Austen’s unpublished writing in context; or, Jane Austen her own Vanity Press

I have now attained the true art of letter-writing, which we are always told is to express on paper exactly what one would say to the same person by word of mouth. I have been talking to you almost as fast as I could the whole of this letter” — (Jane Austen Letter 29, Sat-Mon, 3-5 Jan 1801)

An image of Lady Susan in Austen’s fair copy

Dear friends and readers,

In middle March I wrote a blog-essay where I tried to work out what state I thought Austen’s different ms’s were in, some chronology for them, and then tried to ascertain what might have been the divisions of her novels in manuscript before her publishers’ printers got hold of them and either followed her or changed what she had sent in order to make her writing conform to published criteria set up to make money or be conventionally attractive to a wider readership.

At that time I queried a couple of lists asking for books or essays which studied manuscripts and tried to explain underlying principles in the different types of ms’s. I got no texts that were useful, but a couple of the texts I was told of had in their bibliography lists of others texts and among these lists I found Donald Reiman’s The Study of Modern Manuscripts: Public, Confidential and Private, which was described in the body of the text as a rare study which differentiated between pre-modern (pre-1790s or pre-long 18th century) and modern (post French revolution) manuscripts. I obtained this book, have read and tonight want to recommend it and discuss Austen’s ms’s in the light of Reiman’s study.

Reiman’s book covers all authors who left work in manuscript. I would not call this blog-posting Austen’s unpublished writing in context, except that I read Reiman’s book with an eye to understanding and finding some theory to explain my instinct that the way Austen’s ms’s are presented is, even with (a hero in Reiman’s book) often fall into misrepresentation because they are not printed to enable the reader to study them as ms’s. As the reader who goes over to glance at my middle March blog will see, I began this new project when I was asked to review The Later Manuscripts in the series called The Cambridge Edition of Jane Austen, this one edited by Janet Todd and Linda Bree, and it has set me thinking, returning to my project on Austen’s calendars where I tried to reach her work in ways so fundamental that I would enter her process of writing itself.

What follows is my response to Reiman’s book: I summarize him in the light of what I know about manuscripts and Austen. I have studied early modern manuscripts: of Vittoria Colonna and Veronica Gambara’s poetry, of Anne Murray Halkett’s life-writing, of Anne Finch’s poems, and now I’m adding Jane Austen’s ms’s. I have had occasion to read about what’s left of Trollope. He did save some of his manuscripts even after they were published as book, and in particular (blest man) the complete untruncated version of The Duke’s Children, now about to be published by Stephen Amarnick. John Sutherland has studied some of these, most notably the ms for The Way We Live Now.

*********************

An image of the original ms of Canto 7 of Byron’s Don Juan

Reiman is a well-known respected Romantic scholar, his specialty is PBShelley and he has studied the manuscripts left by PBShelley, Mary Shelley, Byron and their friends and associates. His The Study of Modern Manuscripts contains about 5 pages on Austen’s ms’s in one place and a couple of references in another. Basically he discusses the difference between pre-modern ms’s — medieval and Renaissance through early modern into the 18th century; with the modern period beginning right around Austen’s time. First of all, Reiman makes the important distinction of private, confidential and public manuscripts (as his subtitle suggests): who was the audience the writer thought of for his or her writing. He looks at the state of ms’s.

Private ms: these are addressed to specific people, selected in advance, sometimes they are not intended for anyone but the writer. Marginalia. Personal communications. Diagnoses. Lawyer’s opinions to clients.

Confidential or corporate ms: addressed to specific group of individuals all of whom are known to the writer or belong to pre-defined group who share communal values. You may expect the immediate recipient to show ms to others. Memos to partners in law firms, business, departments, readers’ reports. They may be written without regard to author’s reputation.

Public ms’s: intended for dissemination among people we don’t know. (As the circulating manuscripts of poems in the Renaissance.) There seems to be a slide from confidential to public. You want a public record. I’d say anything on the Net not specifically defined as going to a single person and not to be spread further is automatically at risk of being public or simply is public upon being put into cyberspace packets (including supposedly closed listservs and webrings.)

It’s the social intentions of the writer that matter.

The important difference between pre- and post-1790s ms’s in general is that after 1790 we find many more manuscripts of books which are published. Authors and their executors begin to save their ms’s, to value them, and there is suddenly a huge expansion of private and confidential ms’s. By private and confidential Reiman means autobiographical writing: letters, memoirs, life-writing of all sorts (autobiography, travel books). Before the eighteenth century many authors we now read did not publish their work by print at all; they allowed it to circulate in public manuscripts; it was not done to attribute the work to yourself, especially for a woman and aristocrats. When a work was published that showed you were trying to make money (that would be after the early modern period when the literary marketplace started to exist and expand) or gain fame (unseemly) or produce propaganda. People just did not have a positive view of writing or writers as wise people trying to help others. In the later 18th century still, when people did publish their works, they did not value the ms’s; the ms was regarded as say one would orange peels or something to discard and even when the author made a fair copy apart from the copy sent to the publisher, most of the time the ms’s does not survive.

There are no specific pages on Austen in the section of Reiman’s book on ms’s before the later 18th century, but there are specific in the long section on confidential ms’s. Confidential ms’s are ms’s meant for a small audience, not just oneself (Boswell’s diaries and Fanny Burney’s) but much of iot not meant for a vast impersonal public.

An Image of the so-called cancelled chapter of Persuasion

Mary Shelley becomes the first of a typical kind of person familiar to us today: she saved every scrap PBS ever wrote, whether she published it or not. So too Teresa Guiccioloi, Byron’s papers. This preservation of ms’s began in the 17th century but only spreads in the 19th; at the same time starting in the later 17th century published autobiography, books of letters, the invention of modern biography begins, the popularity of travel writing.

In general Austen seems to belongs to the pre-1790s period in attitude. She often reflects the era before the romantic one; she is anti-romantic. The puzzling lack of any manuscripts of books which were published except the case of the two chapters of Persuasion is then explained by Reiman’s book. If we remember that in fact both Northanger Abbey and Persuasion were not published by Austen, and may represent an un-, or hastily finished truncated works (Persuasion), and or a work she was not satisfied with (NA), both of which were as yet not even titled for sure, the left over chapters of Persuasion don’t seem such an anomaly. Especially chapter 10, the where Anna visits the Crofts, is welcomed by the Admiral and Mrs Crofts, and finds herself in a room with Wentworth who then proceeds to propose marriage, be accepted and we get a kind of enigmatic response from Wentworth’s sister and brother-in-law which could suggest they knew for some time that Anne had been engaged to Wentworth previously. It’s a draft meant to be worked into some imagined final version of Persuasion which death cut Austen off from.

An image of one of Jane Austen’s letters to Anna: it is unusually “fair:” it looks like she copied it out

So Austen is on the cusp. She was alive at the time of the the early years of the romantics and was writing personally every day it seems, and every 3-4 days sending off missives to Cassandra and others. This kind of life-writing was not done in the pre-1790s period in this way. Reiman describes the growth in interest in the personal and valuing the individual’s inner life. He says that over the course of the 18th century you get people no longer deriving their identities from their status in the community, which remained unchanged, and was the result of who their family were. Now people were creating an identity for themselves which could change depending on what they achieved in life.

Consciously Austen’s letters are of the confidential and private type but they also witness a real valuing of the individual and personal; that’s why they exist in the first place, why she wrote so copiously.

Further, she has a kind of confidential ms’s that is a substitute for public you can find by women in the early modern period; the polished fair copy. (Reiman does not think like a feminist and so doesn’t mention this at all). This is an ms by a woman of a book prepared to look like a published book, one in which the author really works hard as if she (or he) were publishing it because it will not be published, but the author does value the book and wants it to circulate. This is the state of Lady Susan and the Juvenilia. This is how I see the fair copy of Lady Susan and perhaps too the Juvenilia (less so because she carried on correcting them).

Women did this because often they were not permitted to publish this or that particular work. Their writing was not valued. One of Anne Finch’s ms’s books begins as a polished confidential book which she later starts to use just as a another copy book into which she puts more poems as if the book were not polished, were partly private partly confidential. This is the ms today known as the Folger book (because it’s owned by the Folger Shakespeare library). It’s mostly in her husband Heneage’s hand. It has a preface, table of contents, is paginated and the first part beautifully copied out.

Austen’s letters would be private and/or confidential; she did not mean them to circulate beyond her family and if she had yearnings to reach more people, this never surfaced consciously. Perhaps she was ambivalent too — and that can be seen in the way her brother, Frank, saved his 3 packets of letters, never destroyed them, kept them by him until his death and they were destroyed not by his generation or his youngest spinster daughter. Burney’s equivalent grand-niece published hers — to whom we are enormously grateful, for she also did not destroy the ms’s after she published her tiny selection of 6 volumes.

Such books when they survive are today published in corrected polished forms — Chapman and then LeFaye’s edition of the letters; before them Brabourne (Austen’s great-nephew) who still regards them as owned by the family and reflective of the family status, not just Jane Austen’s. LeFaye seems to regard them as still belonging to and reflecting on Austen’s family.

From Austen’s time we get many books by women intended for publication, half-written with the larger audience in mind: Anne Grant, Madame du Deffand, Graffigny, Lespinasse (so too the men like Pope’s letters). Yes they are doctored with the public in mind but then so are their fictional works or poems when they write them.

Reiman thinks the way we should talk of the life-writing private and confidential works that we now publish is as as works reflective of the individual in his or her circle. We must take into account what they were meant to be, who for, what state they are in.

What I like about all Reiman’s distinctions here, is he shows where Todd and Bree went wrong in their edition. The letters they present as being a theory of Austen’s writing are confidential writing meant for Anna’s eyes or private writing just meant for Anna (see letter 76, a parody of a novel by Rachel Hunter, one of the authors published by Minerva Press, among whom Austen could not count herself). Thus whatever Austen said about Anna’s novel is shaped by Austen’s relationship with Anna and might not be what she would say about Anna’s novel were she to discuss it with a larger public or even the other relatives. She might not have thought as highly of it as she appears to. She is not on oath and we have the case of a letter to Anna where she appears to think so well of Anna just around Anna’s marriage, and Anna’s early housekeeping and in the next letter to Fanny we see this is not so; she does not want to visit Anna for real, she thinks Anna’s desires to fulfill herself in owning a playing a piano absurd or is out of sympathy with the very impulses that when she, Austen, had them she approved of.

They do not separate the fair copy of Lady Susan from the worked upon papers of The Watsons & Sanditon; the three sets of ms’s are presented as a coherent group as if they amount to the same sort of thing. They do not. The two chapters of Persuasion are not included in the Later ms’s — as they should have been — and with the ms’s of The Watsons and Sanditon. Lady Susan should have been published with the Juvenilia not as Juvenili, but as a book Jane Austen valued and prepared for a version of public dissemination. She half-wished she could publish them more widely but knew no one would(and her relatives would be horrified by any publication of the amoral witty monster-mother Lady Susan).

The attitude towards the Juvenilia which publishes them as Jane Austen’s “handbasket” is wrong; she did value them but knew no one in her time would publish them so she did in this fair copy form. Right the paper and books are cheap stuff, but she was poor herself and it was all she had to put them in. Her relatives would not spend money for her to keep her books as fair copies as they had limited value for them. But the first work after James Edward Austen-Leigh published his memoir that he published was the untitled Lady Susan because instinctively he (and his sisters) recognized it as a ripe and ready work all set to show to others — I’d call it privately published, Jane Austen her own Vanity Press.

An image of a gothic-historical novel published by the Minerva press, a press that would not have accepted Northanger Abbey

**********************

I strongly recommend Reiman’s book. His final chapter is an angry one in a way: he inveighs against editors who do not at all think about what the ms’s they are publishing represents. Some become doctors of the works and try to improve them; others decide which version of a work they think is the best and publish that as the only or final one, sometimes an early ms. I am “guilty” of this in the case of Anne Finch for, like others, I think her earlier versions of her poems better than the later ones where she began to censor and modify what she wrote in terms of conventional ideas; in my section on her poems where I publish texts I consistently prefer the earlier text.

Lord Brabourne’s edition of his great-aunt’s letters is an openly family edition

Or editors become family friends — Deirdre LeFaye exemplifies this. The editor conceives of his or herself as an advocate of the family and produces an edition of the poetry which presents the family’s view of the poet. This is just how LeFaye sees herself, down to the notes she provides for the letters. Mary Shelley broke with this entirely in her edition of Shelley; if she had not, she would have destroyed many of his poems, censored others, and presented those that survived with very different prefaces.

Reiman’s book would cover all authors and his opening section on pre-modern, pre-18th century is valuable even if short. If it’s added to Margaret Ezell’s Social Authorship and the Advent of print, it becomes an important brief primer on ms’s in the early period of European writing. Ezell brings the woman’s perspective I have in on this. Women’s ms’s differ from men’s as generally they were not allowed to publish at all and have been published by later generations with different perspectives than the individual’s, often in pathetically truncated forms.

Another useful and informative book, an anthology on the early modern into 17th century world of ms’s: Arthur E. Marotti and Michael D. Bristol, Print, Manuscript, Performance: The changing relations of the media in early modern England. This last one is wonderful for bringing in the perspective of the net, and publication on websites, listservs and (dare I say?) blogs. I know about it because there’s an essay on Anne Murray Halket’s autobiography, a fragment of which survives and I made an etext of and have written two papers about which I published on the Net. Halkett represents a highly ambivalent woman: she writes a memoir in vindication of herself which she really wants to reach many people, but consciously it’s somewhere between private and confidential for she knows if it reached others it would be regarded as scandalous and all we now have is a fragment because some relative did find and destroy most of what she wrote.

See Jane Austen letters archive; also my study of the timelines in Austen and chronology of the novels: Time in Jane Austen.

Ellen

P.S. Some people online regard writing to small listservs as confidential communication. As a list-moderator I’ve been asked more than once to make sure the listserv postings are kept closed except to members. I do not think this is useful. Anyone can join the listserv at any time. I regard blogs as a form of listserv where I put postings I mean as confidential as well as public.

Often people look at me as strange because I just put my polished work I could try to publish in conventional books on the Net; I must have some ultimate motive beyond trying to reach people. I suppose I do but it’s not money or promotion. I did hope at one time someone might be attracted to the Colonna poetry and want to publish it in a book, but I’ve learnt that that was very naive of me, showing that I had no idea why and how most books are published, usually the result of social relationships combining with desire for money or prestige of some sort when not promotion and advancement.

My putting my writing on the Net the way I do, on my website particularly is the equivalent of Austen’s writing out a fair copy of Lady Susan and letting it circulate that way as far as she was allowed. I am circulating my work as far as I am able and putting into print (as in facebook where friends of friends read one another’s writing) the context too.