The beloved novelist — author of Sense and Sensibility, Pride and Prejudice, Mansfield Park and Emma — is known for her polished prose, her careful phrasing and her precise grammar. "Everything came finished from her pen," Austen's brother, Henry, said in 1818, a year after his sister's death.
But now — though it may pain die-hard Austen fans — it turns out that Austen may have simply had a very good editor. Kathryn Sutherland, a professor at Oxford University, has been studying more than 1,000 original handwritten pages of Austen's prose. She's found some telling differences between the handwritten pages and Austen's finished works — including terrible spelling, grammatical errors and poor (often nonexistent) punctuation. (via NPR)
Listen to the NPR interview with Sutherland here.
Take a look at the digital manuscripts here.
No comments:
Post a Comment