In Jane Austen’s time (1775-1817), spelling was still variable as can be seen by her idiosyncratic spellings such as freind, adeiu, beautifull, and wellcome. Whether to hyphen or not to hyphen was not fixed as it is (to a certain extent) today. So I figured, why not look at Jane Austen’s hyphens. Is she regular in terms of when she uses it or does she vary as people do still today? Or do certain words get hyphenated later on or whether certain words undergo dehyphenation?
Let’s find out!
For the purpose of this small research, I looked at the prefixes (or they could also be seen as compound part 1, but I will refer to them as prefixes) well-, ill-, and good-.
I went about this in the following way: I used the Concordance function in WordSmith Tools using the word search syntax well-*/well^*/ill-*/ill^*/good-*/good^*. For explanation’s sake, / allows you to search for multiple words at the same time, * allows you to search for everything that is within the word (i.e. good* will find goodbye, goodness, goody), ^ allows you to search of a specific character of the alphabet and whichever symbols you allow inside a word (a hyphen and an apostrophe, for example). The corpus existed of the works of Jane Austen written by her (accessed through http://www.janeausten.ac.uk/index.html and Jane Austen’s Manuscript Works by Bree et al.), i.e. not the published novels.
Well
Almost all of the instances (13 out of 19) of well are written with a hyphen: for example,
“It is well-known…” in Lady Susan,
“a well-bred Man.” in Evelyn,
“well-penned Note.” in Love and Freindship.
The instances of well without a hyphen are wellcome (3 times), wellfare, wells, and wellbehaved.
The only instance that, considering her earlier instances of well-, would be expected to be written with a hyphen is wellbehaved. This instance occurs in Jack and Alice. This is one of her early stories which she wrote when she was fifteen (1790). It could be that afterwards. she learned about the hyphenation process which could indicate that she wrote Jack and Alice before Love and Freindship as in this text, well only occurs with a hyphen.
Ill
Most of the hits of ill occurred without a hyphen (20 out of 34): for example,
“the long illness..” in Lady Susan,
“which she illustrated with…” in Catharine, or the Bower,
“what an illiterate villain..” in Love and Freindship.
In the case if ill-, you find the following instances:
“accuse her of ill-nature and…” in Lady Susan,
“They were really ill-used.” in Sanditon,
“naturally ill-tempered and Cunnin” in Lesley Castle.
This time around, we found instances of both ill-nature and illnature (even in the same text! Lady Susan), ill-suited and illsuited (in Sanditon and Evelyn,respectively). The ill‘s that would have been expected to be written with a hyphen are illdisposed (The Watsons), illsuited (Evelyn), illhumour (Catharine, or the Bower), and illnature (Lady Susan). It seems that in this case, there does not seem to be a certain pattern as The Watsons was written at the latest date of the texts exemplified (sans Sanditon). It does seem that by the time that Sanditon was written (she started writing this near the end of her life), there are no more ‘mistakes’ in terms of hyphenation.
Good
Most of the instances are, again, written without a hyphen (24 out of 32): for example,
“…nice little goodhumoured Woman…” in The Watsons,
“…speech, was too goodtemper’d…” in Frederic and Elfrida,
“…of propriety and Goodbreeding…” in Catharine, or the Bower.
Hyphens occur in instances such as,
“…a good-looking young Man…” in Lesley Castle,
“…a mere good-tempered…” in Love and Freindship,
“…a good-natured lively Girl…” in Catharine, or the Bower.
What is interesting is that in Sanditon, you only find goodnatured or goodnature and not good-natured, and goodbreeding but not good-breeding. In the Watsons, there are no hyphenations with good either, this may indicate that by the time that Jane Austen wrote the Watsons she already deleted the hyphen when good was attached to either a noun or a past participle (-tempered, -natured).
It might be that she already put a space in between good and the following word and a quick peek into goodnature(d) and good nature(d) shows that they both occur. Not in the same place though! Good-natured occurs in Catharine, or the Bower and Lesley Castle, good nature in Catharine, or the Bower, and goodnature(d) in The Watsons and Sanditon.
It all seems a bit irregular, but later on she does appear to be somewhat more consistent. This sure would be interesting to research some further but as I do not have the time for this as of yet, I might consider another time.
For the Life of Me... 