Gosh, I think that's above my pay grade. You know who to ask - on MeFi - might be Horace Rumpole. I've never seen him pop up here, or I'd just add him to your "paging" annoucement.

Yo thanks for the response! I think they've published it in a book so I'd have to get a hold of that. To be honest what I really want to do is own something from her originals *evil face* need to get rich first (at which point I'd realize it's more efficient to someone with an actual museum setup hold it.)

I just looked up why I thought of you and it turns out you were telling me a second-hand story of a rare book librarian; "He had neat observations of what Keats people are like, Meliville people are like, but he was like "Dickensonians are the WORST." coz he found them crying and swooning over her originals. haha

Quick diversionary search: Amherst College in Amherst, MA owns the manuscript (citation on p. 140 of the finding aid). Information on use.

props init! wow that's a *lot* of first lines.

My, her handwriting was pretty.

you were telling me a second-hand story of a rare book librarian

Yeah - though I didn't know it at the time, Horace_Rumpole works with that librarian!

My, her handwriting was pretty.

I also find it interesting how her dashes look shorter than hypens, almost, but when we print them we'd insist on actual dash characters (—) which are more imposing in the flow of the text.

That's true and a good observation, Firas.

I think we (today) have a harder time understanding the dash. It was really common in Victorian correspondence. I always think it gives a sense of "I'm writing quickly just to capture these fleeting ideas and words, and I recognize I haven't constructed the kind of compound sentence with complete punctuation we expect from journalism and novels, and that's okay because this is a private communication and you have access to my unrestructured thoughts."

Overemphasizing them as a mannered, always-intentional punctuation seems a little off the mark to me sometimes.