Pride, prejudice and poor punctuation

Everyone on the interwebs is talking about Jane Austen's sloppy subbing skills . It turns out she wasn't the  the pristine literary stylist most imagined, in fact, she got super liberal with her use of colons, capitals and commas when they weren't actually necessary (and here I was thinking spinsterhood was the only thing we had in common!) Obviously Jane's editor had to get busy with red marker and everything was heavily edited before it went to print. This is not that unusual it's just that Jane's brother Henry fuelled the myth that she never put a letter out of place when, a year after her death, in 1818 he wrote, "Everything came finished from her pen".

Sensibility

I love Jane Austen. Girl can write an elegantly structured, irony rich, feminist portrait of 18th Century romantic politics and my goodness can she slam dunk a love triangle. I've never checked out those books where they mince up her work like Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters or Pride and Prejuidice and Pool Ponies or whatever it's called but I guess the release of this new CD is a similarly dark moment in marketing Austen. I give you... Bonnet Dramas Revisited.

The presser says "'Bonnet dramas’ is TV-speak for those wonderful, detailed costume productions on TV and film that have given us all so much pleasure! Whether it’s the joyous score of Pride & Prejudice with its historically-informed colour or the thrilling nobility of the music for Persuasion, you can have it all! 

Having it all never seemed quite so terrifying. I say leave Jane alone... unless you are the makers of a classic BBC mini series then, please, go about your magical business of creating the greatest television period dramas of all time. Thank you.