Reference no: EM133367507

Questions: Read the following draft below and answer the questions in full deatil in the form of a peer review.

• What works well in the draft, and why?
• At what points in the draft were you confused, and why?
• What other suggestions do you have to the writer at this point?

Case: Following our assignment on creative writing processes, I was interested to learn more about the writing methods and techniques of the well-known author Jane Austen. I think understanding Austen's struggles and learning that even great writers like her struggled will help
ease the stress of writer's block. In this article, I will dive into her writing methods and practices and explain her struggles as a female writer ruled by a man's world. Jane Austen cultivated her talents through personal observation and interpretation of  others and often wrote on small slips of paper using a quill. Her way of writing was to craft her initial draft, then cross out phrases or whole paragraphs of work. Next, she would revise the
entire piece. "The experienced writers describe their primary objective when revising as finding the form or shape of their argument" (Sommers, 384). One of the most essential and loved parts of her process was reading her work aloud to her friends and family, particularly her sister Cassandra. Looking over preserved manuscripts, it is easy to observe that Austen was not troubled by grammatical errors and punctuation as she wrote. "Professor Kathryn Sutherland of Oxford University studied over a thousand original handwritten pages of Austen's unpublished writings and points out that they feature blots, crossing outs, and "a powerful counter-grammatical way of writing"" (Riches).

Though she had tried many different genres and voices, she finally felt she had found her voice when she was just 20. Though Austen never married, she was skilled at observing others and translating those interactions into her "voice." Her style of writing and voice is more of an
omniscient narrator, where the author tells the story in a third-party voice, having access to the character's inner thoughts and emotions. Austen would often focus more on speech and action instead of the description of the scene. In fact, if you open one of her books, it is packed full of dialog, which is structured more like a script and ideal to read aloud. "Jane Austen also made extensive use of a style known as "free indirect discourse" or "free indirect style"" (Janes Austen's House). This literary technique is when the narrator's voice appears to take on properties of the character's voice to the extent that as a reader, you are not quite sure who owns the words or thoughts Though she did not create this technique or was the first writer to utilize this style, she is one of the few writers to use it consistently. Other writers that have used this technique are Virginia Woolf and James Joyce. Both of them used this style in the early twentieth century.

In 1801, Jane Austen's father, George, a retired clergyman, moved his wife and two unwed daughters to Bathe. Shortly after their move, Jane found her creativity stifled. She found that the move took her from the very things she felt influenced her writing, which were the  feelings of home, nature, privacy, friends, and neighbors. This caused her to lose her muse, and  for nearly five years, Jane neglected her pen. However, all of the struggles and uncertainty in  Bathe are what contributed to her later works being so successful. "Tucked into the pages of  Pride and Prejudice, Sense and Sensibility, Persuasion, and the rest, are glimpses of this time  when she could not write." Jane only found her muse again after her brother purchased a cottage.

This is where she produced her later work and where she lived when her early books were
published.

In 1803, she permitted her brother to submit her novel Susan to a publisher named Benjamin Crosby, who paid her brother 10 pounds. Though Crosby never fulfilled his promise to publish the work. Through all of Jane's rejections, she pressed on and continued to work towards her goal of publication. Like many other female writers of the time, she had to be incredibly  determined and resorted to writing under pseudonyms. Austen was incredibly witty, and in 1809 she even wrote to Benjamin Crosby under the name Mrs. Ashley Denni, which was a pseudonym with an acronym of M.A.D. Unable to presser Crosby into publishing, her novel sat. Finally, in  1816, Jane's brother Henry was able to purchase back the copyright of Susan. Having been fed up with the rejection, she received from some publishers, between the  years of 1811 and 1816, she anonymously published Sense and Sensibility (1811), Pride and Prejudice (1813), Mansfield Park (1814), and Emma (1815). Austen then signed her novels as  "by a lady," only making her gender known to the public. "The significance of her work being
anonymous was that she showed to the male audience that woman could write well while adding  a sense of mystery" (Nicholson). Austen's identity was not revealed until after her death by her  brother.

In conclusion, Jane Austen learned and struggled like the rest of us. Though writing came naturally, she also suffered from the dreaded writer's block. Jane used her struggles as a steppingstone that ultimately added to why she is revered as one of the greatest female writers.
She followed her beliefs that women should marry for love, and though she was never married, Austen defied eighteenth-century gender roles and expectations. On November 18, 1814, in a letter written to her niece Fanny Knigh, she expressed her opinions on love: "There are such

beings in the world, perhaps one in a thousand, as the creature you and I should think perfection; where grace and spirit are united to worth, where the manners are equal to the heart and understanding; but such a person may not come in your way, or, if he does, he may not be the eldest son of a man of fortune, the near relation of your particular friend, and belonging to your own county" (Nicholson).