Rereading Austen

A. C. Bradley’s lecture on Jane Austen, delivered at Newnham College, Cambridge, and printed in Essays and Studies (1911), has been described as the ‘starting-point’ of serious criticism on the novelist.¹ The University Press at Cambridge, however, has, until now, played a surprisingly small part in publishing her work: CUP’s abridged 1910 Pride and Prejudice, in the English Literature for Schools series, is the only output from the Press listed by David Gilson in his 1982 bibliography of Austen.²

Austen’s fiction has been within the domain of many publishing houses, of course, but most definitively that of Oxford University Press since the publication in 1923 of R. W. Chapman’s five-volume edition of The Novels of Jane Austen. Chapman collated, for the first time, the early editions, producing meticulous texts indebted to critical methods more commonly used in the editing of classical authors. This contributed to Austen’s reputation as an English writer worth serious study, while such methods also permitted small textual emendations that didn’t conform to the lifetime editions, but instead to other notions of grammatical or semantic precision.³ Kathryn Sutherland’s recent work on Chapman has brought his scholarship to the foreground of critical debate about how we encounter and understand Austen’s writing, and his pioneering editorial work has been acknowledged by editors who have depended upon, revised, and, more recently, separated themselves from the texts that he produced. OUP’s Austen is still, to a great extent, Chapman’s. The popular Oxford World’s Classics editions reproduce the novels as they appeared in the Oxford English Novels series of 1970–1, edited by James Kinsley, which were based, in turn, on Chapman’s texts with revisions made by Mary Lascelles in the 1960s. The Oxford Illustrated Jane Austen Set, advertised by Oxford as ‘the most authoritative and comprehensive edition available’, is Chapman’s edition with later revisions.

Cambridge University Press has now righted its near-absence from Austen publishing history. Under the general editorship of Janet Todd, eight of the nine volumes of the Cambridge edition of the works of Jane Austen are available, including a volume devoted to the juvenilia, and another (forthcoming) to Austen’s later manuscripts. The first three volumes of the series (the subject of this review) – Mansfield Park, edited by John Wiltshire; Emma, edited by Richard Cronin and Dorothy McMillan; and a companion volume, Jane Austen in Context, which is a collection of forty short essays edited by Janet Todd – are also marketed together as a separate set.

The Cambridge edition is committed to closeness to its chosen copy-texts. For the novels published in Austen’s lifetime, these are the last editions to which she might have made some contribution, and for the posthumous work, the first published edition. There is no modernising of spelling or punctuation; variant spellings across a volume are unchanged; and corrections are made ‘only when an error is very obvious indeed, and/or where retention might interrupt reading or understanding’ (general editor’s preface, p. x). In practice, these can, at times, be difficult categories to determine, though in the case of Austen’s published work, the most obvious errors (and their amendment) have long been established through the work of Chapman and others. The Cambridge policy to minimise variation from the base text means that in Emma the well-known cara sposo crux remains uncorrected, as the ‘error’ is just as likely to be Mrs Elton’s; on the other hand, there are changes to quotation marks (Mr Woodhouse’s ‘Ah! my dear, as Perry says, where health is at stake, nothing else should be considered . . .’; Cambridge) that other – although not all – editors of...