http://blog.booklistonline.com/2007/07/20/poor-unpublishable-jane-austen/ Behind the Book Reviews--The Official Blog of Booklist Online Sat, 05 Jul 2008 10:39:42 +0000 http://wordpress.org/?v=2.3.3 http://blog.booklistonline.com/2007/07/20/poor-unpublishable-jane-austen/#comment-60548 Likely Stories » Blog Archive » More on Austen’s Powers Wed, 25 Jul 2007 20:33:43 +0000 http://blog.booklistonline.com/2007/07/20/poor-unpublishable-jane-austen/#comment-60548 [...] Also, the lightly rewritten Austen manuscripts didn’t come through an agent: That means the unsolicited fiction is now the leftovers. A terrifying proportion of these manuscripts come from people writing in green ink on scraps of Basildon Bond - surely its only use now. And if they aren’t in green ink, the manuscripts arrive handwritten in capital letters, or from prison, or from a secure mental hospital. Of course there may be lost masterpieces lurking in the mad rantings of the sad, the bad and the dangerous to know (to plagiarise again), but publishers are not social workers. [...] […] Also, the lightly rewritten Austen manuscripts didn’t come through an agent: That means the unsolicited fiction is now the leftovers. A terrifying proportion of these manuscripts come from people writing in green ink on scraps of Basildon Bond - surely its only use now. And if they aren’t in green ink, the manuscripts arrive handwritten in capital letters, or from prison, or from a secure mental hospital. Of course there may be lost masterpieces lurking in the mad rantings of the sad, the bad and the dangerous to know (to plagiarise again), but publishers are not social workers. […]

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