Mea Culpa: Jane Austen’s undiscovered seventh novel

Errors and infelicities in last week’s Independent, put right by John Rentoul

Austen’s House in Chawton is the Hampshire cottage where the author lived and wrote (Getty)

We appeared to have broken a big literary news story, writing, “Jane Austen’s House … was charged in April 2021 with ‘woke madness’ when its attempts to engage with the Austen family’s complicated links to slavery were wilfully misinterpreted.” Was this a reference to a previously unknown seventh novel? Or a long-running television adaptation of Mansfield Park, given a new title for the US market to make clear that it refers to a landed estate rather than a green urban space?

No, it was just a mistaken case of italics applied to the cottage in Chawton, Hampshire, where Austen lived and wrote her novels, which is now a museum. It has a capital “H” because that is the name of the museum, but it has been de-italicised now.

Zombie taste test: In a report of the Australian mushroom poisoning case, we wrote: “Death caps – which taste delicious according to people who have mistakenly eaten them and survived – look similar to other nonpoisonous mushroom species.” We did not need to specify that accounts of their fine taste came from people who have survived. And we belatedly inserted a comma after “other”, because without it a formal reading of the sentence would be that death caps are nonpoisonous.

Opposed to breathing: On Thursday we reported: “Mr Sunak has appeared to shift his tone on green policies after his party unexpectedly clung onto its Uxbridge and South Ruislip seat by seizing on the backlash against the London mayor’s Ulez anti-air pollution charge.” The rogue hyphen made it look as if Sadiq Khan is “anti-air”, so we changed it to “the backlash against the London mayor’s proposal to expand the Ulez scheme, which levies a fee on some motorists in an effort to combat air pollution”.

One of the advantages of The Independent being online-only is that we are able to correct these infelicities after publication. Another is that it doesn’t matter if the easier-to-understand version is slightly longer.

Virtuoso: Hats off to Kate Devlin, who ignored my warning against using any form of the “cannot be understated/overestimated” formula, by using both in her account of past security data breaches in Northern Ireland – and getting them right. “The dangers” of the latest leak affecting the police in Northern Ireland “cannot be underestimated”, she wrote, later adding that “the potential ramifications cannot be overstated”.

It is so easy to get the overs and unders mixed up that I still advise everyone else to avoid the device, but Kate should not be underestimated and is exempt from the Banned List order.

Crooked syntax: In one of our reports of the mystery of the Crooked House pub, we said it was “heavily damaged after the blaze”. It is true that after the fire it remained damaged, but thanks to Philip Nalpanis, who pointed out that we meant “by the blaze”. At least we didn’t say “amid the blaze”.

Pivotage: Thanks for Susan Alexander for pointing out this ungainly sentence in Wednesday’s editorial: “As Ms Zelenska reminds us, it is tempting for states such as Turkey, Kazakhstan and Armenia to try to leverage some short-term tactical gains from covert assistance to Russia.” I am afraid “leverage” is bad enough as a noun, but as a verb it is as unacceptable as “tactical” is unnecessary. What we meant to say was: “... to try to gain some short-term advantage from covert assistance to Russia.”

One century out: We made a howler in Saturday’s quiz last weekend. One of the questions was: “MCMLXXX is which year in Roman numerals?” We gave the answer as 1880, when anyone can see that it is 1980. Sorry about that. We should have asked a more interesting question, such as, “What would be the last Roman numeral if they were listed in alphabetical order?”