British Library to put on display Austen’s notes of what friends, family and correspondents thought of her third novel

Many novelists studiously avoid hearing opinions about their writing, but Jane Austen not only encouraged it, she meticulously compiled them in thorough, sometimes hilarious notes.



Next month the British Library will put on display Austen’s handwritten notes of what friends, family and correspondents thought of her third novel, Mansfield Park.

A display marking the bicentenary of Austen’s death will also include three volumes of writings from her teenage years, being brought together for the first time in 40 years.

The Mansfield Park document is fascinating. It shows that Austen’s mother, Cassandra, thought the novel not as good as Pride & Prejudice and found the heroine, Fanny, “insipid”. Her sister, also called Cassandra, on the other hand was “fond of Fanny” and “delighted much in Mr Rushworth’s stupidity”.

A lady called Augusta Bramstone is recorded by Austen as thinking Sense & Sensibility and Pride & Prejudice “nonsense … but [she] expected to like M.P. better, & having finished the 1st vol. – flattered herself she had got through the worst”.



Facebook Twitter Pinterest Austen’s notes. Photograph: British Library

The library’s manuscripts curator Sandra Tuppen said Austen was keen to know the opinions of as many people as possible. “She wasn’t getting published reviews, so this was a way of justifying what she was doing by getting these opinions. I don’t think she would have done it if she felt completely confident.”

Austen collected dozens of opinions and documented them faithfully, good or bad. Mrs Bramstone, for example, was much pleased, particularly with Fanny. She preferred it to Austen’s other books, although she “imagined that might be her want of taste – as she does not understand wit”.

A man called Charles “did not like it near so well as P&P – thought it wanted incident.”

Austen, one suspects, would have been a regular self-Googler, but other writers prefer not to know. In a Radio Times interview this week, Julian Barnes revealed he allowed his agent to send him only the “three best” reviews of the latest novel. And as for online reviews: “I never go there. I think a lot of mad people operate there.”

Tuppen said what was striking about the Austen notes was that she had phrased them in her own voice: “It is creative writing as well as just gathering information.”

Mansfield Park was published in 1814 and is sometimes, unfairly, called Austen’s dullest book. Her notes about it will be displayed next to three volumes from her formative years, two owned by the library and one being lent by the Bodleian in Oxford.

They include a spoof version of English history featuring illustrations of kings and queens by sister Cassandra, with her drawing of Mary Queen of Scots looking suspiciously like young Jane.

The library’s chief executive, Roly Keating, said it was impossible to mark every literary anniversary, but it felt it had to for Austen. “This is the British Library … we can’t let the moment pass without a bit of a celebration.”



The objects going on display said much about “her humour. and wit, and liveliness, and invention, even at that young age,” he said.

The library also formally announced that it was making the archive of PG Wodehouse publicly available for the first time. Containing letters, manuscript drafts and notebooks, it is being loaned by the writer’s step-grandson Sir Edward Cazalet.

• Jane Austen Among Family and Friends is at the British Library 10 January-19 February.