Jane Austen e la punteggiatura

Di nuovo sugli errori di punteggiatura. Questa volta a usarla scorrettamente pare fosse Jane Austen. "The truth universally acknowledged, that Jane Austen was one of the most pristine literary stylists of all time, has been exploded: her punctuation was erratic, her use of capital letters eclectic and her paragraph breaks often nonexistent. ... In fact much of the credit for her elegant prose must go to publisher's reader and editor William Gifford, according to an academic who has compared the manuscripts and the published versions line by line. Gifford, a much more obscure figure who was said to be shy and awkward, polished up Austen's manuscripts, smoothing out the style, regularising the punctuation, introducing the famous exquisitely placed semicolons and eliminating her blizzards of dashes. ... 'Does it make her less of a genius?' said Professor Kathryn Sutherland of the English language and literature faculty at Oxford University. 'I don't think so,' she said, answering her own question. 'Indeed I think it makes her more interesting, and a much more modern and innovative writer than had been thought. In particular, her use of dashes to heighten the emotional impact of what she is writing is striking: you have to wait for Virginia Woolf to see anything comparable." g/o.