Jane Austen’s fiction manuscripts are the first substantial collection of creative writings in the author’s own hand to survive for a British novelist. They represent every stage of her writing life, roughly 1787 to 1817; that is from childhood (aged 11 or 12) to the year of her death (aged 41). They display a wide variety of physical states: working drafts, fair copies, and crafted ‘publications’ for private circulation among family and friends. Laid out in conscious imitation or parody of the formal features of book design, and labelled by Austen Volume the First, Volume the Second, and Volume the Third, the teenage, handwritten notebooks (with the possible exception of Volume the Third) have long appeared to scholars to be finished artefacts. By contrast, most of the other manuscript writings consist of pre-print or rough drafts in various stages of development: the experimental novel later entitled The Watsons, a short, discarded section of Persuasion, and Sanditon, the final novel, unfinished when she died.  There is no evidence to indicate that Jane Austen saw the bulk of these drafts as anything other than provisional.  Hence the stark situation that no manuscripts appear to remain for works published or planned for publication in her lifetime (Sense and Sensibility, Pride and Prejudice, Mansfield Park, Emma, Northanger Abbey or Persuasion, the famous six novels). The assumption must be that their working and finished drafts were routinely discarded once replaced by print forms. There is only one exception: the two cancelled chapters of Persuasion, which represent an alternative ending to the one that made it into print.

The manuscript evidence therefore represents a different Jane Austen: different in the range of subjects, themes, and narrative experimentation they contain from the novels we know only from print; and different in what they reveal about the workings of her imagination: in particular, what they can tell us of the ebb and flow, the struggle or ease of creation. Because of the variety of their written states, because of their experimental range, and because of the way they extend the time span of her writing life (far longer than the single decade, the years 1811-1818, that saw the publication of the six printed novels), these manuscripts can claim a special place in our understanding of the evolution of the famous fictions and the writing laboratory of one of the greatest English novelists. Quite literally, they represent Jane Austen’s beginnings and endings as a writer.

Some 1100 pages in total, the fiction manuscripts were held after Austen’s death in 1817 in a single collection under the stewardship of her sister Cassandra. Evidence of wear to their physical structures supports family stories that during these years (1817-1845) they were frequently read and even copied within the extended Austen family. When Cassandra died in 1845 the collection was dispersed, according to the provisions of her will, among surviving brothers and nieces and nephews. There was a second major dispersal in the 1920s when manuscripts and other memorabilia shifted from family hands into the auction rooms. From the 1920s, too, printed editions began to appear, but shorn of the idiosyncrasies of hand and design that make authors’ manuscripts so fascinating. Crucially, the collection as Austen left it, has been unavailable for comparative inspection or simply enjoyment since 1845. Since 1845 it has not been possible to set all the manuscripts side by side.

The focus of the present digital edition is three-fold: the virtual reunification of this significant collection of fiction manuscripts by means of high-quality digital photographic images; the linking of these images to fully encoded and searchable diplomatic transcriptions; and the creation of as complete a record as possible of the conservation history and current physical state of these frail objects. Through virtual reunification, scholars and interested users are provided for the first time with the opportunity to compare the forms and texts of these dispersed manuscripts – their different physical construction, shifts in handwriting and presentation – to examine passages of erasure and revision, to question editorial readings in the transcriptions, and to make their own new discoveries about Austen’s working practices across her writing career.

Simply by being electronic, this is a new kind of manuscript edition. The history to date of the critical editing of Jane Austen’s fiction manuscripts has been bounded by the possibilities of the printed book and the selective facsimile representation of the evidence. The Austen we are most of us familiar with is the writer of six classic novels. All are works recoverable only as products of the printing press, since with one or two small exceptions all trace of their manuscript lives has been lost. By contrast, the manuscripts available to us, all of them unpublished in her lifetime, literally present a different face. These are Jane Austen’s teenage writings, a short novel in letters, and abandoned or otherwise incomplete drafts of later fictions. Where the finished published novels went through the normalizing processes that attend print – from the removal of signs of erasure and revision, to the introduction of paragraphing and expansion of abbreviations – the blots, interlinear insertions, and false starts of the irregular writing and rewriting hand of the manuscripts appear integral to their meaning. The best recourse for the editor might seem complete photo-facsimile reproduction of the primary documents accompanied by detailed diplomatic transcriptions: that is, something that looks like the real thing together with an informed interpretation of its inked marks and shapes. But even in Austen’s case, where the manuscript evidence is modest in size, facsimile reproduction remained through the twentieth century an expensive option.