11/6/2022 0 Comments Sentence for slapdash![]() Modern readers will be disconcerted to see Austen sticking a comma between a subject and verb or strewing dashes apparently at random. My guess is that she would have little use for people who went around clucking their tongues over misplaced apostrophes in grocers' signs - the sort of pedantry she might put in the mouth of Mr. The modern notion of correctness was a recent invention in Austen's time, and to people of Austen's sort it smacked of the schoolmaster and the social climber. In fact, it's pure anachronism to describe any of those things as "wrong" or "incorrect" it's like calling Elizabeth Bennet a bachelorette. She was inconsistent about possessives, and she sometimes put e before i in words like believe and friendship, but you can find the same thing in the manuscripts of Byron and Scott and Thomas Jefferson - the rules just weren't settled yet. And by the standards of the time, she wasn't a bad speller. There are some careless errors, but these are rough drafts, and you can't take off points for something that hasn't been handed in yet. Take A Look At The Digital Manuscripts hide caption toggle captionĪnd looking at those manuscripts, I had a hard time figuring out what the problem was. See The Manuscripts: More than 1,000 of Austen's handwritten documents have been archived online. All that Sutherland or anybody else has to go on is the manuscripts for some teenage juvenilia and the rough drafts of some unfinished or discarded works. For one thing, there's no evidence that any editor ever took a blue pencil to Austen's prose, and we don't have so much as a page of the manuscripts of the novels that she submitted to her publishers. And Austen's defenders made some telling points. The Janeites are the only literary cultists who take their title from their idol's given name, and they're apt to take criticisms of her personally. ![]() Not surprisingly, those stories provoked a swell of indignation from the blogs and websites of the Janeroots. The BBC headed its report "Jane Austen's Elegant Style may not be Hers." The French media website Actualité led with "Jane Austen massacred the English language," and the Italian daily Il Giornale used the headline "Austen Revised and Corrected by a Man!" It's a measure of Austen's rock-star status that those claims got international coverage as a major celebrity scandal. She concluded that Austen's prose must have been heavily edited for publication, quite possibly by the querulous critic William Gifford. SENTENCE FOR SLAPDASH FULLAccording to her, the manuscripts are full of faulty spelling, break every rule of English grammar, and give no sign of the polished punctuation we see in the novels. Sutherland was publicizing a new website that has put 1000 pages of Austen's manuscripts online. "A storm in a teacup" is the British version of the idiom, and it's hard to imagine a more apt example than the squall that blew up recently over the claim by Oxford professor Kathryn Sutherland that Jane Austen was actually a sloppy writer. ![]()
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