Geoff Nunberg offers a different take at Language Log:
There are some careless errors, but these are rough drafts, and you can't take off points for something that hasn't been handed in yet. And by the standards of the time, she wasn't a bad speller. She was inconsistent about possessives, and she sometimes put e before i in words like believe and friendship, but you can find the same thing in the manuscripts of Byron and Scott and Thomas Jefferson — the rules just weren't settled yet...More at the link.
Punctuation was in flux, too. Modern readers will be disconcerted to see Austen sticking a comma between a subject and verb or strewing dashes apparently at random. But as Sutherland herself noted in an earlier book, Austen often used punctuation to signal the rhythms of speech rather than the grammatical structure...
As one grammarian put it, the semicolon is the mortar that joins two ideas into a greater one. But semicolons don't create a structure; they just point to one. It's nice to know where a semicolon is supposed to go, but it's nothing to swell your chest over. The artistry is in being able to write sentences that require one...
If you would like to view Jane Austen's manuscripts directly (vide image above), go to this link and explore.
I will say this. The more I write (and I do a lot of technical writing) the more I realize that I do not care one lick about punctuation as long as there is a competent writer involved. If you have some moron mucking up their writing with dubious grammar then it is atrocious. But, competent writers are often much more expressive when they break the rules than when they follow them. The analogy that comes to mind is Jackson Pollack vs. a kid with buckets of paint, there is a difference.
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