors!) blots and crossings-out. Seriously, these articles are written as though they expect Austenians, en masse, to drop their fans and spill their tea. The Telegraph, in particular, makes much of the fact that Austen's surviving manuscripts are written without paragraph breaks, including the dialogue passages. It seems obvious to me that she must have done this to save paper, since dialogue with paragraph breaks leaves much more white space.
In any case, if even I (who am no devotee of Austen's) can see what bollocks this is, then surely the spurious nature of this "revelation" must be readily apparent to one and all. Meanwhile, I'm raising a glass to the unsung Mr Gifford, on behalf of editors everywhere.