Sanditon’s Shorthand
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 18 February 2020
The conclusion to this book reflects on how compression and concision may have been fundamental to Austen’s drafting process, especially as revealed in the manuscript to her unfinished novel, Sanditon, written in the year of her death. By the time that Austen was writing Emma, at least, she was drafting strikingly elliptical prose, as in the strawberry-picking episode at Donwell Abbey. The often similarly fragmented sentences of Sanditon are not jottings or shorthand to be expanded later, as they were once thought to be. Rather, Austen’s manuscripts suggest that she channelled the contingencies of the drafting process into some of her most forward-reaching stylistic developments, as she sought to capture the spontaneity of the human voice.
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