Page:Fragment of a novel written by Jane Austen.pdf/13

 up the chapters into paragraphs; and he would, in a greater or less degree, have regularized the spelling and the punctuation. It has seemed best not to do this in 1925, but to print the author's manuscript as nearly as possible in the last form it attained. It may be thought pedantic to reproduce irregularities which the author would not have wished to retain; but it seemed more important to avoid another danger. To have smoothed out the manuscript into a specious semblance of finality would have been to prejudice, in some degree, the question how far it did, in fact, represent the author's final intention. This edition, printed as it is, is open to no such objection. It is, for critical purposes, virtually a facsimile of all that Miss Austen wrote and did not erase.

It will be seen from the textual notes, printed at the end of the volume, that the manuscript contains a very large number of erasures and interlineations. It is so neat, and so uniformly spaced, that it is almost