Was English author Jane Austen a naturally gifted writer who had an elegant style of writing? Or, was the exquisite and grammatically superior prose all due to a good editor?
A British academic has revealed that Austen, who wrote ever popular Pride and Prejudice, had a lot of help from an interventionist editor in refining her style. Professor Kathryn Sutherland of the Faculty of English Language and Literature at Oxford University found while studying a collection of 1,100 original handwritten pages of her unpublished writings that Austen was not a perfect stylist.
“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 reputation of no other English novelist rests so firmly on this issue of style, on the poise and emphasis of sentence and phrase, captured in precisely weighed punctuation,” Prof. Sutherland said.
The polished writing, especially the style found in Emma and Persuasion, is simply not there, said the Oxford academic.
The most likely editor involved in polishing Austen’s writing is William Gifford. “Letters between Austen’s publisher John Murray II and his talent scout and editor William Gifford, acknowledging the untidiness of Austen’s style and how Gifford will correct it, seem to identify Gifford as the culprit,” Prof. Sutherland revealed.