It’s 26 February 12024 and I feel like writing something—pretty much anything, actually. I’m working on a text of Jane Austen’s Persuasion, based on what I can recall of R. W. Chapman’s work, and utilizing the 1818 text (the only authority derived from Jane Austen’s (lost) manuscript) as a basis. I was going to read the Project Gutenberg text, but it’s so filled with careless errors (“reference” for “deference”, for example) that I had to give up on it. All my Jane Austen (except for a volume of the minor works) stuff is in storage, or maybe lost completely, so I can’t just pull it down from the shelf when I want to.
Persuasion (and this is mostly from memory) is the last of Jane Austen’s finished novels, and it was published posthumously along with Northanger Abbey, which her brother had rescued from a publisher who had bought it but not printed it, thus losing the chance to be a footnote in history. Jane Austen was working on another novel when she died, this one satirizing hypochondria and the institutions that preyed on its sufferers. Persuasion is probably my fourth-favorite Jane Austen novel, coming after Emma, Pride and Prejudice, and Northanger Abbey. (If Love and Friendship were to be counted in the total it would be my fifth-favorite.)
Northanger Abbey has a special place in my heart as it was the first Jane Austen novel I read. Some oddities in it were explained by examination of a more reliable text; I seem to remember that “baseball” had been substituted for “cricket” on its first appearance and “cricket” omitted on its second, where cricket, base ball, and riding about the country were noted as Catherine Morland’s favorite activities rather than reading books of useful knowledge. It could have been something else. The text was unusually corrupt, to my mind, as I saw when I got a look at a decent edition—probably R. W. Chapman’s.
Life continues, anyway. For the moment. We’ll see.
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