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Search tags: Lady-Susan
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url 2014-08-20 17:02
Jane Austen Used Pins to Edit Her Abandoned Manuscript, The Watsons

The manuscript is written and corrected throughout in brown iron-gall ink. The pages are filled in a neat, even hand with signs of concurrent writing, erasure, and revision, interrupted by occasional passages of heavy interlinear correction…. The manuscript is without chapter divisions, though not without informal division by wider spacing and ruled lines. The full pages suggest that Jane Austen did not anticipate a protracted process of redrafting. With no calculated blank spaces and no obvious way of incorporating large revision or expansion she had to find other strategies – the three patches, small pieces of paper, each of which was filled closely and neatly with the new material, attached with straight pins to the precise spot where erased material was to be covered or where an insertion was required to expand the text.

 

OH MY GOD. Of Austen's juvenalia and uncompleted works, I've only read Lady Susan, but I should really take a run at The Watsons and Sanditon. 

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