Jane Austen
Complete untranslated source text — the original English
Jane Austen's complete surviving US-public-domain corpus in her own English, arranged as a writing life: the six novels from Northanger Abbey (finished 1803) to Persuasion (1816), Lady Susan, the three fragments including Sanditon and the pure text of The Watsons, the teenage burlesques of Volume the Second, the Plan of a Novel with both sets of Opinions, ninety-four letters of the 1884 Brabourne edition, and the verse down to the lines she dictated three days before her death. This is a source edition, not a translation: the public-domain text stays English, and Hermitsh Press adds the apparatus the raw files lack — clean chaptered text, stable paragraph citations, per-work headnotes, a glossary of the people and places of the novels and the letters, and source provenance for every work. A small late-published remainder (the 1932 letters, Volume the First and Third, the prayers) is not yet in the US public domain and is documented rather than included.
What makes this different
A few things, taken together, set this edition apart. Click any to expand.
Austen in Austen's English.
No translation is claimed or performed. The readable text is public-domain English source text, cleaned out of archive wrappers and set in chapters and letters, with Austen's own spellings — 'Freindship', 'cheifly', 'Tythes' — and the manuscript abbreviations of the diplomatic texts preserved rather than modernized.
Arranged as a writing life.
The works run by composition, not publication: the juvenilia at 1788-1793, Lady Susan at 1794, Northanger Abbey at its 1803 completion, the great Chawton novels in their writing order, and Sanditon and the Winchester verses at the 1817 end. Posthumous first printings (1871, 1922, 1925, 1926) are recorded in every headnote.
Only Austen's own words.
Everything by another hand is excluded and the exclusion is stated: the two completions of The Watsons, Brabourne's commentary and his two closing letters that are Cassandra's, the Memoir's connecting prose, the thirty-nine family charades that are not Jane's, and the family's rose rhymes beside hers. Nothing by anyone else is presented as Austen.
The letters as a corpus.
Ninety-four letters of 1796-1816 from the two-volume Brabourne edition of 1884, one letter per section under Brabourne's own numbering — the balls and bonnets of Steventon, the publication years of the novels, the advice to Fanny Knight and Anna, and the backwards letter to little Cassy — with the editor's frame removed and every scanner-era correction logged.
Honest scope, dated to the year.
The edition is complete to the US public domain and says exactly where that line falls: letters first collected in 1932, the Volume the First and Volume the Third notebooks, the three prayers, and a handful of later-printed poems remain outside it for now, listed on this page with their expected entry dates rather than passed over in silence.
The corpus
More about this edition Jane Austen's life as a timeline Source on GitHub