Later Manuscripts completes the Cambridge Edition of the Works of Jane Austen,
described on the dust jacket as “the definitive edition for the twenty-first
century”. Here Janet Todd and Linda Bree gather up manuscripts left homeless
by the publication of the Juvenilia and Persuasion, most notably” Lady
Susan”, an epistolary novella broken off abruptly by the author;” The
Watsons”, an unfinished courtship novel; and” Sanditon”, that scintillating
satire interrupted by the author’s death. Bulking out the book are Austen’s
letters about fiction, already available in Deirdre Le Faye’s fine edition
of the correspondence (1995), together with Austen’s” Plan of a Novel”,
verses by herself and family members, charades and opinions on her novels.
Despite their own persuasive arguments against its attribution, the editors
reprint a dramatization of Samuel Richardson’s novel The History of Sir
Charles Grandison, together with three prayers and four poems they regard as
equally dubious. The volume is 742 pages long.
Is this edition really as” definitive”,” scholarly”,” accurate and
authoritative” as Todd and Bree proclaim in their introduction? Alas, no.
Later Manuscripts is a confusing title for such a miscellany of early, late,
undated and discredited works. It lacks the history of previous editions
that would make it truly authoritative, while its editorial practice departs
inexplicably from that of the Juvenilia in the same set. The editors’
emendation of” The Watsons” and” Lady Susan” is unjustifiable, and they are
not the first, as their silence implies, to reveal how Austen’s reputation
was shaped by the family. And for an edition aspiring to become the standard
the cost is high.
The title seems to promise revelations about where Austen was heading when
illness struck, but only” Sanditon”, left unfinished in 1817, was written
late in her career. Those genuinely later manuscripts, the cancelled
chapters of Persuasion (1816), have already appeared in the Cambridge
edition (2006). The editors define” later” as” her creative activity as an
adult”, but they themselves argue that” The Watsons”, the earliest of her
working manuscripts to survive, dates from about 1804, and that Austen
drafted” Lady Susan” before 1805, six years before the appearance of her
first published novel, Sense and Sensibility, in 1811. Thus” The Watsons”
and” Lady Susan” are later relative only to the juvenilia, not to the
published novels as the Cambridge title might suggest.
To lump” Lady Susan” and” The Watsons” in with” Sanditon” distorts the
trajectory of Austen’s career, for these early works belong squarely in her
pre-publication past. In the forward-looking” Sanditon”, by contrast, she
engages keenly with a new entrepreneurial century. Another reason to fix
“The Watsons” and “Lady Susan” firmly in their temporal context is the
debate about whether Austen harvested them for the published novels.
Curiously, the case for” The Watsons” is examined, but not that for” Lady
Susan”.
As the editors themselves point out,” Lady Susan” looks back to older
literature. Its feral female Lovelace and complex epistolary form especially
recall Richardson’s Clarissa and the heroines of Restoration drama, as Paula
Byrne argues in Jane Austen and the Theatre (2002). And as for the
sober-sided” Watsons”, Margaret Anne Doody has suggested in Catharine and
Other Writings (1993) that by the time Sense and Sensibility appeared in
1811, Austen had abandoned the Rabelaisian style of the juvenilia for the
popular courtship tale. If so,” The Watsons” represents Austen’s deliberate
reining-in of adolescent high jinks in order to get published.
Thirteen years later, however, her sophisticated and topical satire in”
Sanditon” shows how far she had moved on.
The dust jacket promises” a history of the manuscripts and a full account of
the current state of scholarship on them”. But in the absence of a history
of textual interpretation or even a bibliography, it is hard to know what
else has been consulted. Although Todd and Bree may have personally examined
every copy text, they rarely acknowledge that scholars such as R. W.
Chapman, Mary Lascelles, Marvin Mudrick, David Gilson, John Davie, Margaret
Drabble, Terry Castle, Claudia Johnson, Kathryn Sutherland and Arthur M.
Axelrad first did the hard yards of locating, transcribing and editing the
manuscripts, as well as putting them into their biographical,
bibliographical, chronological and literary contexts. Brian Southam
especially, who wrote Jane Austen’s Literary Manuscripts (1964), revised
Chapman’s edition of Minor Works (1969), published” Sanditon” in facsimile
(1975) and produced Jane Austen: A students’ guide to the later manuscript
works (2007) does not receive his proper due. Other omissions include Doody
and Douglas Murray’s significant edition of Catharine and Other Writings,
which contains, like this volume, Austen’s” Plan of a Novel”, verses and
prayers. Doody anticipates Todd and Bree with her moving revelation that an
amanuensis, possibly Cassandra, substituted” When once we are buried you
think we are gone” for” you think we are dead” in the light-hearted poem on
Winchester races composed by a dying Austen.
The editorial policy for Later Manuscripts diverges radically from that of
Peter Sabor in his impeccable edition of the Juvenilia for the same set
(2006). As Sabor explains,” No changes have been made to Austen’s spelling,
capitalization, paragraphing or punctuation. Her idiosyncrasies and
inconsistencies, which form part of the texture of her prose and which can
help establish the date of a particular item, have been carefully
preserved”.
Todd and Bree claim that” we have tried to avoid over-stabilizing... shifting
texts and destroying their ‘aura’”; and they write that” we have not changed
Jane Austen’s spelling, capitalization, paragraphing or punctuation; her
idiosyncrasies and inconsistencies, which form part of the texture of her
work, have been carefully preserved”.
So why, then, make an” exception of the reading texts of ‘The Watsons’ and
‘Sanditon’”, which have been” discreetly edited to reflect basic publishing
conventions of the early nineteenth century”? Todd and Bree” strongly
recommend that readers compare the resulting reading text with the
line-byline transcriptions, to reach a rounder sense... of Austen’s creative
process”. But how to compare manuscripts with texts that never actually
existed? Readers seeking Austen’s last thoughts as she herself left them,
not as smoothed out by the editors, must figure them out for themselves or
go back to Chapman’s Minor Works (1954).
Todd and Bree’s transcription of” Sanditon” in Appendix B seems to derive,
without acknowledgement, from Arthur M. Axelrad’s Jane Austen Caught in the
Act of Greatness: A diplomatic transcription and analysis of the two
manuscript chapters of Persuasion and the manuscript of Sanditon (2003). And
although they state that they” cannot indicate whether revisions were made
at the time of first writing or later (on which one can speculate only when
examining the manuscript in its material state)”, Axelrad managed to
disentangle the different versions in his commentary, while Sutherland
showed how to represent them simultaneously in Jane Austen’s Textual Lives:
From Aeschylus to Bollywood (2005).
Todd and Bree relate how the family shaped Austen’s reputation as a decorous
Victorian lady author, but that story had already been told in Sutherland’s
important revisionist edition of James Edward Austen-Leigh, A Memoir of Jane
Austen and Other Family Recollections (2002). They mention it mainly to cite
its sources. Also available during the preparation of this volume was
Sutherland’s Textual Lives, which lays out the consequences of what they call”
Protecting Jane: Jane Austen’s manuscripts and the ‘reasons of taste’ that
governed their posthumous publication” (TLS, December 5, 2008). Here again,
Todd and Bree failed to acknowledge either of Sutherland’s books.
The editors’ account of the critical reception is generally full and fair, and
with Le Faye’s expert help, they do justice to the family context. Elaborate
descriptions of the manuscripts and their provenance might have been tucked
more economically into headnotes, however. Annotations, often useful, but at
times redundant, wordy or repetitive, together with lengthy citations of
similar usages in Austen and elsewhere, take up 157 pages. And by focusing
on social history, material culture and biography rather than her
intellectual and historical allusions, the editors miss the chance to
exhibit what Barbara Everett calls a biography of the imaginative mind (TLS,
August 17, 2007). As with Shakespeare, it is not what Austen took that is
revealing, but what she made of it.
The flaws in Later Manuscripts should not detract from the contributions of
other editors in the series. The Cambridge Works is a handsome thing,
lavishly produced on thick creamy paper with shiny red covers, slender
maroon ribbon bookmarks, large type and generous margins. And yet did it
have to be so grand? To displace Chapman’s Austen as the standard, these
volumes need to be in everybody’s hands, but given the price, they will
probably remain works of reference rather than personal possessions. The
pity of it is that another complete edition of Jane Austen is unlikely to
appear in our lifetimes, if ever.
THE CAMBRIDGE EDITION OF THE WORKS OF JANE AUSTEN Volume Nine: Later
Manuscripts
742pp. Cambridge University Press. £ 65
Jocelyn Harris is the author of Jane Austen's Art of Memory, 1989, and
A Revolution Almost Beyond Expression: Jane Austen's" Persuasion",
2007.
To read the response to this review click here.
Your Comments
Order By: