The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - Review
Saved from history’s waste-paper basket
From a scene Austen hid, to Beckett’s whisky-label verse – great writers’ drafts, seen for the first time
One of Europe’s oldest libraries, the Bodleian in Oxford is famous for its manuscripts. While some are beautifully illuminated medieval treasures, others are the barely legible scribblings of more recent authors – a blizzard of deletions, additions and notes. Studying this discarded, unpublished material has sometimes been regarded as akin to rummaging in a writer’s waste-paper basket. Yet it is precisely because the writers chose not to throw away these fragments that they ended up in the library.
Write Cut Rewrite, a new exhibition at the Bodleian, emphasises the role of “killing your darlings” in creative writing. It unearths the kind of rough drafts that seldom see the light of day. Would TS Eliot’s The Waste Land have had the same impact if Ezra Pound had not pruned it to half its original length? If Edgar Allan Poe had not rejected his initial idea for the bird that keeps saying “Nevermore” would his famous poem “The Raven” instead be known as “The Parrot”?
Written on postcards, torn-up pages or even litter, these drafts by great writers – from Jane Austen to Samuel Beckett – give a glimpse of literary history’s “what ifs”.
JANE AUSTEN’S AWKWARD FIG LEAF
It is thought that Austen abandoned her novel The Watsons shortly after her father’s death in January 1805. The heroine of the story, Emma Watson, is the youngest daughter of a widowed clergyman with six children. At a ball she meets the young Lord Osborne, who – “after hard labour of mind” – starts an awkward conversation about the weather. When Emma replies that she missed her morning walk that day because of the foul weather, he replies that she should wear half-boots or, better yet, ride on horseback. The conversation runs as follows:
“Ladies should ride in dirty weather. – Do you ride?”
“No my lord.”
“I wonder [why] every Lady does not. Ride. – A woman never looks better than on horseback. –”
“But every woman may not have the inclination, or the means.”
“If they knew how much it became them, they would all have the inclination – & I fancy Miss Watson – when once they had the inclination, the means would soon follow.”
On the back of the page, Austen wrote the continuation of this conversation but appears to have had trouble developing it. She crossed out almost all the text on the top half of the page, which reads as follows:
Emma replies that she is probably to suppose that Lord Osborne means a compliment, but she does “not exactly understand it”.
The author gently pushes the embarrassment further:
Lord Osborne laughed rather awkwardly – & then said “Upon my Soul, I am a bad one for Compliments. Nobody can be a worse hand at it than myself.”
Then Austen inserts an uneasy silence of “some minutes” and keeps building up the embarrassment by letting him add insult to injury:
“Cannot you give me a lesson Miss Watson on the art of paying Compliments. – I should be very glad to learn. I want very much to know how to please the Ladies. – one Lady at least.”
Between the lines, the author then intervenes again:
Austen crossed out this entire passage and pinned a patch of paper over it, replacing the fragment with an alternative version in which, instead of letting the multiple embarrassment escalate, Austen gives Emma the floor and has her speak her mind:
“Your Lordship thinks we always have our own way. – That is a point on which Ladies & Gentlemen have long disagreed – But without pretending to decide it, I may say that there are some circumstances which even Women cannot controul. – Female Economy may will do a great deal my Lord, but it cannot turn a small income into a large one.”
The pinned patch physically covers the embarrassing scene, like a fig leaf. The archive keeps both the fig leaf and the naked awkwardness underneath. It also keeps the rest of the manuscript. Whatever reason Austen had to abandon the novel, she did not throw it away.