Jane Austen novels heavily edited for errors—expert - INQUIRER.net, Philippine News for Filipinos: "LONDON— Jane Austen, one of the greatest novelists in English literature, had her work heavily edited to sort out the mess of her original manuscripts, an expert said Saturday.
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“It’s widely assumed that Austen was a perfect stylist — her brother Henry famously said in 1818 that 'everything came finished from her pen’ and commentators continue to share this view today,” the Oxford University academic said.
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“Austen’s unpublished manuscripts unpick her reputation for perfection in various ways: we see blots, crossings out, messiness — we see creation as it happens, and in Austen’s case, we discover a powerful counter-grammatical way of writing. She broke most of the rules for writing good English.”"
1 comment:
In at least one of her novels, she uses that bane of English teachers everywhere: "their" instead of "his" or "her." (For example, "Each person ate their dinner.") It didn't detract in the least from the book, but it did make me appreciate the fact that that has always been a grammatical problem and didn't just pop-up in the last 50 years.
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