Friday, October 29, 2010

Sense and ... Sensibleness?

The editors among us might appreciate this piece that aired on NPR yesterday. New evidence suggests that English novelist Jane Austen—long praised for her meticulously polished style—might not have acted alone.  It seems she owes some of her success to a very attentive editor who spit-shined her prose to its signature cordovan gleam.

From the story:

The beloved novelist—author of Sense and Sensibility, Pride and Prejudice, Mansfield Park and Emma—is known for her polished prose, her careful phrasing and her precise grammar. "Everything came finished from her pen," Austen's brother, Henry, said in 1818, a year after his sister's death

But now—though it may pain die-hard Austen fans—it turns out that Austen may have simply had a very good editor. Kathryn Sutherland, a professor at Oxford University, has been studying more than 1,000 original handwritten pages of Austen's prose. She's found some telling differences between the handwritten pages and Austen's finished works—including terrible spelling, grammatical errors and poor (often nonexistent) punctuation.

Original Austen manuscript. Not pictured: An editor, softly weeping.


Editing can be a pretty transparent trade. Two hundred years seems like a long time, but I think I speak for the editors everywhere when I say we should all be so lucky.

(While I'm on the subject of Austen, and in the spirit of Halloween ... has anyone read Pride and Prejudice and Zombies?)


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