Austen Chat: Episode 29

November 6, 2025

Jane Austen & Her Manuscripts: A Visit with Kathryn Sutherland

Join us for a chat with noted Austen scholar Kathryn Sutherland about Jane Austen’s surviving manuscripts and what they reveal about her writing process and creative confidence. Kathryn also shares the story behind the ambitious digital project that brought Austen’s scattered manuscripts together in a virtual archive and talks about some of the material objects she included in her book Jane Austen in 41 Objects—reflecting on how tangible artifacts can bring us closer to the writer we think we know.

Kathryn Sutherland is Professor Emerita and a Senior Research Fellow at St Anne's College, Oxford. She is the author Jane Austen's Textual Lives (2005), Why Modern Manuscripts Matter (2022), and Jane Austen in 41 Objects (2025). She is also the editor of many editions of Austen's works through Oxford World's Classics, including Teenage Writings (with Freya Johnston, 2017). Sutherland was also the Project Director and Principal Investigator for Jane Austen's Fiction Manuscripts, a website that houses the digitized files of all Jane Austen's known fiction manuscripts. She is a patron of Jane Austen's House in Chawton, a trustee of Friends of the Nations' Libraries, and a trustee of the British Library Collections Trust.

Show Notes and Links

Many thanks to Kathryn for joining us on Austen Chat!

• Learn more about Kathryn Sutherland and her work.  
• Visit the Jane Austen's Fiction Manuscripts Digital Edition website
  
  

Listen to Austen Chat here, on your favorite podcast app (Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and other streaming platforms), or on our YouTube Channel.

Credits: From JASNA's Austen Chat podcast. Published November 6, 2025. © Jane Austen Society of North America. All rights reserved. Image: Manuscript page from Jane Austen's The History of England (British Library, Public Domain). Theme Music: Country Dance by Humans Win.

Transcript

This transcript has been lightly edited for clarity and readability.

[Theme music]

Breckyn: Hello, Janeites, and welcome to Austen Chat, a podcast brought to you by the Jane Austen Society of North America. I'm your host, Breckyn Wood from the Georgia Region of JASNA. As this wonderful year of celebration for Austen's 250th birthday winds to a close, I am thrilled to have a truly incredible Jane Austen scholar as my guest today, someone who has spent more time with Austen's actual handwritten manuscripts than almost anyone else. Kathryn Sutherland is a Professor Emerita and Senior Research Fellow at St. Anne's College, Oxford. She's the author of Jane Austen's Textual Lives, Why Modern Manuscripts Matter, and Jane Austen in 41 Objects. She is also the editor of many editions of Austen's works through Oxford World's Classics, including Teenage Writings. And she was the Project Director and Principal Investigator for Jane Austen's Fiction Manuscripts, a website that houses the digitized files of all Jane Austen's known fiction manuscripts— which is an absolutely invaluable resource for Austen scholars and admirers. That project turned into Kathryn's five-volume print edition of Jane Austen's Fiction Manuscripts, which was published by Oxford University Press in 2018. Welcome to the show, Kathryn.

Kathryn: Thank you, Breckyn. I'm delighted to be with you today.

Breckyn: Okay, so to start, can you tell us a bit about your Austen origin story? When did you first encounter her works? And then when did you know that you would become an Austen scholar? That was just two different branches of your journey.

Kathryn: They are different, in fact. Like so many of us, I discovered Jane Austen as a teenage reader at school. I was given Northanger Abbey when I was 13, I think, and I still think it's the best of her novels to give to a new young reader. I went on to study Austen at school and at university, but I wasn't at this stage greatly taken with her. Actually, I didn't find her very interesting, if I'm honest. And nor did I belong, as so many do, to a family of devoted Austen readers. No one in my family read her. My background is Scottish, and I don't know if you can tell that in my voice at all, but as a child I was drawn to a very different literary tradition, and that did continue in my early work, too. So I was more interested in myths and legends and adventure stories—you know, Walter Scott, Robert Louis Stevenson, that kind of thing. And it wasn't until I was asked to edit Mansfield Park as a new Penguin edition in 1995 that I actually became interested in her.

Breckyn: That late? I'm surprised by that.

Kathryn: Yeah, I'm a very late developer, I'm afraid.

Breckyn: But then you—how you have blossomed as an Austen scholar!

Kathryn: But what interested me there—because we decided we'd do something different with Mansfield Park, we decided to go back to the first edition, the 1814 text, rather than the 1816 edition that every other publisher was publishing, and still does, mainly.

And I really got interested then, just looking at the differences between the two texts, and I got very close to the grain of that novel in a way that I'd never done with any of her writings before, and that just fascinated me. And I then went on to think about how the text of her biography had been put together by her family, how James Edward Austen-Leigh played around with the texts of his sisters' recollections—his sisters who knew Jane Austen far better than he did—and how he wove those texts together. And then, eventually, that turned into Jane Austen's Textual Lives. By then, I was pretty well hooked on her, yeah. But a late developer, yeah.

Breckyn: Interesting. So you became this like forensics textual investigator, though. That's what drew you in.

Kathryn: Yeah. With her, that's what draws me, and it doesn't necessarily with other writers, but it has been with her.

Breckyn: Okay. Well, that's a great transition to my next question, which is—I mentioned at the top that you published a book in 2022 titled Why Modern Manuscripts Matter, which covers not just Jane Austen but also contemporary writers like Samuel Johnson and Walter Scott. And so, why do manuscripts matter? Beyond the words on the page, what do the artifacts themselves have to teach us?

Kathryn: I think you set up that question very well, Breckyn, for manuscripts are so much more than words. In English, the term manuscript, in fact, denotes both handwriting and the thing onto which you write: a support, an object that holds meaning and significance beyond the words. This seems an obvious point, but until recently most manuscript scholars thought only the words mattered, which is a bit like—if you think about it, it's a bit like a classical Greek scholar saying it's only the black profile figures on a vase that matter but, you know, the vase is dispensable completely.

A manuscript, and I mean by that a writer's working manuscript, a draft manuscript with deletions, revisions, with mess—it's a space of great energy and excitement, I think. Manuscripts are highly emotive objects. They're kind of sticky with a writer's presence. They have identity about them. They're a place and a moment in which you know something happened. So a manuscript is a writer's DNA or a writer's laboratory, and they call a work back to its origins. They reveal insights into ways of working, how a work takes shape, but also how it didn't take shape. You know, there are often ideas on a manuscript that never actually get into print, so you can learn more about a work than you can from the finished printed book.

Kathryn: I think, as well, manuscripts as objects are clues to ways of working, the kinds of paper a writer uses, how the words hit the page, and so on. So there are so many dimensions, and that's what excites me.

Breckyn: So, I've seen—you talk about Jane Austen's manuscripts a lot. There's a video of you at her house in Chawton, which is really fun, talking about The Watsons manuscript. And so something I've heard you point out a lot is that Jane Austen always writes to the edge of a page.

Kathryn: Yes, she does. Yeah.

Breckyn: She doesn't really leave herself margins. So what does that say about her as a writer? Why do you point that out?

Kathryn: I point that out because I think it shows how incredibly disciplined a writer she was, and how incredibly confident she was as well. She was very bold. She seems to have been a one-draft writer, and many of her contemporaries weren't. You know, one of the writers I compare her to in Why Modern Manuscripts Matter is Fanny Burney. Fanny Burney has endless drafts, and she's scribbling and revising across so many different sheets of paper. Whereas with Austen you have the sense—and the evidence seems to suggest this—that she works with only one draft. So, she starts writing on one particular draft and, okay, she'll go back, and she'll revise, and she'll delete. So the time frame might be wide, but the physical space is not wide. So in the case of something like the unfinished Watsons, you have the sense of a composite of several possible creative drafts over time, but all on the one page, on the one place. And her writing surfaces are always very small. She made homemade booklets. She took sheets of letter writing paper; she cut and folded it down into booklets of—ranging from between eight and 80 pages. You know the Sanditon manuscript has a booklet of 80 pages in it.

And these are very small booklets—seven-and-a-half by about four-and-a-half inches—so really small. It suggests she uses a very restricted surface, and I think that shows great discipline. I think, as well, these small booklets would have been portable; they would have been easy to carry around, easy, as well, to hide from prying eyes. So, you know, that family myth about her hiding sheets of paper when somebody intruded—I think there may have been some truth in that, to be honest. I think the way that she works suggests that. But I think, too, that writing into a booklet, as she does, is a very risky thing, because it sort of implies self-belief. There's economy to it, too, and Austen, we know, is a thrifty writer. She doesn't waste words. You see that from print. But as a surface for the evolution of composition, a booklet suggests the writer is very assured, because it forces the work—a booklet forces the work forward in a sequence whose elements are threaded together already from the start, suggesting you can't really change the order. Unlike writers who write, say, onto single pieces of paper, as, say, William Godwin did, or Walter Scott might have done. She doesn't do that.

So, there's real boldness in that. I think as well, it suggests she probably creates a draft in her head before it hits the page. But yeah, the pages are very densely filled. She never leaves a margin. Every other writer I've looked at leaves margins or white space to add stuff. She doesn't, and I think this highly disciplined way of working was a kind of material counterpart. So, I think that's where you see the booklets are almost metaphors for the thing you get. It's a sort of economy of creative expression, which is there in the physical as well as in the final product—which is the printed page and the style we recognize.

Breckyn: Right. That's what—and so, I finally got to go to her house just recently, and it was my first time, and seeing her desk, and how small of a space that is, is astounding. I mean, I've seen pictures of it, but then you go and see it in person and you're like, How? How is she writing in this tiny space? I need space to spread out and put all of my papers. And like you said, that discipline—and she's got these tiny booklets on this tiny desk on which she is writing—it's really incredible.

Kathryn: Yeah, that's right. I'm sitting at my desk now—I've got water. I've got a cup of coffee. I've got papers everywhere.

Breckyn: I have two laptops right now.

Kathryn: Yeah, exactly. Exactly. And she's just focused in on this tiny little booklet. I think it's quite astonishing. Very recently we had—you know, I work—I'm a patron at Jane Austen's House, and very recently we had to reinsure lots of the items. So, for reinsurance we had to reexamine the writing table, and, for the first time, we noticed that there were worn away grooves in the edges of that little table. Now, if it had been used for something else—you know, just for standing stuff on, as it was originally probably meant to be used rather than for writing at—there wouldn't have been these worn away edges. It's a real, absolute proof that that's what she did. She's sort of resting her arms against the table and writing, and her arms are rubbing away the edges of this—this shaped table. It's only 47 centimeters wide. I mean, it's really small.

Breckyn: Well, so can you talk about the pins that she would use to edit? Because I think that's another fun detail about the manuscripts, because she's so careful and precise with that as well.

Kathryn: She is very careful, very precise. Yeah, with The Watsons, where she did decide that she needed to develop after she'd filled these little booklets, she adds little sheets of paper, which she folds up and then pins exactly, precisely, where this new text is meant to be inserted. And then you can see from the folds that then those pieces of paper would be—in order to uncover them and to read from them, you'd have to fold them down. But, yeah, she pins very precisely. And these are dressing pins—so, pins that would have been used, you know, to hold bits of her garments together, perhaps. You know it's nice to think that she might have just—as she was working away, just pulled a pin off from her clothing and inserted it onto the manuscript. Yeah, incredibly neat, fastidious way of working.

Breckyn: And it's part of family lore that—I mean, she calls herself like the best sewer or best stitcher, right?

Kathryn: That's right.

Breckyn: She's good at that small, careful work with her hands as well.

Kathryn: Yeah, absolutely. Her nephew, James Edward, in his pioneer biography, he says this in 1869, you know—that the handwriting and the sewing have a kind of something in common, the neatness.

Breckyn: A parallel.

Kathryn: And I think—you know, especially feminist critics, we—and I am one of them—we've often thought, you know, he's dismissing her writing as just domestic, but actually there's also a truth in it, I think as well. A truth in that neatness, and also in her homecrafted—the homecrafted aspect to her writing style.

Breckyn: And the precision with which she works. I really admire it. Can you tell us a bit about the digiti—ooh, that's a hard word to say—the digitization project? That seems like it would have been a massive undertaking. For people who don't know, the remaining manuscripts are scattered among multiple institutions across the pond, right?

Kathryn: Yup. I mean, they're in the Morgan Library, they're in the Bodleian Library here in Oxford, they're in the British Library, they're in Cambridge. And in October 2007, when we began the project, one of the manuscripts was still in private hands. It was in private ownership still, so there was a lot of careful negotiation. The project—it took three years to develop. So, we developed it in three years, and it went live in 2010. All the manuscripts were known, of course, before digitization, but at that stage our window onto them all was print, which either tidied away or ignored their dynamic features: deletions, revisions, what we call the genetics of the page. You couldn't get at that from the printed editions. Because they were dispersed in public and private libraries, no scholar had ever been able to work with them as a single collection. So, digitization allowed them to be viewed and studied as a unified, simultaneous collection, as it were. So that was what was good about it. It was also a conservation project, because these are extremely fragile. So, it was a way of getting close to the manuscripts without having to touch them.

There were huge challenges in working with a scattered collection—challenges I hadn't expected. The first one that I hadn't expected was that catalog records in the various libraries would share no common language, so we couldn't just take them over. We had to create our own consistent language to describe these manuscripts. And, as I say, the manuscripts were fragile, precious, so they required really careful handling. And in fact, the cameras and the photographers we used—and the photographs—are incredibly high spec. I mean, they will survive hundreds of years. Nothing else about the edition will, but they will. The photographers—the cameras we used—had previously worked on the Dead Sea Scrolls.

Breckyn: Whoa.

Kathryn: So, they moved from ancient Hebrew texts on parchment and papyrus to Jane Austen manuscripts, which I think is really rather nice.

Breckyn: I think she would love that, don't you?

Kathryn: Yeah, I do too. Yeah. We encoded them in XML, which is Extensible Markup Language, in order to turn them into a live resource so that you could actually interrogate them right down to the level of single words, commas, everything. So, it was really hard work. The real challenge now is keeping it alive. I'm 15 years on, which is how old the website is—that's a long time in digital history. How do we keep it alive and free for users around the world? I mean, unlike a printed book, a digital resource is never finished, and the clock's always ticking down towards its obsolescence. So, you have to keep upgrading it, moving it to new platforms as the technology changes. This is costly of time and funds. Recently, of course, cybersecurity has become a problem as well. You wouldn't believe it, but people do hack into everything. And so, you know, software updates, server updates, routine maintenance—where do we find the funding for this? It's a big problem. There is still, I think, in our world an assumption that certain kinds of digital products should simply be free to use, just as there's an assumption that those products were never created by human effort. I'm always amused that people don't realize how much work we put into this—that they just somehow think, you know, the fairies made them.

It's one of the hardest things I've ever done in my life. But we do seem reluctant to concede that we can't just grab and reuse stuff for free online, and that, you know, it belongs to someone else. It might be someone else's intellectual property. We don't really understand this. And it does seem to me that we do need a new funding model if we're to sustain objects like this as part of our digital heritage, because quite soon it probably will disappear, to be honest. I won't be able to keep it up.

Breckyn: No, don't say that.

Kathryn: I won't be able to keep it up, you know?

Breckyn: That's so interesting because you do think like, Oh, we took a picture of it. We digitized it. Boom, we're done. And in perpetuity, it will be there forever. I had no idea.

Kathryn: No, it won't. It won't!

Breckyn: Okay, so in editing all of your various editions of Austen, you have done extensive annotation work. So where do you begin with a job like that? Specifically, how do you decide what to explain, and how to explain it, when you're making all these indexes and these appendices?

Kathryn: Yeah. Annotation is—it's a tough thing to think about, and it shapes the reading experience. It really does shape what you read, annotation. So it needs to be done responsibly, and I think not too indulgently, to be honest. There's a general rule for annotation, which is that you explain things like literary quotations and historical and cultural references that might be lost on a reader at any given time in history, but that you don't offer opinions or critical speculation. That's the general rule. We don't all obey it, but that's a kind of rule.

I think the real discipline in critical annotation is to resist expanding, actually—to keep it within limits. When I was a student, editions of classic texts might have a few pages of annotation. I recently looked at my old Penguin—student Penguin paperback of Persuasion. There were three pages of notes. The modern paperback edition of Persuasion has more than 20 pages of notes. I'm not sure that that's altogether a good thing. Back in the mid-18th century, Samuel Johnson, who Jane Austen much admired, actually had something to say about annotation. And he says—he uses this phrase, which I think is wonderful, and I try to remember it—he says, "Annotation refrigerates the brain."[sic] It slows you down as a reader, and I sometimes think, does it really matter if you're not, as a reader, directed towards a meaning for everything? You know, perhaps it's better not to be too informed, to let your imagination run free rather than to freeze it, you know, which is what Johnson says is happening.

And, in fact, when I put together the five-volume edition, which is a real hardcore edition for serious textual critics of Jane Austen—that five-volume edition which came from the website—I deliberately included textual annotation but absolutely no critical annotation at all. I just wanted it to be free of that, and for the reader to use that edition in a different way—so, to explore Jane Austen's choice of words, and the words she erased, and why she chose this word and not that word—but not to worry about whether or not they got every single allusion in her text.

Breckyn: Some of us are clamoring for more. I love your textual analysis so much. You have such a way with words, and your explications are so clear but also just so engaging. And so sometimes I read your stuff and I'm like, but tell me more about what you think, Kathryn. So do you usually put that in the foreword, or—there's other places where you provide analysis.

Kathryn: Yeah, there's other places you can put that. Yeah, you can put it in an introduction or whatever. With the five-volume edition, I wrote short essays. So, I wrote a short essay about how she uses the notebooks that she creates, a short essay on the kinds of revisions—her characteristic form of revisions, short essay on quirks of handwriting, that kind of thing, which you know, the reader can use or forget about. Whatever suits you, really.

Breckyn: So, I'll mention the juvenilia a bit because I have your edition of it, and that's the one that I've read. It is so full of inside jokes and references.

Kathryn: Yeah.

Breckyn: So, are you just so immersed in 18th-century literature that any time she says anything, you're like, "Oh, well, that's a quote from this poem, or that's a quote from the—" Do you know it already, or—how do you even know what to annotate?

Kathryn: No, I don't. No, I am grateful to Mr. and Mrs. Google for so much stuff.

Breckyn: That's good. That makes me feel a little better.

Kathryn: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, there are so many resources now, aren't there? I mean, that sometimes makes me think, why bother annotating anything— critical annotations? Because if the reader wants to look it up, they can. You know, you can find a Shakespeare quotation so quickly nowadays. You don't need to be given it in a printed edition.

Breckyn: I would say—I mean, because AI is getting so big and misinforming and warping things—I am more grateful than ever for the book hoarding that I've been doing—which is what I call—I own an absurd number of books, and, Listeners, Kathryn is in front of one of her book shelves. But I think now having it on the printed page is so valuable, because I know that AI was in no way involved with this. That it wasn't—you know, maybe one day things even that are printed will have been written by AI, but my entire library is free from that influence, and I find that valuable.

Kathryn: Yeah, I think the only thing that bothers me about annotation is nowadays you buy a novel, say, and it almost carries its own body weight of notes behind it.

Breckyn: That's true.

Kathryn: And you just think, "Well, come on, how much do you need? How much do you really need in order to enjoy this book?" And the answer is probably a lot less than you're given.

Breckyn: Right. I love the "refrigerates the brain." I'm going to keep that. Samuel Johnson has an opinion on everything.

Kathryn: He does.

Breckyn: It's also really ironic, because the man just wrote and wrote and wrote, and he had a lot of commentary on a lot of different authors. I mean, he annotated a ton of stuff. Okay, so your brand new biography, like this year, of Austen, her life in 41 objects—am I correct in assuming that you picked 41 because that's how many years she lived?

Kathryn: Well, there are two reasons. The obvious one is, yeah, 41 for the number of years she lived. But also, 41 is a prime number, which means it cannot be divided by any number other than itself or one. And I kind of like that because that to me says something about Jane Austen, too. She is unique.

Breckyn: That's great.

Kathryn: Jane Austen is a prime number.

Breckyn: I have never thought of her that way—mathematically—at all. And I think that's wonderful. There's that quote in Emma about, "had she been a mathematician," or when she's talking about Emma being an imaginist. I think that's the only time she mentions the word mathematician. That's so wonderful. So, why did you choose this approach to Austen's life in this way, via objects?

Kathryn: Well, really, seriously—and I have to say it's the book that I've written that I've enjoyed writing most, and I wrote most easily as well—but I was attempting to address a paradox that, of all writers, Jane Austen is among those few that we most ardently wish to know and even to possess. We're very possessive about her. You know, we really want to know her. Katherine Mansfield said this wonderful thing, didn't she—Katherine Mansfield, the New Zealand writer at the beginning of the 20th century—and she said, "Everyone imagines that they are Jane Austen's secret friend."

Breckyn: Oh, yeah, we sure do. And we all have my Jane, my voice in the room.

Kathryn: Yeah, my Jane, my Jane.

Breckyn: And that's the real one.

Kathryn: You know, it's not just that we think that Jane Austen knows us, but we think we know her. And the paradox, of course, for a biographer is that we all want to possess her because that's what biography is about. It's about possessing somebody. But there's so little to—that's survived to base our knowledge on. So, it's a paradox. So, 41 objects—to say you can summarize a person in 41 objects is deliberately ironic. It's an ironic biography. It's a way of acknowledging that no life can be fully known or recorded, that all our encounters with another life are selective and partial.

And at the same time, I thought objects, because objects are amongst the most tangible signs of possession. They help us get a handle on someone or to feel close to somebody. So, objects for that reason, too. But also, it's a biography in reverse. I was thinking that—you know, I was trying to be as ironic—I mean just for my own amusement—as possible. But it's a biography in reverse because each object has its own little biography. Her life becomes a moment in the lives of these objects. Many of the objects I chose are domestic and they're very modest objects.

Kathryn: And that was deliberate because I wanted to suggest, too, that—something very important about Jane Austen—that she worked a quiet revolution in the novel, didn't she? She wrote novels about ordinariness. She's probably the first novelist to think that you can just take the ordinary lives of middle- class women and, you know, describe those, and make that into a novel—make a novel out of drinking tea or going to the shops or having a picnic or going for a dance. Very ordinary things. So, all of that went into it, really.

Breckyn: And am I correct in thinking that some of the objects are posthumous?

Kathryn: Yeah, they are.

Breckyn: And so, I feel like that adds to the irony.

Kathryn: Well, it adds to the irony. I was also thinking that so much of her life has been lived since she was dead, you know. We constantly—what a biographer does is have a conversation with the subject, the person they biographize, and it's a different conversation, depending where you are situated as the biographer. It's a bit like if you're a portrait artist—you know, a portrait painted by a painter in the 21st century won't look like a portrait painted in the 19th century. So, lives change, too. And so I was thinking that so much of her life has been lived after her death. So, you know, when does a life end? When does a life end?

Breckyn: Well, we're celebrating the 250th.

Kathryn: Well, exactly. So, you know, that's why I have things like Grayson Perry's pot in there, and Mr. Darcy's shirt, and so on.

Breckyn: Well, so what are a few of your favorite objects from the book, if you had to pick?

Kathryn: Yeah. There's a fragment of wallpaper that we found in 2018 in a cupboard in Chawton Cottage, in Jane Austen's House, and that is one of my favorite objects. Another is Marianne Knight's dancing slippers. We don't have any of Jane Austen's dancing slippers to survive, but we have Marianne Knight's. And that was important to me because the dancing slippers of Marianne Knight—Jane Austen would have owned pair upon pair of dancing slippers exactly like those. But, you know, after dancing only a single evening your dancing slippers would be ruined. You'd have to throw them away. So I wanted to get at the idea that any life is made up of fleeting joys, fleeting happiness that you can't capture. And also, that so much of what we want to know about a life has disappeared, so Jane Austen dancing was important.

Breckyn: Don't they mention—she mentions in Pride and Prejudice, roses for dancing slippers, or something like that? It's like one line. Do you know what that is? What those are?

Kathryn: Yeah, they're ornamentations on the slippers. Yeah.

Breckyn: Okay. Because I think it's like as soon as they can get those, and enough white soup, then they're ready for the ball.

Kathryn: Yeah. But another of my favorite objects is a flower spray. It's a little spray of artificial flowers that was found in the attic space in the rafters of Jane Austen's House. Now, we don't know if it had belonged to Jane Austen or not, but it got at a couple of things for me. One of the things it got at for me was the fact that everything you find in a museum—you know, when you're renovating Jane Austen's House, say, looking below the floorboards or going into the attic, you find all kinds of things. You find broken pipes—smoking pipes—you find nails, you find all kinds of things. Being a museum, you can't throw any of this away. It's rubbish, but you can't throw it away. You've got to record and code it. So, we found this flower spray, which we could date to 1800, so it could have been an artificial spray of flowers that Jane Austen herself bought, but it may not be. So, there's something serendipitous about it. And that appealed to me, too, because it points to the limits of biography, where imagination takes over. You know Jane Austen has a lovely letter from 1799, around the time of—that dates the flower spray, where she's in Bath and she's writing to her sister.

And Cassandra has set her a chore in Bath to find artificial fruit to put on their hats, to decorate their hats. But Jane doesn't have enough money left, for she's been buying presents for other people. So she says, "I haven't got enough money to buy artificial fruit, but I can buy a spray of artificial flowers." And she says in this letter something totally fabulous. She said, "And I do somehow think" she says to Cassandra, that, "It is more natural for flowers to grow out of one's head than fruit." So, I like to think this is the spray that she brought back. But who knows? You don't know.

Breckyn: And that's part of the fun of it.

Kathryn: It's part of the fun but, you know, I was thinking about—I mean, a few years ago, my mother died, and I was clearing out her house, and you find things. You find things, and you think, "Where did that come from? I don't remember seeing this before. What's this?"

Breckyn: And you see new facets of someone that you thought you knew.

Kathryn: Yeah, or you see a photograph album, and I say, "Oh, that's great-aunt Mildred," and my sister will say, "No, it's Uncle Fred." You can't tell which one it is. And I wanted to keep that sort of—that puzzling sense of biography alive in the book, so that's why I wrote it the way I did.

Breckyn: Well, something that you said in Why Modern Manuscripts Matter—you say that mess matters, right? It's all of the detritus around the writing that tells its own story. And so I kind of like that parallel, like you said, with a museum or with her house. It's like even the random stuff that you're finding under the floorboards—it all has a story to tell. We all wish that we could be a fly on the wall in Jane Austen's living room or in her dining room, but this wallpaper that we found was on the wall at the time.

Kathryn: Well, exactly. It was on the wall. It surrounded her as she wrote. And I also wanted to—with the wallpaper—I mean, she is the first novelist who really explores the inner life of characters, and, you know, inner life has so much to do with the domestic furnishings of rooms as well—that these were an aspect of women's creative self-expression. So I wanted to bring the two together by showing the wallpaper.

Breckyn: That's wonderful. And it's incredibly humanizing, this work that you've done. It really gives us this human aspect of Jane Austen, takes her off her pedestal and makes her a real person.

Kathryn: Well, I hope so. I hope so.

Breckyn: Well, this has been such a rich conversation, Kathryn. Thank you so much for chatting with me today. Where can listeners go to find out more about you, and your books, and your work?

Kathryn: Probably my website, actually, which is part of the Oxford University's English Faculty website.

Breckyn: Okay. And I think we'll also put a link in the show notes to the digitized manuscripts for people.

Kathryn: That would be lovely, yeah.

Breckyn: That would be very valuable. And maybe some people will help fund it. Now that I know that it's in danger, maybe I will as well. Yeah, but it's something that needs to live on in perpetuity. It's the legacy of her handwritten work. So, thank you so much for all you've done.

Kathryn: Well, thank you, Breckyn. I've enjoyed talking to you. It's been a pleasure.

Breckyn: Dear listeners, I just wanted to end today's episode by saying thank you. Austen Chat now has over 100 five-star reviews on Apple Podcasts. We are thrilled and so grateful for everyone who has left a review. If you haven't left a review yet, please consider giving the show five stars on Apple Podcasts. The more reviews we get, the easier it is for new Janeites to find us. Join us again next month for another episode. In the meantime, I remain yours affectionately, Breckyn Wood.

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