If you are struggling with spelling and punctuation, don’t despair. Jane Austen failed at both. Oxford research revealed that her work had to be heavily edited prior to publication. All you have to do, therefore, is getting yourself a really good editor to catch those little mishaps. Nothing will hinder you swooning away over your own Mr. Darcy even if he misses a point or two.
We all have our battles with the spelling of certain words, I know I do. Jane Austen took it one step further. The analysis of her original manuscripts has revealed that her spelling was atrocious. One rule she was waging a constant war with was ‘i before e except after c’. Accordingly, her writing abounds with words like ‘veiw’ and ‘recieve’. But these spelling mistakes were by no means the end of the story.
Seemingly, she was further hampered by a pronounced Hampshire accent, at least according to Oxford University's release on the study. Spellings like 'tomatas' and 'arraroot' are an indication of the local dialect used in Hampshire, says Professor Kathryn Sutherland. Jane Austen would certainly have approved of the spellcheckers we use today.
We all love Pride and Prejudice and Sense and Sensibility for their style and humor. There are few other writers in English literature whose importance and fame is built as much on style, elegantly constructed sentences, poised phrase, and immaculate punctuation. It is apparent once you peruse her writing that none of these characteristics apply to Jane Austen's manuscripts. The stories were hers; the presentation rested on the shoulders of her editor.
Sutherland holds the opinion that this editor was poet and literary critic William Gifford. He was working for Jane Austen’s second editor John Murray. All the polish and panache of her writing were added on after her manuscripts were submitted. It might feel like a let-down, but it also gives hope to all of us lost in punctuation; I know mine is at times haphazard.
I personally dare to doubt that Jane Austen would have accepted such radical changes to her work; I would rather think that she was involved in the editing process. Sutherland's pointing out William Gifford as the editor seems to stand on wobbly feet. Sense and Sensibility, Pride and Prejudice, and Mansfield Park were all published first by Thomas Egerton. As they all received some positive reviews by the critics, I fail to see them having been published in a rag tag state of errors and omissions.
As the biography of Jane Austen is one big blank, it is hard to guess how she worked. Her biography is based on family myths, wishful thinking, and hypocrisy of later family members. The works that have been analyzed, too, include the unfinished Watsons and Sanditon; both manuscripts might be in the state of a scribble, a fast dash of putting down what the mind is brewing up. It is probable that she would later transcribe these scribbles into proper manuscripts while eradicating the odds and ends in spelling and punctuation.
None of what I said should keep you from visiting the Austen Manuscripts online. If nothing else, her spelling might lift you out of the blues when your own spelling is getting the better of you. And now the Bank of England has even put a price on bad spelling: £10. As Jane Austen is gracing the new ten pound note, that should make it easy for you to tell your editors what they will get paid for their troubles.
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