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Was Jane Austen a sloppy writer? That’s the claim made by Oxford professor Kathryn Sutherland, and she’s posted more than 1,000 pages of Austen manuscripts online that she says prove her point. In fact, Sutherland has concluded that Austen’s celebrated style is really the work of an unknown editor. The claim has generated  publicity and even controversy; in an NPR interview last month, Sutherland remarked that some of the reactions have been unpleasant and extreme, and that Austen critics should “just stop polishing her halo.” 

There was another NPR piece today which offered some useful perspective.  Linguist Geoff Nunberg notes that though there are errors in the manuscripts, they are just that–working manuscripts. And besides, many of the rules we observe today about things like spelling and punctuation hadn’t been settled in Austen’s time, so to fault her for them is as anchronistic as calling Elizabeth Bennet a “bachelorette.”

This entry was posted on Wednesday, November 17th, 2010 at 3:49 pm and is filed under Writers and Writing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.