Bore and Boredom

20 July 2007



UK Publishers Reject Jane Austen Manuscript

David Lassman is a would-be novelist who is discovering that there is a big gap bridged by that hyphen. He hasn’t had much luck in getting a publisher in the UK for his work, so he decided to see if he would have any luck with someone else’s. Since he works at the Jane Austen Centre in Bath, England, as the director of the Jane Austen Festival, he submitted some of Ms. Austen’s works. Of 18 UK publishing pros, only one spotted the ruse. That could mean they don’t know their literary history, or that they couldn’t be bothered to read the submissions, or that Ms. Austen couldn’t get published in 2007. One expects it’s a mix of all three and must confess to disliking her works intensely.

Mr. Lassman typed out the first three chapters of Northanger Abbey a dreadful book first published in 1798, Pride and Prejudice, a book that’s much shorter than it seems from 1813, and the understandably ignored Persuasion from 1818. The only changes he made were to the characters’ names and the titles. Even here, he gave the dupes a clue, calling P&P by its original title First Impressions, giving his return address at work, and signing them all Alison Laydee, punning on Ms. Austen’s early pseudonym A Lady.

Penguin, which currently publishes P&P in the UK, wrote back that the first chapters of the manuscript was “a really original read,” but never asked to see the rest. Bloomsbury, Random House, Harper Collins and Hodder & Stoughton all turned the book down. With publishers like that, it must come as no surprise that literary agency Christopher Little, JK Rowling’s agent, was “not confident of placing this material with a publisher.”

Mr. Lassman said of his experiment, “Getting a novel accepted is very difficult today unless you have an agent first, but I had no idea of the scale of rejection poor old Jane suffered.” He also said, “If the major publishers can't recognize great literature, who knows what might be slipping through the net? Here is one of the greatest writers that has lived, with her oeuvre securely fixed in the English canon and yet only one recipient recognized them as Austen’s work.”

And who came out of this with reputation intact? Alex Bowler of publishers Jonathan Cape Ltd. His reply read, “Thank-you for sending us the first two chapters of First Impressions; my first impression on reading these were ones of disbelief and mild annoyance, along, of course, with a moment’s laughter. I suggest you reach for your copy of Pride and Prejudice, which I’d guess lives in close proximity to your typewriter, and make sure that your opening pages don’t too closely mimic that book’s opening.”

Perhaps now, Mr. Lassman will have generated enough of a buzz about himself that an agent or publisher will look at his own work more closely. Sad what an author has to go through, isn't it?

© Copyright 2007 by The Kensington Review, Jeff Myhre, PhD, Editor. No part of this publication may be reproduced without written consent. Produced using Fedora Linux.

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