- The Cambridge Edition of the Works of Jane Austen, and: Jane Austen in Context, and: Emma, and: Juvenilia, and: Mansfield Park, and: Northanger Abbey, and: Persuasion, and: Pride and Prejudice, and: Sense and Sensibility, and: The Cambridge Introduction to Jane Austen, and: Jane Austen: A Students’ Guide to the Later Manuscript Works, and: Jane Austen and the Enlightenment
The publishing history of Jane Austen’s novels appears deceptively straightforward. Only one English edition of Emma was published during her lifetime, although there were two editions of Sense and Sensibility and Mansfield Park, and three of Pride and Prejudice (the third appearing sometime in 1817, whether before or after Austen’s death we do not know). Northanger Abbey and Persuasion appeared together posthumously in four volumes in December 1817 (dated 1818 on the title page). [End Page 563]
The principal consideration for an editor, therefore, would appear to be which editions of Sense and Sensibility, Pride and Prejudice, and Mansfield Park to use as copy text. Since the publication in 1923 of the first edition of R.W. Chapman’s monumental The Novels of Jane Austen: The Text Based on Collation of the Early Editions, editors of Austen’s novels have almost invariably chosen the first editions of Pride and Prejudice, Emma, Northanger Abbey, and Persuasion, and the second editions of Sense and Sensibility and Mansfield Park, for the reasons given by Janet Todd in her general editor’s preface to the Cambridge edition: “For the novels published in Jane Austen’s lifetime the edition takes as its copytext the latest edition to which she might plausibly have made some contribution: that is, the first editions of Pride and Prejudice and Emma and the second editions of Sense and Sensibility and Mansfield Park. Where a second edition is used, all substantive and accidental changes between editions are shown on the page so that the reader can reconstruct the first edition, and the dominance of either first or second editions is avoided. For the two novels published posthumously together, Northanger Abbey and Persuasion, the copytext is the first published edition.” Not long before the first volume of the Cambridge edition appeared in print, however, the late David Gilson observed that, with the publication in the 1990s of the new Penguin edition of the novels of Jane Austen, “the tyranny of the traditional viewpoint (that the second editions of Sense and Sensibility and Mansfield Park must necessarily be preferable as base texts) seems finally to have been overcome” (Gilson, “Jane Austen’s Text: A Survey of Editions,” Review of English Studies 53 [2002]: 85). To appreciate why, in the...