Dash it all, Miss Austen
Speaking of old ideas, the shock release of an original Jane Austen manuscript has revealed that everyone's favourite romantic novelist had no sense of grammar.
The handwritten chapters from Persuasion, going on display in the British Library from November, include nothing but dashes by way of punctuation: no commas and barely a full stop. Austen's publishers, it transpires, edited every paragraph to shape the works we know and love today. Forget the painstaking spinster in the attic; this was a hurried hack, banging it out with no respect for the structure of the language.
And that's just the half of it. What has not yet come to light is the amount of effing and blinding that had to be removed before the novels were fit to print.
The first draft of Pride And Prejudice, for example, sees Elizabeth Bennet returning from the ball at Netherfield and telling her mother: "I met that Mr Darcy from up the road – what a c***."
Victoria Cohen-The Observer
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2010/aug/22/graeme-swann-jane-austen-victoria-coren
http://www.victoriacoren.com
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