A Scrap of Jane Austen

Oh, Austen Nation, did you hear?

A previously unknown scrap of paper hand-annotated by Jane has appeared, tucked into a book at the Jane Austen’s House Museum!

Per NPR:

A small but rare sample of Jane Austen’s handwriting has been found tucked into another book at the Jane Austen’s House Museum. The scrap reads, “Men may get into a habit of repeating the words of our Prayers by rote, perhaps without thoroughly understanding — certainly without thoroughly feeling their full force & meaning.” It is thought to be a passage from one of her brother’s sermons, rather than her own composition, though the museum’s curator, Mary Guyatt, told The Guardian, “What especially intrigued us about this fragment is its apparent date, 1814, and the evidence that offers of the cross-currents between Austen’s family life and her literary reflections on prayer in Chapter 34 of Mansfield Park, published the same year.” Writing on the back of the scrap of paper is less legible, but scholars plan to use humidity to try to clean the paper and decipher it.

I love this. I don’t think I could be more excited if it had been a long-lost novel. It could be a grocery list (“Kale, cheese, cheese, cheese, the good red licorice”), and I’d be thrilled.  And while I’m not sure I’d like my own miscellaneous paper trail to turn up for all posterity, I think this is for the same reason I automatically read everything by Kate Atkinson, and why I heard about the Tina Fey episode of Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee and watched it at lunch in my office that very day: it’s more. I want to hear what these women have to say about pretty much everything, and I’m happy to follow that trail of breadcrumbs. Even if they’re trivial. Especially if they’re trivial, because trivial so often means unrehearsed. And, of course, because Jane is no longer with us, this little surprise bit of everyday presence seems even more precious and exciting. Even if it isn’t something she herself came up with, it’s something that struck her—enough that she wrote it into that apparently telling passage in Mansfield Park. It’s a little bit of Jane’s brain, written out and hidden in a book for two hundred years.

Thanks for the surprise, Jane.