Thursday, October 8, 2020

A New Edition of ‘Pride and Prejudice’

 From Smithsonian:

 The regularity of the mail in Austen's novels is often the heart of the story. Indeed, it is generally agreed that Austen's most famous work, Pride and Prejudice, began as an epistolary novel called First Impressions, consisting exclusively of letters between the characters. The epistolary novel was one of the main traditions from which Austen's remarkable realism emerged, and in each of her six full-length novels, letters serve (quite naturally) as crucial points in developing plot and character. To imagine an Austen novel without letters would be, to borrow a word from Jane Fairfax, astonishing.

Now, Barbara Heller, a set decorator for film and television, has curated a special edition of Pride and Prejudice that offers readers handwritten reproductions of the 19 letters that appear in the novel, artfully rendered by calligraphers at the New York Society of Scribes. Turn to Chapter VII in the first volume, for instance, and you'll find a sleeve enclosing two letters: one from the fancy Caroline Bingley, inviting the more modest Jane Bennet to luncheon at lavish Netherfield Hall, and a subsequent note from Jane, informing her younger sister Elizabeth that she has caught a cold en route to Netherfield. The two letters are written in visibly different styles of handwriting—which is exactly what Heller had in mind when she set out on the project.

"Austen herself correlated handwriting with character," says Heller. "I thought Jane Bennet would have sweet, pretty handwriting, and we know from the novel that Mr. Darcy writes in a really even hand, and Caroline Bingley writes in a very flowing hand." (Read more.)


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