Jane Austen's Fiction Manuscripts: Volume IV: The Watsons; Persuasion; Susan; Opinions of Mansfield Park and Opinions of Emma; Plan of a Novel; Profit [Hardcover]

Kathryn Sutherland presents an edition of the fiction manuscripts of Jane Austen: the first substantial collection of autograph writings to survive for a British novelist. Volume IV contains the facsimiles and transcriptions ofThe Watsons,Persuasion,Susan,Opinions of Mansfield Park and Opinions of Emma,Plan of a Novel,Profits of my Novels.Kathryn Sutherland presents an edition of the fiction manuscripts of Jane Austen (1775-1817). Scholars have pored over this much-loved novelist for decades, yet there are still more riches to be uncovered by the careful presentation of the texts in this fully annotated new edition. Jane Austen's fiction manuscripts are the first substantial collection of autograph writings to survive for a British novelist. They represent every stage of her writing life, from childhood--aged 11 or 12--to the year of her death. The manuscripts represent a wide variety of physical states: working drafts, fair copies, and handwritten publications for private circulation. Where the juvenile, handwritten notebooks have long appeared to scholars to be finished artefacts, most of the other manuscript writings consist of pre-print or working drafts in various stages of development. There is no evidence to indicate that Austen saw the bulk of these working drafts as anything other than provisional. Hence the stark situation that no manuscripts remain for works which saw publication in her lifetime, the assumption being that these were routinely destroyed 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. The manuscript evidence therefore represents a different Jane Austen: different in the range of fiction they contain from the novels we know only from print; and different in what they reveal about the workings of her imagination. Because of the variety of their pre-print states, belã#