Ingrid Tieken-Boon van Ostade has a chair in English Sociohistorical Linguistics at the University of Leiden Centre for Linguistics (Leiden, The Netherlands). Her two most recent books include The Bishop's Grammar: Robert Lowth and the Rise of Prescriptivism (OUP, 2011) and An Introduction to Late Modern English (EUP, 2009). She is currently the director of the research project "Bridging the Unbridgeable: Linguists, Prescriptivists and the General Public".

• Preface and acknowledgements ; Abbreviations ; Chapter 1. Introduction ; 1.1. Introduction ; 1.2. The language of the letters ; 1.3. A sociolinguistic analysis ; 1.4. Jane Austen's language ; 1.5 A single-author, focussed corpus ; 1.6. The wider perspective ; Chapter 2. Letter-writing ; 2.1. Introduction ; 2.2. The surviving letters and those that were lost ; 2.3. Letter-writing materials ; 2.4. The postal system ; 2.5. Letter-writing: a social activity ; 2.6. Being dependent on the post ; Chapter 3. A social network of letter writers ; 3.1. Introduction ; 3.2. Jane Austen's correspondents ; 3.3. Letter-writing formulas ; 3.3.1. An index of formality? ; 3.3.2. Opening formulas ; 3.3.3. Closing formulas ; 3.3.4. Dating and signing letters ; 3.4. The correspondence network and the lost letters ; Chapter 4. The letters as a corpus ; 4.1 Introduction ; 4.2 Types of letters ; 4.3 Self-corrections ; 4.4 Short forms ; 4.5 Dashes and capitalisation ; 4.6 Two corpora for analysis ; Chapter 5. The language of the letters: Spelling ; 5.1. Introduction ; 5.2 A dual spelling system ; 5.3. Epistolary spelling in the letters ; 5.3.1. Tho' and thro' ; 5.3.2. Older spellings ; 5.3.3. Other epistolary spelling features ; 5.4. More variable spelling features ; 5.5. Problems with the apostrophe ; 5.6. Spelling as evidence of pronunciation ; 5.7. A consistent if idiosyncratic speller ; Chapter 6. The language of the letters: Words ; 6.1. Introduction ; 6.2. Jane Austen in the OED ; 6.3. Creative language use ; 6.4. Vulgar words and intensifiers ; 6.5. Linguistic involvement ; 6.6. Referring to close relatives ; 6.7. Jane Austen's linguistic fingerprint? ; Chapter 7. The language of the letters: Grammar ; 7.1. Introduction ; 7.2. Developing grammatical awareness ; 7.3. Variable grammar in the letters ; 7.4. Verbal -ing forms ; 7.5. Changing grammar ; Chapter 8. Authorial identity ; 8.1. Introduction ; 8.2. The discarded Persuasion chapters ; 8.3. Different house styles for Mansfield Park? ; 8.4. Dating The Watsons ; 8.5. Why analysing spelling matters ; Chapter 9. Conclusion ; Appendix 1. Letters referred to in the text ; Appendix 2. Letters (sent and received) referred to by Jane Austen ; Appendix 3. Transcription of letter 139 ; Appendix 4. Jane Austen's epistolary network ; References

thoroughly and painstakingly provides the linguistic evidence for a number of assertions which might previously have been based on intuition or common sense ... clearly an excellent example of the sociolinguistic approach to written text.