Morgan Library & Museum, New York, MA 1958

A small scrap of laid writing paper (45 x 122 mm.) written on one side only in brown-black iron-gall ink. It is now hinged above a separate piece of grey paper, to which it was once pasted, into a window mount (279 x 196 mm.) by the Morgan Library.

The fragment has been cut from a larger piece of paper and all its edges are irregular. The cut edges have no edge colouring or gilding. The paper is a handmade laid paper formed on a single-faced mould and there is a single chain line running horizontally through the fragment. The fragment contains no watermark. The orientation of the chain line may indicate that this fragment was cut from a quarto leaf of a similar size to the Juvenilia and Lady Susan manuscripts.

Housed with the fragment is a piece of grey wove machine-made paper (66 x 122 mm.) with ‘Miss Austen’¹ written in black Indian ink at the centre of its tail edge.
This is also cut on all edges and the upper left corner is now torn away. The Susan fragment was once pasted to this, possibly as part an autograph book. The surface of the blank verso of the Susan fragment was partially disturbed when it was lifted from the grey paper.