Jane Austen Had an Editor? How Sensible

So now we have the story that Jane Austen wasn't the paragon of good grammar and stylish prose that we all think she was. Big deal. Some people probably still think she wasn't poking fun at her subjects or her society in her books.

If, as an esteemed professor claims after an exhaustive study of more than a thousand original handwritten pages from the sainted Ms. Austen, what she wrote and what we read aren't exactly the same thing, then so be it, it doesn't diminish the power of her ideas or the beauty of her characterizations. The fact that the description of Mr. Darcy may have had a few spelling mistakes in the first draft in no way detracts from the indelible impression that the brooding heartthrob has made on millions of readers. (After all, we don't read the first draft; rather, we read the final draft, the one for which a whole department, if necessary, of editors, proofreaders, and printers tidies up the manuscript and presentation so the reader gets the best of all possible words.)

See, Jane Austen had an editor — a good one, in fact. This would be William Gifford, who worked for Austen's publisher, John Murray. Gifford knew how to string sentences together (or, as it sounds like it was in Austen's case, how to distinguish one sentence from the next in a forest of semicolons). The editor knew best, and we need look no further than the finished product to see proof of that assertion. He was able to read Austen's scrawls as well as her intent and meld the two into compelling, universally appreciated prose.

Another point that the esteemed professor makes is quite telling, actually. Kathryn Sutherland, the professor (of Oxford, no less), asserts that Austen, in lumping her sentences together with sparse punctuation, may have been writing in a sort of stream of consciousness, taking chances with the writing style in order to get more compelling characters who would come alive more on the page — more Willoughby than Colonel Brandon, if you will. Those used to thinking of Austen as wearing a sort of literary straitjacket akin to the tight corsets worn my her matronly characters might need to reassess.

So where does that leave us? Jane Austen, one of the English language's most revered novelists, didn't produce the great British novel first time out, every time out. Who does?