Jane Austen’s complete fiction manuscripts available online

The History of England..By a partial, prejudiced, & ignorant Historian?, a spoof history written by a teenage Jane Austen. Image by kind permission of the British Library and Jane Austen's Fiction Manuscripts Digital Edition. A new website launching today is collating and making publicly available for the first time ever the hand-written fiction manuscripts of Jane Austen. Led by Professor Kathryn Sutherland from the English Faculty of the University of Oxford, and funded by a grant from the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC), the digitisation project is supported by a sophisticated technical infrastructure developed in collaboration with the Centre for Computing in the Humanities at King's College, London. With the launch of the website, anyone with an interest in Jane Austen can now read the author's own hand in rare manuscripts that have previously only ever been seen by a handful of scholars. Professor Sutherland says: 'The manuscripts were originally held in a single collection by Jane's sister Cassandra. However at Cassandra's death in 1845, they were dispersed - first among the Austen family and subsequently into museums and private collections across the world - so the collection hasn't been viewed as a whole for over 150 years.