Fragment of a Novel Written by Jane Austen, January-March 1817

Some explanation may be thought necessary of the way in which the fragment is printed. It approximates to the manner of 1817, and the result is somewhat less in bulk than one of the three volumes in which Mr. Egerton or Mr. Murray would doubtless have issued the work if it had been completed for publication. The printer, however, would have made certain departures from his copy: he would have expanded the contractions; he would have broken 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.