275–6). The most interesting manuscript is that of Jane Austen’s very last literary work, the set of verses beginning ‘When Winchester races’. There are two manuscripts of that piece extant. One, regularized, is very obviously the work of the revising James, and it is this one which appears in Chapman’s Minor Works. The other manuscript was spoken of so disparagingly by Chapman and by Park Honan that it seemed scarcely worth looking at. This manuscript (in the Henry W. and Albert A. Berg Collection in the New York Public Library) is, however, a revelation. It is the most moving of all of the Austen documents we have encountered in preparing this volume.

This manuscript of ‘When Winchester races’ is in the hand of Cassandra Austen. This is what she wrote at the dictation of her sister, the dying Jane Austen, three days before her death. It is neatly and clearly written, save for a few mistakes and irregularities of the sort that are very likely to happen in any dictation. Perhaps Jane Austen’s voice was failing her a little; it is hard to believe that Cassandra was not agitated. Yet Jane Austen composed the comic verses about the Winchester races being rained out by an annoyed St Swithin, and Cassandra wrote them down, and probably both sisters laughed, sharing a little last happiness together. It was perhaps later and not on that day itself that Cassandra underlined in her sister’s poem the lines ‘When once we are buried you think we are gone/But behold me immortal!’ (see p. 246). We may wonder why the line ends with the word ‘gone’ when the forthcoming rhyme word is to be ‘said’. Is not the obvious phrasing ‘when once we are dead’? (That is the phrasing supplied by James in his edited version.) Did Jane Austen perhaps actually say the word ‘dead’—and did her sister find herself unable to write the word? It is truly moving to see this manuscript, the very piece of paper that was in the room with the two sisters, that quiet and somewhat poky room in Winchester in a rainy July.

Jane Austen wrote these verses on 15 July 1817 and died early in the morning of 18 July. Her immediate family admired the gallant spirit which allowed her to compose verses and leave evidence of a mind functioning to the end; her brother Henry, in the ‘Biographical Notice’ prefaced to the posthumously published Northanger Abbey and Persuasion (December 1817) mentioned the verses, even exaggerating their proximity to the very hour of death: ‘The day preceding her death she composed some stanzas replete with fancy and vigour’10. But, as Deirdre Le Faye and Jo Modert have shown, the younger Austens in the nineteenth century did not approve of Austen’s composing these last verses.11 The reference was deleted from the ‘Biographical Notice’ after 1833, and James Edward Austen-Leigh refused the request of the fifth Earl Stanhope to print the interesting verses in the second edition of the Memoir (first published in 1870). Jane Austen’s niece Caroline was vexed at ‘Uncle Henry’ for having referred to the lines. She and James Edward found them an embarrassment, too ‘light and playful’ as James Edward told the Earl. Caroline was afraid of these lines being ‘introduced as the latest working of her mind … the joke about the dead Saint, & the Winchester races, all jumbled up together, would read badly as amongst the few details given, of the closing scene’.12 Caroline’s letter of June 1871 shows us a sharp difference between the eighteenth century and the High Victorian age. Jane Austen was an eighteenth-century woman and valued the courage of wit, as well as the endeavour to take some pleasure in the circumstances life offered. Jane herself—and the sorrowing Cassandra and Henry—could esteem the merry heart that has fortitude and flexibility enough to maintain cheerfulness (and ‘fancy and vigour’) even in the Valley of the Shadow.

When the young Jane Austen was writing in her notebooks, however, the Valley of the Shadow was a long way off. The young Jane Austen wrote and wrote. And yet she never wrote verbosely, or lachrymosely (common faults of adolescent writers). Even more surprising, she is not autobiographical, nor does she plunge into some form of fiction that allows easy egress to the wishes of the dreamy self. Her writing is always awake, always witty. And what she wrote are (at least in some sense) shrewd and laughing parodies of contemporary fiction. Thus far everyone is in agreement.

But as to what to make of these first works, opinion may differ widely.