The Jane Austen’s Fiction Manuscripts Digital Edition

After the death of her sister Cassandra in 1845, Jane Austen’s unpublished manuscripts were divided and ended up in private collections and museums across the world. But a digital archive made available online in October has brought together high-quality images of the manuscripts, and being able to study them side-by-side has yielded fresh insights into the way one of Britain’s most popular authors worked.

The Jane Austen’s Fiction Manuscripts Digital Edition was a three-year project led by Professor Kathryn Sutherland of the Faculty of English Language and Literature, which  photographed, transcribed and encoded 1,100 original handwritten pages of Austen’s unpublished writings. With funding from the Arts and Humanities Research Council, it is a collaboration with Oxford’s Bodleian Library, King’s College London, the British Library and other libraries and private collectors worldwide.

Digitization

The Jane Austen digital edition applied advanced methods of digitization to the process of photographing and analysing the manuscripts. Much of the digital photography was done by the same team that photographed the Dead Sea Scrolls, and using the same high standards and techniques. Professor Sutherland worked with computer experts from King’s College London to develop a highly sophisticated markup language, based on XML, to encode and analyse the manuscripts in minute detail. The technical demands of the project were formidable, primarily because the purpose of the online edition was to represent not only the content of the manuscripts as images and transcriptions, but also their 'genetic' features – their temporal sequence of composition. As a result, the project has set new world standards for the complex encoding of draft or working manuscripts – not only for Austen but also for other modern authors.

Austen’s variety

Jane Austen’s manuscripts are both fascinating and frustrating. We do not have the manuscripts we most want to see: no working drafts of Pride and Prejudice or Emma or of any of the famous six novels (other than two chapters of an alternative ending to Persuasion). On the other hand, we do have manuscripts that stretch her writing life back to the age of twelve and forward to age 41, when she died. We have teenage notebooks filled with spoof fictions, an abandoned novel and Sanditon, the work she was writing in the last months of her life. These manuscripts represent a different Jane Austen: different in the range of fiction they contain from the novels we know only from print; different in what they reveal about the workings of her imagination.

Quirks of Austen’s writing

Being able to view Austen’s original manuscripts revealed fascinating details about the mechanics and quirks of her handwriting. Professor Sutherland said: ‘Her famous description of her way of working – “the little bit (two Inches wide) of Ivory on which I work with so fine a Brush, as produces little effect after much labour” – is borne out by the small homemade booklets into which she wrote the later manuscripts. Her style appears obsessively economical, and we see this in the tiniest details; in her formation of carets from recycled elements of other letters, and her layered punctuation (the merging of a caret with the down stroke of a ‘p’ and a semi-colon with an exclamation mark), and her regular use of the dash to maintain a material connection between her thoughts and the paper.’

The homemade booklets also provide clues to how Austen worked. ‘They suggest a writing surface that was easy to carry from place to place, that could be kept secret from inquisitive eyes and that offered the writer the sense of an actual book growing, gathering by gathering, beneath her hands. It is important to remember that these little booklets contain working drafts, full of crossings out and revisions. There is a huge difference between using a gathering for making a fair copy and for early composition. This is especially the case where narrative is concerned. As a writing surface, they suggest considerable confidence on the part of the novelist to carry the story forward as a sequence whose elements are threaded together from the start in their proper order. Of course, the writer can delete or insert new lines, but flexibility is limited.’

‘Immediately striking when you look at images of Austen’s booklet pages is how densely filled they are, apparently closing off options for complex revision very early. She leaves no space for extensive reworking. This suggests that once set down she did not anticipate protracted redrafting of storylines, descriptions or dialogue. She is particularly good at capturing conversations with little alteration. On the few occasions where sustained revision was needed, she literally applied paper patches to the draft manuscript. In The Watsons, for example, there are three neat patches, originally pinned to the page, and tailored to the space they were to fill.’

The visual evidence from the manuscripts, now available for all to examine in the digital edition, extends Professor Sutherland’s earlier research on Austen’s methods of writing published in Jane Austen’s Textual Lives: From Aeschylus to Bollywood.

The digital edition of Jane Austen’s Fiction Manuscripts provides images of the original pages of all the fiction manuscripts for critical examination. We can now see how presentation on the page is so much a part of the meaning of the juvenilia in the original circumstances of coterie reading. We also see how evidence of composition within the working drafts offers an opportunity to reconsider and enrich our appreciation of the printed works.