Charlotte Bronte's Heron Scissors: Cancellations and Excisions in the Manuscript of Shirley

Charlotte Bronte's legible and beautifully uniform handwriting mesmerizes the reader of her manuscripts. It is so neat that even when (or perhaps because) a passage is cancelled, the reader is tempted to decode it, thus violating the author's explicit wishes to eliminate it altogether. After the publication of Jane Eyre, she resorted to a more radical and effective means of concealing her struggle to write Shirley: excision by scissors. While she still cancelled portions of text simply by crossing them out with one thin line that left the text perfectly legible, she used excisions twenty-eight times in this manuscript. This paper examines how Charlotte Bronte escalated from cancellation in Jane Eyre to cancellation and excision in Shirley.