Round brackets in Jane Austen

Abstract

Round brackets undergo a process of stylistic re-evaluation that coincides with the development of Austen’s literary career (from pernicious elements that break the perspicuity of the Enlightened sentence to positively appraised markers of spoken spontaneity and emotion). Through a corpus-based study of her Juvenilia , letters and mature novels, this paper examines Austen’s use of round brackets with a view to exploring whether the contemporaneous salience of the punctuation mark may have had an impact on Austen’s style.