Jane Austen Used Pins to Edit Her Manuscripts: Before the Word Processor & White-Out

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Jane Austen Used Pins to Edit Her Manuscripts: Before the Word Processor & White-Out

Before the word processor, before White-Out, before Post-It Notes, there were straight pins. Or, at least that’s what Jane Austen used to make edits in one of her rare manuscripts. In 2011, Oxford’s Bodleian Library acquired the manuscript of Austen’s abandoned novel, The Watsons. In announcing the acquisition, the Bodleian wrote: The Watsons is Jane Austen’s first extant draft of a novel in process of development and one of the earliest example…