Jane Austen Research Paper

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Opinions on Emma and Mansfield Park From the moment I began reading Pride and Prejudice, I knew Jane Austen would be one of my favorite authors. I fell in love with her writing and her ability to portray characters. For this reason, I decided to analyze a manuscript of Jane Austen’s for my final digital project. I found my document on a website called Jane Austen’s Fiction Manuscripts (http://www.janeausten.ac.uk/index.html), joint created by King’s College and University of Oxford. Jane Austen’s Fiction Manuscripts has several of her manuscripts and aspires to collect all digital copies of all known Jane Austen manuscripts. I chose to analyze “Opinions of Mansfield Park and Emma, first printed and published in 1870. I was interested to read …show more content…

Jane Austen scholars are also suspicious of her “Opinions” because of the ambiguity of how she received them. There are very few opinions that a transcribed word for word and the rest are a combination of transcription and paraphrasing. I also noticed that the paraphrased opinions point out both the likes and the dislikes of the readers. “Miſs Sharp – better than MP,but not so well as P. & P. — pleased with the Heroine for her Originality, delighted with Mr. K, called Mrs . Elton beyond praise, diſsatisfied with Jane Fairfax.” The verbatim opinions praised her work excessively, mostly praising her naturally depicted characters. “Anne Sharpe writes, ‘Your Characters are drawn to the Life, so very, very natural & just” and “Lady Gordon wrote "In most novels you are amused for the time with a set of Ideal People whom you never think of afterwards or whom you the least expect to meet in common life, whereas in Miſs A —s works, & especially in MP. you actually live with them, you fancy yourself one of the family; & the scenes are so exactly descriptive, so perfectly natural, that there is scarcely an Incident a conversation, or a person that you are not inclined to imagine you have at one time or other in your Life been a witneſs to, born apart in, & been acquainted with." Though I find it odd that Jane Austin would choose to directly quote some of her critiques and paraphrase the words of others is strange to me, I appreciate that she kept her opinions very honest and real. She didn’t omit any opinions because the person disliked her