Ingrid Tieken-Boon van Ostade

Spelling as evidence: from Jane Austen’s Juvenilia to The Watsons

Jane Austen (1775–1817) had had very little formal education. Apart from two very short spells, in 1783 and 1785–6, she never attended school. “[T]he remainder of Jane’s education,” Le Faye (2004: 52) writes, “was acquired at home.” But what did this education consist of? Her father’s library, extensive though it was, does not appear to have contained any grammars, spelling books or even letter writing manuals (cf. Gilson 1982). If any linguistic education occurred – her father as a private tutor prepared boys for admittance to university –it would have been in Latin, not English. And yet, she became one of the most popular writers of English fiction ever.

So how did she learn to write? Her handwriting would have been formed at school, but her so-called Juvenilia, her earliest attempts at writing which date from when she was around eleven or twelve, suggest that she taught herself to write literature through practice. Sutherland (2013) consequently calls them “a writer’s apprenticeship”, a self-imposed and very seriously undertaken job with well-known results. The same applies to her letter-writing, as I argue in In Search of Jane Austen (2014), which apart from her writing of novels formed a major occupation during her lifetime. Her first letter (in as far as they have come down to us) dates from 1796, hen we still see her struggling with grammatical features like the flat adverb, the use of which she eventually adopted for the purpose of linguistic characterisation (Tieken-Boon van Ostade 2013). But five years and quite a few letters later she claimed that she had “now attained the true art of letter-writing, which we are always told, is to express on paper what one would say to the same person by word of mouth” (Le Faye, 2011, Letter 29, 1801). Learning by practice had been a major incentive for her in becoming a letter writer, too.

The Juvenilia and Jane Austen’s private letters are among the very few sources of her writing that are in her own hand: they are available for analysis in a digital edition (Jane Austen’s Fiction Manuscripts) and as a standard printed edition (Le Faye 2011), respectively. Analysing their spelling has proved of great significance, on the one hand to gain insight into Jane Austen’s (linguistic) personality, and as evidence for suggesting a proper date for her unfinished novel, The Watsons, on the other, whose accepted date is based solely on family tradition. In this presentation, I will focus on Jane Austen’s spelling, a subject that she was never formally taught but that she acquired by practice, thought it would eventually be influenced by her contact with the editors of her published novels.

References:

Gilson, David (1982). A Bibliography of Jane Austen [repr. with corrections]. Winchester: St Paul’s Bibliographies/New Castle, Delaware: Oak Knoll Press.

Jane Austen’s Fiction Manuscripts: https://janeausten.ac.uk/index.html.

Le Faye, Deirdre (2004). Jane Austen: A Family Record [2 nd ed.]. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Le Faye, Deirdre (ed.) (2011). Jane Austen’s letters [4 th ed.]. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press.

Sutherland, Kathryn (2013). A writer’s apprenticeship. In: Jane Austen, Volume the First. Oxford: Bodleian Library. v–xxxi.

Tieken-Boon van Ostade, Ingrid (2013). Flat adverbs and Jane Austen’s letters. In: Marijke van der Wal and Gijsbert Rutten (eds.), Touching the Past. Studies in the Historical Sociolinguistics of Ego-Documents. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. 91–106.

Tieken-Boon van Ostade, Ingrid (2013). In Search of Jane Austen: The Language of the Letters. Oxford/New York: Oxford Univerity Press.