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.