This edition was produced in collaboration with the prestigious Morgan Library & Museum of New York, allowing readers to discover the pages once handwritten by Jane Austen in a graphically-restored version of the original.
In 1947, it was purchased for $6750 by Belle da Costa Green, Director of the Morgan Library in New York, where the manuscript is now housed. When sold at the Rosebery sale in 1933, it was described as “THE FINEST LITERARY MS. First inherited by her son, it passed through the hands of several buyers until the mid-20th century. This Lady Susan was printed from a non-authorial copy, as the manuscript only emerged after Lady Knatchbull’s death in 1882. The novel first appeared posthumously in 1871, when Lady Knatchbull authorised the writer’s nephew, James Edward Austen-Leigh, to publish it in the second edition of his Memoir of Jane Austen. Written and paginated in her hand, this 158-page manuscript is dedicated to Lady Knatchbull, Austen’s niece and considered by her as a ‘sister’. She wrote out this fair copy in Bath no earlier than 1805-the date of watermarks found on the paper stock used for this manuscript. The precocious Jane most likely started writing Lady Susan in the early 1790s while staying at Steventon rectory, her childhood home in Hampshire. Though encouraged by family to pursue her literary interests, she could not have anticipated her eventual fame as one of the world’s most beloved authors, whose works would be widely adapted for film and theatre. Lady Susan : the only complete surviving manuscript of Jane Austen’s fiction, reproduced in a graphically restored version for the first time.Īged 18 or 19, when most young women of the Georgian period would have been thinking about engagement and marriage, Jane Austen was preoccupied with getting the fruits of her already fertile imagination down on paper.
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