Jane Austen’s fiction manuscripts digitised and made available online

A new website which launches on Friday 28 May is collating and making publicly available for the first time a wealth of previously unseen materials from the hand-written fiction manuscripts of Jane Austen.

The project is led by Professor Kathryn Sutherland of St Anne’s College Oxford and funded by a grant from the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC).

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. But now, thanks to the latest digital technology and funding from the AHRC, the manuscripts have been reunited online for the benefit of scholars and the general public alike."

The project breaks new ground in the online presentation and encoding of any author’s manuscript materials, enhancing remote access to Jane Austen’s writings and allowing anyone interested in her work to make new discoveries for themselves and to see her imagination at work.

The Jane Austen’s Fiction Manuscripts Digital Edition, edited by Kathryn Sutherland, is at  http://www.janeausten.ac.uk