October 2023 meeting: Punctuation and Jane Austen

Our October meeting was inspired by an article titled “Shouty Jane Austen? On the evolution of the exclamation mark” written by scholar and writer Florence Hazrat. This article, and an older one by Maev Kennedy, titled “Pride, prejudice and poor punctuation”, were shared in advance with members. Our homework was to think about the articles and Jane Austen’s use of punctuation. The topic was not to everyone’s taste, but for those who attended, it resulted in a stimulating meeting that produced more questions than it answered.

The “Shouty Jane” article, published in 2022, explores Austen’s punctuation, her use of the exclamation mark in particular, and the implications of editors “smoothing” Austen’s punctuation out. Kennedy’s article, however, was published in 2010 in the wake of Professor Kathryn Sutherland’s project which saw the publication online (and in print) of all known Austen manuscripts. It resulted in some commentators questioning Henry Austen’s claim that “everything came finished from her pen”. A fracas ensued with, as Kennedy writes, some arguing that the manuscripts undermined the prevailing image of Austen as “one of the most pristine stylists of all time”.

William Gifford, by John Hoppner (d. 1810), via Wikipedia

Scholars, for example, pointed to Austen publisher John Murray’s use of the editor Gifford who wrote of Mansfield Park:

I have read the Novel, and like it very much – I was sure, before I rec’d your letter, that the writer was the author of P. & Prejudice &c. […] It is very carelessly copied, though the handwriting is excellently plain, & there are many short omission which must be inserted. I will readily correct the proof for you, & may do it a little good here & there.

Despite his comment, it would appear that he made more extensive changes to the ms than is implied here.

Sutherland argued, however, that these manuscripts, do NOT make Austen “less of a genius”, that in fact, “it makes her more interesting, and a much more modern and innovative writer than had been thought”. She says that Austen’s “use of dashes, to heighten the emotional impact of what she’s writing is striking: you have to wait for Virginia Woolf to see anything comparable”.

So we had our own little look and think. A member suggested we start with the opening chapter of Persuasion (for which we don’t have a manuscript). Is the punctuation we see Austen’s? Probably not.

Hazrat shares two examples from Persuasion, one from the available ms and one from the published book, and says that the “sobriety and self-control exuded by the full stops and semicolon” in the published version “stand in stark contrast to the vitality of the original manuscript, with its capitalised words, emphatic underscorings, shoal of dashes and single bold exclamation mark”. The manuscript, she argues, shows an author “well versed in catching the rhythms of dialogue and speech, particularly of an emotionally stirred kind”. In the ms, in other words, Anne’s words are full of passion and feeling whereas the edited version is calm, controlled. These versions offer very different readings of Anne’s character.

We also looked at a short excerpt from the published Persuasion, shared by a member. Note the exclamation marks in Wentworth’s sharing of his fears with Anne:

to see your cousin close to you, conversing and smiling, and to feel all the horrible eligibilities and proprieties of the match! To consider it as the certain wish of every being who could hope to influence you! Even if your own feelings were reluctant or indifferent, to consider what powerful supports would be his!

We spent some time discussing Hazrat’s article, because her discussion of the “exclamation mark” and of the history of punctuation, generally, gave us much to think and talk about.

One member suggested that the Juvenilia – at least that edited by the Juvenilia Press – provides us with a good idea of Austen’s original punctuation. Christopher Weibe, who wrote the Note on Text for their edition of Love and freindship, discusses their editorial decisions. He says they had “opted for minimal editorial intervention” because “one purpose of publishing Austen‘s early writing is to provide a window on her formation as a writer”. Their edition, he says

is therefore closer to the manuscript than that of [Margaret] Doody and [Douglas] Murray, whose major intention was “to supply the reader “readily readable” text.

He goes on to argue that the paucity of manuscripts for Austen’s published novels “to illumine her techniques of composition and revision” gives greater importance to the Juvenilia, because “in them we can observe her writing, unmediated by the modalities of contemporary publishing practices”.

He also says that, regarding punctuation, they had left it as it is in the manuscript, following Chapman’s dictum that “to modernize is – in however small a degree – to falsify. Austen, they believe,

displays a jouissance in her punctuation that is very articulate: she is, in the manuscripts, outside the publishing industry’s “corrective”, and standardising influence. We have preserved her famous “freindships” and other eccentric spelling practices; we have reinstated a few words and phrases omitted by previous editors; and we have retained the ampersand symbol, since it conveys the impromptu feel of the novel in letters.

There is a similar (but unattributed) note on the text for Juvenilia Press’s publication of Austen’s Three mini-dramas (their title). They made a few changes, mostly relating to stage direction and presentation of the text as a play, but otherwise, they “made no changes to Austen’s punctuation, nor to her spelling or abbreviations”. This means that, unlike Chapman, they did not make compound words (such as turn “any thing” to “anything” in “The visit”), and they kept her underlinings of words, rather than italicising them as Chapman did.

According to the Juvenilia Press, Doody and Murray argue that ‘Austen only “sometimes uses the conventional system“ of punctuation’ which “can pose a challenge to the reader”, but they

consider that Austen’s flouting of convention is generally purposeful, and there is more to be lost and gained in regularising it.

Yes, our group generally concurred. As the member who brought these comments to the meeting said, Austen’s Juvenilia provide good examples of her often breathless, frequently dramatic, and always expressive prose, much of which is conveyed through dashes and exclamation marks.

Another member shared some thoughts from John Wiltshire who argues that Austen punctuates to reflect conversation. Austen uses dashes for Mr Knightley’s struggle with his conscience, for example, and these dashes, argues Wiltshire, are the cracks within which emotion lies. Her punctuation, in other words closely conveys feeling, emotion.

The evidence?

Overall, we were feeling that editors had suppressed Austen’s more expressive prose. However, one member shared Geoff Nunberg’s comments. He suggests that given we have no examples of the actual copy that Austen submitted to her publishers – “all that Sutherland or anybody else has to go on is the manuscripts for some teenage juvenilia and the rough drafts of some unfinished or discarded works” – we don’t know what cleaning up she’d done. He also argues that her inconsistencies were rather par for the time. We see the same things in the manuscripts of Byron, Sir Walter Scott and Thomas Jefferson.

Indeed, Nunberg argues that it’s anachronistic to see these features as wrong. He and Hazrat make clear that “correctness” in spelling and punctuation were only being established about this time. He says:

By the time Austen was writing, that rhythmic use of punctuation was yielding to the modern system based on syntax, which took the written language further from the intonations of speech. That’s the system that shows up in most of the early editions of her novels, and that’s more-or-less the one we use today.

But who supplied the punctuation in the novels? Was it Austen herself, or her publisher John Murray, or some nameless editor or compositor? Nobody knows. 

In the end, he argues, it doesn matter because:

What’s remarkable about Austen is the way that artistry shows up even in those ragged manuscripts. The punctuation may look slapdash or peculiar to modern eyes, but those complex sentence structures are always already there. 

Sutherland is also on record as saying that “the structure we all love is there”, that Austen’s artistry is still evident in these “ragged manuscripts”.

What did Jane think?

Well, in a word (or two), we don’t know. Nowhere in her surviving letters does she comment on what editors/publishers had done to her work. Was she concerned, or did they not do much to those final copies we haven’t seen? Was she just happy to be published, and didn’t mind what they did? Was she a woman writer accepting what the male editors/publishers told her?

We don’t know! We don’t know how much she changed her manuscript for the fair copy she gave to her publisher, and we don’t know what she thought about it all. The only fair copy known to be in existence is that for Lady Susan, which, being at the end of her Juvenilia period, doesn’t provide enough evidence of her mature practice. Whatever the story, though, we all agreed with Janet Todd that having these manuscripts online is a great resource.

So, it comes down to this: We understand that Lord Byron, the Brontës and others weren’t very clue-y about punctuation and were happy to be edited. Perhaps our Jane was too. Some of us didn’t like that possibility, preferring to think her expressive writing had been toned down against her will. Others of us weren’t so sure! Problem is, we’ll never know! (Says yours truly, liberally using the exclamation mark.)

Sources

Florence Hazrat, “Shouty Jane Austen? On the evolution of the exclamation mark”, Literary Review (paywalled), November 2022.

Maev Kennedy, “Pride, prejudice and poor punctuation“, The Guardian, 23 October 2010.

Geoff Nunberg, “Was Jane Austen edited? Does it matter?“, NPR, 17 November 2010.

Christopher Weibe, “Note on the text and acknowledgements” in Jane Austen’s Love and freindship, Juvenilia Press, 1995.

John Wiltshire, The hidden Jane Austen, Cambridge University Press, 2014.