Austen's Manuscripts and the Publicity of Print

Abstract

This essay examines Jane Austen's late manuscripts--written at the height of her career--to complicate the dominant narrative of her literary life as a simple progression from script to print and from amateur to professional authorship. Austen's late manuscripts, and her representations of manuscript culture within the published novels, evidence both a continual struggle to reconcile her fictional impulses with the publicity of print and an ongoing need for more socially circumscribed forms of literary transmission. Just as scholarship has overlooked the persistence of Austen's scribal habits throughout her print career, so too have we neglected the vital role that an invigorated manuscript culture played during the print boom of the Romantic period.