Jane Austen handwritten fiction manuscripts available online -- A painstaking research project three years in the making, Jane Austen's Fiction Manuscripts Digital Editon is now available online. The project was funded by the Arts & Humanities Research Council (AHRC) and conducted by Oxford University and King's College of London. Professor Kathryn Sutherland is Project Director and Principal Investigator.
The digital edition of Jane Austen's manuscripts makes it possible for readers, teachers, and scholars to study the original manuscripts of the British novelist online from their own computer screens.
Works digitized include all the surviving mansuscripts -- about 1100 pages. Readers of some of the more famous of Austen's six novels, however, may be disappointed, since manuscripts of several of these books apparently do not survive. The project explains the situation this way:
"The assumption must be that their [the six finished novels] working and finished drafts were routinely discarded once replaced by print forms. There is only one exception: the two cancelled chapters of Persuasion, which represent an alternative ending to the one that made it into print."
Works that are available include the Juvenilia, Volumes 1-3; Lady Susan; Susan; "the experimental novel later entitled The Watsons, a short, discarded section of Persuasion, and Sanditon, the final novel, unfinished when she died."
Additional papers include: "Opinions of Mansfield Park;" "Opinions of Emma;" "Plan of a Novel;" and "Profits of My Novels."
To access Jane Austen's fiction manuscripts, Jane Austen's Fiction Manuscripts Digital Edition, online, go to the edition's website.
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