Jane Austen Used Pins to Edit Her Manuscripts: Before the Word Processor & White-Out

There were straight pins in front of the word processor, in front of the whiteout, and in front of the post-it note. Or at least that’s what Jane Austen used to edit in one of her rare manuscripts. 2011, Bodrian Library in Oxford Austin manuscript has been obtained Abandoned novels, Watsons. When announcing the acquisition, Bodrian wrote:

Watsons It was the first surviving draft of the novel in Jane Austen’s development, and one of the early examples of English novels to survive in its formation state. It is known that only seven manuscripts of Austin’s fiction survive. The Watsons manuscript has been extensively revised and revised, along with the addition of intersections and interiors.

janeausten.ac.uk (Austin’s manuscript is now digitalized website) Watsons Manuscript, Note:

The manuscript has been written and revised throughout brown iron goal ink. The pages are filled with neat hands. And even signs of simultaneous writing, erasure, and correction interrupted by the occasional passages of heavy line correction are filled with hands. …The manuscript is not without informal divisions with wider spacing and governed lines. The entire page suggests that Jane Austen did not expect a long-term regeneration process. With no calculated white spaces and no obvious way to incorporate large-scale revisions and extensions, she had to find other strategies. There are three patches each closely and neatly filled with new material, small pieces of paper, and precise spots covering the erased material, or if insertion is required to expand the text.

According to Christopher FletcherKeeper of the Bodleian Library’s special collection, this thorny editing method was nothing new. Library archivists can track pins used in 1617 as editing tools.

You can find Watsons Online here:

Note: Previous versions of this post were published on our site in August 2014.

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