Manuscript O

I chose to transcribe this manuscript because I liked the handwriting. The transcription procedure that I followed is neither purely genetic nor purely clean in its approach, but uses elements of both approaches and is about as involved with ‘cleaning’ as with genetic tracing. In part the reason for dearth of genetic tracing within the transcription relates to the relative lack of genetic information that the manuscript provides in so far as, to my eye, erasure, overwriting and editorial insertion are unusually limited. There is, for example, only one instance of insertion, which involves the word ‘been’, and that I have enclosed in brackets at the point at which it occurs in the transcription in order to indicate that this word is an insertion. As for cleaning, I have suppressed a quotation mark that would appear to open a quote, except that the sentence does not read as if the material is being quoted and there is no corresponding close –quote notation. I have included the underline mark that appears seven times in the document, but not every time (or not even half of the time) before the first word of a new sentence. I do not know if this mark represents an idiosyncracy of the letter writer, a convention of her own or perhaps a wider convention of the time for marking a new paragraph. I decided to leave it in. I have also retained underlined words when they appear and where, very rarely, a shorter underline mark appears mid-sentence, I have also retained it along with the manuscript punctuation which relies heavily on the semi-colon. In short, a guiding principle that I have followed is to avoid suppressing information when I am not too sure of its significance.

Paul Holchak