Jane Austen's Fiction Manuscripts are now available in a digitized version online. These facsimiles offer Jane Austen's novels in a virtual collection. Many of the Austen manuscripts are frail; open and sustained access has long been impossible for conservation and location reasons. The site's aims and objectives are to:- To create a digital resource reuniting all the known holograph surviving manuscripts of Austen’s fiction in an unprecedented virtual collection.
- To provide for the first time full descriptions of, transcriptions of, analysis of, and commentary on the manuscripts in the archive, including details of erasures, handwriting, paper quality, watermarks, ink, binding structures, and any ancillary materials held with the holographs as aspects of their physical integrity or provenance.
- To develop complex interlinking of the virtual collection to allow systematic comparison of the manuscripts under a number of headings representing both their intellectual and physical states.
For the majority of us, this is as close to the original (delicate) manuscripts as we will ever get.
Image: watercolor of Elizabeth by Cassandra Austen
I guess I'm wondering what the website means by erasures. I know what erasures are in the modern poetry sense, but I've never heard the word used in connection to old manuscripts or Jane Austen.
ReplyDeleteThat portrait of Elizabeth is a,"corker."
ReplyDeleteErasures.I took it to mean corrections that Jane made as she was writing.
Correct, Tony. She edited and made corrections on her manuscripts!!
ReplyDelete