A blast from my past & Jane Austen at 250!

Manuscript pages 07 to 08 transcribed from Frank Austen’s memoirs

Not many people know this about me, but as part of my studies towards completion of my Ph.D. thesis, I became expert in the study of paleography (old handwriting). My specialty was early modern Spanish of the 15th through 17th centuries, pretty hard to read. So transcribing an excerpt from the memoirs of Jane Austen’s brother Frank (1774-1865) came naturally, and I found it truly thrilling to read! Thanks to the extensive online records of Britain’s Royal Navy, it was also really fun to corroborate the facts and connect the dots between the people, places and ships mentioned on these pages.

How did I get involved? Well, I simply responded to a call, put out by The Jane Austen House via The Guardian Newspaper and soon received pages 07 to 08!

Discover more about this literary adventure and how Frank’s naval career may have fed into his sister Jane’s novels.

Read Frank Austen’s memoirs.