by Jane Austen
Some forms unique to the early entries in the teenage notebooks are best described as childish errors: ‘dispaired’, ‘speek’, ‘Desease’, and ‘Mistery’ subsequently corrected to ‘Mystery’ (Volume the First, pp. 30, 31, 37, 49). The young Austen had trouble determining between ‘g’ and ‘j’, favouring the spelling ‘Magesty’ and ‘magestic’ (Volume the First, pp. 10, 33, 37; Volume the Second, pp. 86, 132), which she returned to correct at Volume the Second, p. 106 (‘unmagestic’ > ‘unmajestic’), and only settled to spelling conventionally, as we might expect, in the course of ‘The History of England’ (‘Magesty’, p. 122; but ‘Majesty’, p. 124; with a wobble at p. 132, where line 18 has ‘Magesty’ and line 21 ‘Majesty’s’). Her coining of the forms ‘diminushed’ (p. 101) and ‘diminushing’ (p. 103) (from ‘Diminution’, p. 101), perhaps the confusion of ‘emminent’ with ‘imminent’ at p. 99 (‘emminent Danger’), and the spelling ‘Dissapointment’ (p. 98), all in ‘Lesley-Castle’, may also fall into the same category of childish error.
Austen shares with a range of contemporary writers, including Walter Scott, other common variant forms, like her youthful preference for consonant doubling. The ‘full’ suffix in words such as ‘beautifull’, ‘chearfull’, ‘delightfull’, ‘dreadfull’, wonderfull’, and the double medial ‘ll’ in ‘Wellcome’, ‘wellfare’, ‘alltho’ ’ is largely confined to Volume the First and Volume the Second, though even here there are signs of standardization in chronologically later entries. The hand that enters into the closing pages of Volume the First the short piece ‘A beautiful description of the different effects of Sensibility on different Minds’ (p. 63) does so after 2 June 1793, though it is not possible to date precisely the correction found at Volume the Second, p. 92, deleting ‘Beautifull’ and inserting above the line ‘delightful’.
Austen’s preference for a fairly consistent series of digraphs, as in ‘beleive’, ‘cheif’, ‘greif’, ‘neice’, ‘peice’, ‘veiw’, ‘yeild’, has come to be seen as a hallmark of her style. The ‘ei’ form of these words is in regular use from Volume the First through to her final adult writings, regardless of an intention to print. Interestingly, the form ‘freind’ (a spelling favoured by Scott too), which we might wish to include in this list, is less likely to be used in the post-teenage writings.
Variation in spelling the proper names of characters is evident early and late: in Mrs Willson / Wilson and Lady Hariet / Harriet of ‘Henry & Eliza’ in Volume the First (pp. 28, 29); in ‘Lesley-Castle’, Volume the Second, where the ‘Lutterell’ sisters (p. 96 onwards) subsequently become the ‘Luttrell’ sisters (p. 106 onwards). This slight carelessness of hand, found too in Scott’s fiction manuscripts, is no more than a failure to look back through the pages and check the chosen form; it may explain the naming in print of Sir Thomas Bertram’s butler as ‘Baddeley’ and ‘Baddely’ in Mansfield Park.2 By contrast, the shift from ‘Catherine’ to ‘Catharine’ in ‘Kitty, or the Bower’ is significantly atypical and strongly suggests that all seven instances of ‘Catharine’ are non-authorial.3
Austen is consistent in favouring the spellings ‘agreable’ and ‘disagreable’, for two of her most regularly employed adjectives. The spellings ‘excercise’ (Volume the First, p. 36), ‘irrisistable’ (Volume the Second, p. 118) and ‘irresistable’ (Volume the Third, p. 171), ‘simpathy’ (pp. 74, 147) and ‘travellor’ are also distinctive. Volume the First corrects ‘travellors’ to ‘travellers’ (p. 33), and Volume the Second has ‘travellers’ (p. 90); but Volume the Third has ‘Travellor’ (p. 164), and she is still using this form in her last manuscript, Sanditon, in 1817, the year of her death. Occasional non-standard spellings may point to Austen’s pronunciation: ‘attrack’ for ‘attract’ (Volume the First, p. 16); ‘pracure’ altered to ‘procure’ (Volume the First, p. 21); ‘extroidinary’ (Volume the Second, pp. 102, 109).4
Some inconsistencies in spelling found in Austen’s fiction manuscripts broadly characterize print of the early nineteenth century: not only the first published forms of her six novels, but also the printed works of her contemporaries share many of Austen’s variant spellings. In general, we should be wary of attaching significance to individual variability and to lack of uniformity within a single text; rather, we should see variation as a sign of the flexibility of the standard or norm within the public printed text as in private usage.5 In this category might be placed the use of both ‘-ise’ and ‘-ize’ endings, as in ‘surprise’ / ‘surprize’, ‘realise’ / ‘realize’, ‘recognise’ / ‘recognize’; and the mixing of older and newer forms, as in ‘chuse’ / ‘choose’, ‘shew’ / ‘show’, ‘croud’ / ‘crowd’, ‘encrease’/ ‘increase’, ‘cloathes’ / ‘clothes’, ‘sopha’ / ‘sofa’. In some instances, the manuscripts suggest that Austen favoured one spelling over another. For example, ‘surprize’ appears only in the teenage writings, and thereafter, she prefers ‘surprise’; ‘choose’ is also confined to the teenage manuscripts, while elsewhere she favours ‘chuse’; ‘shew’ is preferred throughout her writings, as is ‘cloathes’; ‘encrease’ appears to be a youthful preference; while ‘sopha’ / ‘sofa’ are used indiscriminately, both forms appearing in Volume the First and in Sanditon, her last work. While it is tempting to try to argue that changes between Austen’s teenage and post-teenage manuscripts demonstrate a later tendency to favour print norms, in fact, there appears no overriding predilection for either older or normalized forms in the range of manuscript evidence available to us.
1 See ‘Spelling and Punctuation in Lady Susan’, in Lady Susan, ed. Christine Alexander and David Owen (Sydney: Juvenilia Press, 2009), 102. For a similar argument, see N. E. Osselton, ‘Informal Spelling Systems in Early Modern English: 1500–1800’ (1984), repr. in A Reader in Early Modern English, ed. Mats Rydén, Ingrid Tieken-Boon van Ostade, and Merja Kytö (Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 1998), 33–45.
2 Mansfield Park (1814), ed. Kathryn Sutherland (1996; reissued London: Penguin, 2003), 168, 299 (‘Baddeley’), 318 (‘Baddely’); and see Walter Scott, Waverley, ed. P. D. Garside (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2007), 399–400.
3 Kathryn Sutherland, ‘From Kitty to Catharine: James Edward Austen’s Hand in Volume the Third’, Review of English Studies, new series, 66 (2014), 124–43.
4 Compare the printer’s query about ‘arra-root’ in setting Emma in type, which Jane Austen relays with some amusement to Cassandra, writing on 26 Nov. 1815 as she corrects proofs: ‘I am advanced in vol. 3 to my arra-root, upon which peculiar style of spelling, there is a modest qu:ry? in the Margin’ (Letters, 313).
5 Systemic variability was a normal feature of both printers’ and authors’ style well into the nineteenth century. See Philip Gaskell, From Writer to Reader: Studies in Editorial Method (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1978), 7–8; Lynda Mugglestone, ‘English in the Nineteenth Century’, in The Oxford History of English, ed. Mugglestone (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 274–88. See too the examination of inconsistencies in spelling in and between manuscript and first-edition print versions of Walter Scott’s Waverley (1814), in Waverley, ed. Garside, 399–400.
Select Bibliography
Editions
‘Love and Freindship’ and Other Early Works, with a preface by G. K. Chesterton (London: Chatto and Windus; New York: Fredrick A. Stokes, 1922) [an edition of Volume the Second ].
Volume the First, ed. R. W. Chapman (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1933; repr. London: Athlone Press, 1984) [a transcription of the manuscript].
Volume the Third, ed. R. W. Chapman (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1951) [a transcription of the manuscript].
Minor Works, vol. vi of The Works of Jane Austen, ed. R. W. Chapman (1954), rev. B. C. Southam (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1969).
Volume the Second, ed. B. C. Southam (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1963) [a transcription of the manuscript].
The Juvenilia of Jane Austen and Charlotte Brontë, ed. Frances Beer (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1986) [a selected edition wit
h major omissions of ‘Lesley-Castle’, ‘The History of England’, and ‘Evelyn’].
Catharine and Other Writings, ed. Margaret Anne Doody and Douglas Murray, Oxford World’s Classics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993; repr. 2009) [the first edition with full textual and explanatory notes].
Juvenilia, ed. Peter Sabor, The Cambridge Edition of the Works of Jane Austen (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006).
Jane Austen’s Fiction Manuscripts: A Digital Edition, ed. Kathryn Sutherland (2010),
Volume the First, with an introduction by Kathryn Sutherland (Oxford: Bodleian Library, 2013) [a photofacsimile of the manuscript and its notebook].
Love and Freindship and Other Youthful Writings, ed. Christine Alexander (London: Penguin, 2014).
Textual Studies
McAuley, Jenny, ‘ “A Long Letter Upon a Jacket and Petticoat”: Reading Beneath some Deletions in the Manuscript of “Catharine, or The Bower” ’, Persuasions: The Jane Austen Journal, 31 (2009), 191–8.
Marshall, Mary Gaither, ‘Jane Austen’s Manuscripts of the Juvenilia and Lady Susan: A History and Description’, in J. David Grey (ed.), Jane Austen’s Beginnings: The Juvenilia and Lady Susan (Ann Arbor, Mich., and London: University of Michigan Research Press, 1989), 107–21.
Sabor, Peter, ‘James Edward Austen, Anna Lefroy, and the Interpolations to Jane Austen’s “Volume the Third” ’, Notes and Queries, new series, 47 (2000), 304–6.
Southam, B. C., ‘Interpolations to Jane Austen’s “Volume the Third” ’, Notes and Queries, new series, 9 (1962), 185–7.
Southam, B. C., ‘The Manuscript of Jane Austen’s “Volume the First” ’, The Library, 5th series, 17 (1962), 231–7.
Southam, B. C., ‘Jane Austen’s Juvenilia: The Question of Completeness’, Notes and Queries, new series, 11 (1964), 180–1.
Southam, B. C., Jane Austen’s Literary Manuscripts: A Study of the Novelist’s Development through the Surviving Papers (1964); rev. edn (London: Athlone Press, 2001).
Sutherland, Kathryn, Jane Austen’s Textual Lives: From Aeschylus to Bollywood (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005).
Biography
Jane Austen’s Letters, ed. Deirdre Le Faye, 4th edn (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011).
Austen-Leigh, J. E., A Memoir of Jane Austen and Other Family Recollections, ed. Kathryn Sutherland, Oxford World’s Classics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002).
Byrne, Paula, The Real Jane Austen: A Life in Small Things (London: HarperPress, 2013).
Le Faye, Deirdre, Jane Austen: A Family Record, 2nd edn (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004).
McAleer, John, ‘What a Biographer Can Learn about Jane Austen from Her Juvenilia’, in J. David Grey (ed.), Jane Austen’s Beginnings: The Juvenilia and Lady Susan (Ann Arbor, Mich., and London: University of Michigan Research Press, 1989), 7–27.
Modert, Jo, Jane Austen’s Manuscript Letters in Facsimile (Carbondale and Edwardsville, Ill.: Southern Illinois University Press, 1990).
Shields, Carol, Jane Austen (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 2001).
Criticism
Daffron, Eric, ‘Child’s Play: A Short Publication and Critical History of Jane Austen’s Juvenilia’, in Laura Cooner Lambdin and Robert Thomas Lambdin (eds.), A Companion to Jane Austen Studies (Connecticut and London: Greenwood Press, 2000), 191–7.
Gilson, David J., and J. David Grey, ‘Jane Austen’s Juvenilia and Lady Susan: An Annotated Bibliography’, in J. David Grey (ed.), Jane Austen’s Beginnings: The Juvenilia and Lady Susan (Ann Arbor, Mich., and London: University of Michigan Research Press, 1989), 243–62.
These surveys of early criticism are supplemented by later on-line resources, such as Persuasions On-Line, which since vol. 22 (Winter 2001) provides regularly updated bibliographies (
Alexander, Christine, and Juliet McMaster (eds.), The Child Writer from Austen to Woolf (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005) [includes Margaret Anne Doody, ‘Jane Austen, that Disconcerting “Child” ’, 101–21; and Rachel M. Brownstein, ‘Endless Imitation: Austen’s and Byron’s Juvenilia’, 122–37].
Barker, Gerard A., Grandison’s Heirs: The Paragon’s Progress in the Late Eighteenth-Century English Novel (Newark: University of Delaware Press; and London: Associated University Presses, 1985).
Brophy, Brigid, ‘Jane Austen and the Stuarts’, in B. C. Southam (ed.), Critical Essays on Jane Austen (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1968), 21–38.
Byrne, Paula, Jane Austen and the Theatre (London and New York: Hambledon and London, 2002).
Doody, Margaret Anne, ‘Jane Austen’s Reading’, in J. David Grey, A. Walton Litz, and Brian Southam (eds.), The Jane Austen Companion (New York: Macmillan, 1986) (published in the UK as The Jane Austen Handbook (London: Athlone Press, 1986)), 347–63.
Doody, Margaret Anne, ‘The Early Short Fiction’, in Edward Copeland and Juliet McMaster (eds.), The Cambridge Companion to Jane Austen, 2nd edn (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 72–86.
Epstein, Julia, ‘Jane Austen’s Juvenilia and the Female Epistolary Tradition’, Papers on Language and Literature, 21 (1985), 399–416.
Gay, Penny, Jane Austen and the Theatre (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002) [ch. 1 discusses her early experience of the theatre].
Gilbert, Sandra M., and Gubar, Susan, ‘Shut Up in Prose: Gender and Genre in Austen’s Juvenilia’, in The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination (New Haven, Conn., and London: Yale University Press, 1979), 107–45.
Harris, Jocelyn, Jane Austen’s Art of Memory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989) [Appendix 2, ‘Sir Charles Grandison in the Juvenilia’, addresses allusions in the teenage writings to Samuel Richardson’s Sir Charles Grandison].
Johnston, Freya, ‘Jane Austen’s Past Lives’, Cambridge Quarterly, 39 (2010), 103–21.
Kent, Christopher, ‘Learning History with, and from, Jane Austen’, in J. David Grey (ed.), Jane Austen’s Beginnings: The Juvenilia and Lady Susan (Ann Arbor, Mich., and London: University of Michigan Research Press, 1989), 59–72.
Litz, A. Walton, Jane Austen: A Study of Her Artistic Development (London: Chatto and Windus, 1965).
Litz, A. Walton, ‘Jane Austen: The Juvenilia’, in J. David Grey (ed.), Jane Austen’s Beginnings: The Juvenilia and Lady Susan (Ann Arbor, Mich., and London: University of Michigan Research Press, 1989), 1–6.
McMaster, Juliet, ‘The Juvenilia: Energy versus Sympathy’, in Laura Cooner Lambdin and Robert Thomas Lambdin (eds.), A Companion to Jane Austen Studies (Connecticut and London, Greenwood Press, 2000), 173–89.
McMaster, Juliet, ‘Your sincere Freind, The Author’, Persuasions On-Line, 27 (Winter 2006),
McMaster, Juliet, ‘Young Jane Austen: Author’, in Claudia L. Johnson and Clara Tuite (eds.), A Companion to Jane Austen (Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009), 81–90.
Sutherland, Kathryn, ‘From Kitty to Catharine: James Edward Austen’s Hand in Volume the Third’, Review of English Studies, new series, 66 (2014), 124–43.
Tuite, Clara, Romantic Austen: Sexual Politics and the Literary Canon (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002) [ch. 1 discusses the historical context of the teenage writings].
Upfal, Annette, introduction to Jane Austen’s ‘The History of England’ & Cassandra’s Portraits, ed. Annette Upfal and Christine Alexander (Sydney: Juvenilia Press, 2009).
Woolf, Virginia, ‘Jane Austen Practising’, New Statesman, 19 (15 July 1922), 419–20; repr. in Andrew McNeillie (ed.), The Essays of Virginia Woolf, iii (London: Hogarth Press, 1988), 331–5 (a review of ‘Love and Freindship’ and Other Early Works (1922)).
A C
hronology Of Jane Austen
Life Historical and Cultural Background
1775 (16 Dec.) born in Steventon, Hampshire, seventh child of Revd George Austen (1731–1805), Rector of Steventon and Deane, and Cassandra Austen, née Leigh (1739–1827) American War of Independence begins.
1776 American Declaration of Independence; James Cook’s third Pacific voyage.
1778 France enters war on side of American revolutionaries. Frances
Burney, Evelina
1779 Birth of youngest brother, Charles (1779–1852); eldest brother, James (1765–1819), goes to St John’s College, Oxford; distant cousin Thomas Knight II and wife, Catherine, of Godmersham in Kent, visit Steventon and take close interest in brother Edward (1767–1852) Britain at war with Spain; siege of Gibraltar (to 1783); Samuel Crompton’s spinning mule revolutionizes textile production.
1781 Cousin Eliza Hancock (thought by some to be natural daughter of Warren Hastings) marries Jean-François Capot de Feuillide in France Warren Hastings deposes Raja of Benares and seizes treasure from Nabob of Oudh.
1782 Austens put on first amateur theatricals at Steventon Frances Burney, Cecilia;
William Gilpin, Observations on the River Wye; William Cowper,
Poems
1783 JA, sister Cassandra (1773–1845), and cousin Jane Cooper are tutored by Mrs Cawley in Oxford then Southampton until they fall ill with typhoid fever; death of aunt Jane Cooper from typhoid; brother Edward formally adopted by the Knights; JA’s mentor, Anne Lefroy, moves into neighbourhood American independence conceded at Peace of Versailles; Pitt becomes Prime Minister.
1784 Performance of Sheridan’s The Rivals at Steventon India Act imposes some parliamentary control on East India Company; Prince Regent begins to build Brighton Pavilion; death of Samuel Johnson.