If you have a novel inside you that will not come out, or have gone into battle with the blank page and lost, take comfort: Jane Austen knew exactly how you feel.
The novelist’s unfinished manuscript entitled The Watsons is going on display at the Bodleian Library in Oxford, complete with the place where she crossed out an offending paragraph and covered it up with a sheet of paper.
The manuscript is part of an exhibition that opens on Thursday, Write, Cut, Rewrite, bringing together a rare collection of the great edits in English literary history. It shows Austen’s frustration, the censorship of Samuel Beckett and how Mary Shelley borrowed from her husband’s journal.
Other writers who feature include Raymond Chandler, Franz Kafka, James Joyce, Ian Fleming and John le Carré, all of whom provide examples of what might have been in English literature.
“The editorial process, an integral step in the creation of great works of literature, is invisible to the reader when they are enjoying a favourite novel or poem,” said Richard Ovenden, the library’s head. “Our exhibition attempts to bring these cuts and rewrites back from obscurity.”
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The exhibition shows us the various ways in which writers change, trim and even abandon their works. Some are examples of the “Kill your darlings” approach, where beloved ideas are sacrificed for the greater good of the text. Some are tiny tweaks that give an insight into the author’s process. Others are enormous howls of creative frustration.
For Austen, this came in the middle of a conversation in The Watsons where her heroine, Emma Watson, is having an awkward chat about the weather with the young Lord Osborne. It is as English a scene as one could imagine but Austen struggled to form it in her mind. After some effort, she crossed out an entire section of the text. She did so neatly, line by line, yet so offensive was it to her sight that she pinned a piece of paper over it.
She would abandon the text after her father’s death in 1805 but did not throw it away. She kept the manuscript that we have today, while others would have discarded it. Such items are rare, making this collection rather special.
“The exhibition reveals ideas that did not make it into some of our best-known novels, poems or plays — ideas that can only be recovered in manuscripts, held in archives and special collections”, said the curators, Professor Dirk van Hulle and Professor Mark Nixon.
There are not only manuscripts. There are also journals, and Percy Bysshe Shelley’s Geneva notebook reveals an interesting snippet about his working relationship with his wife Mary. The journal contains numerous descriptions that Percy wrote while preparing his poem Mont Blanc. Mary liberally borrowed from one of them, taking bits verbatim which she whacked into Frankenstein. She even literally tore a bit from the notebook. Percy was happy to share and we can see his later revisions.
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Other edits were not of the writer’s volition. A section is devoted to the Lord Chamberlain’s revisions of Beckett’s Waiting for Godot. They have sections marked in a red, fuchsia line and a comment which says: “The lines as marked about a known secondary effect of hanging must come out.” In that section, Vladimir tells Estragon that hanging can cause erections. Estragon resolves that they must “hang ourselves immediately”.
Many of the examples are revisions, albeit ones from famous names. In Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, Fleming changed the Pough family into the Pott family, while Le Carré learnt a lesson in brevity as his opening to Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy was edited from eight lines down to two.
There are also insights into a writer’s process. A scrap from The Lord of the Rings shows how JRR Tolkien would write in pencil and then overwrite in pen. During a chapter titled The Stairs of Cirith Ungol from The Two Towers, he stopped halfway through to draw the scene on the page before continuing to write.
There is also a letter from Kenneth Grahame to his son Alastair in which he writes, “Have you heard about the toad?” before detailing a new character. A note on the envelope describes this as “The beginnings of The Wind in the Willows”.
The exhibition runs at the Bodleian’s Weston Library until January 5 next year and is part of its Season of Great Writers. This will include further exhibitions about Chaucer and Kafka.
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Write Cut Rewrite: The Cutting Room Floor of Modern Literature by Dirk van Hulle & Mark Nixon, Bodleian Library Publishing, £40
