Jane Austen had a very good editor

Transcript
MARY LOUISE KELLY, host:
Jane Austen's brother, Henry, once said: Everything came finished from her
pen. Henry was talking back in 1818, but that view of Jane Austen has stuck.
She's known for her polished prose and careful phrasing and grammar.�Well,
it turns out Jane Austen may just have had a very good editor.�
More than a thousand original handwritten pages of her prose are now online
for the first time. Professor of English Kathryn Sutherland of Oxford University is
leading the project.�
Welcome.
Professor KATHRYN SUTHERLAND (Oxford University): Hello.
KELLY: Professor Sutherland, so how different do these handwritten pages look
from the finished books that we know?
Prof. SUTHERLAND: Well, they look very different, obviously, in that they are
filled with blots, crossings out into linear insertions. When you look deeper you
perhaps find something you wouldn't expect, which is a different punctuation
style.
KELLY: A different punctuation style. How - what do you mean?
Prof. SUTHERLAND: Well, it seems to mean that what she is doing is
punctuating for speech. The English that she is known for is this polished,
printed Johnsonian prose. And it's not there in the manuscript.
KELLY: Do you have a favorite passage that perhaps might illustrate a little bit
of what you're seeing that's different in these manuscripts than what we who
only know the finished version would know?
Prof. SUTHERLAND: Well, it's very hard across the phone. I mean, lots of this
evidence is visual. But what I can give you is a little passage from William
Gifford, who I believe is the man who corrected her English for the press. And
this is what he says about the manuscript of "Emma": It is very carelessly
copied. Though the handwriting is excellently plain and there are many short
omissions which must be inserted, I will readily correct the proof for you.
KELLY: Hmm...
Prof. SUTHERLAND: So it does blow out of the water the idea that everything
came finished from her pen.
KELLY: Do we have any way of knowing how Jane Austen would have felt
when she saw the final polished version of her work that was actually published,
how she felt about the changes that were made?
SUTHERLAND: We have very little evidence of this, because most of her letters
were destroyed. We have a little bit of evidence about how she felt when she
saw the final printed version of "Pride and Prejudice." And there was some
surprise and she said she now could see that she needed more he-saids
and(ph) she-saids.
And part of the power of the manuscripts is hearing the voices overlay each
other and not always being absolutely certain which voice is speaking. And I
think we haven't allowed the very style of that to leak into the novels sufficiently,
because it's there in the manuscripts.
KELLY: Jane Austen, of course, had and still has a huge following. I'm
wondering if you've heard from any of her diehard fans who are surprised,
maybe disappointed, that the work that they always thought of as hers was
actually a little bit different as it left her pen.
Prof. SUTHERLAND: I've heard a range of responses. And I have had some
very extreme and, I have to say, unpleasant responses to my work. All I can say
is that, you know, as critics we should just stop polishing her halo.
There are very few authors that we put in this extraordinary position where we
feel that we should never say anything critical about them. She can stand up to
it. She's interesting. She's experimental. She's an extraordinary writer. The idea
that we can never question what she wrote I think is absolute nonsense.
KELLY: Well, thank you very much.
Prof. SUTHERLAND: Well, thank you.
KELLY: We've been speaking with Kathryn Sutherland. She joined us on the
line from Oxford, where she is a professor and where she's just completed a
digital archive of some of Jane Austen's original manuscripts.
And if you want to see some of those manuscripts for yourself, you'll find a link
on our website, NPR.org.
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