Postscript.
Why should we regard Lady Susan as a product of the mature Jane Austen?
Because she wrote out a whole fair copy on paper watermarked c.1806. This would have entailed a considerable investment of effort and expensive notepaper. Had she wished to make only minor alterations - delete or add a few letters, edit some others - a cut-and-paste approach would have been more efficient and economical for a novel in epistolary form. She would only undertake a complete re-write if the original manuscript had been so heavily re-written as to be pretty much unintelligible to anyone except the author.
If, at the age of 30, you were re-writing a piece which you had first written at the age of 19, could you resist making substantial changes in line with your more mature understanding? Come on folks, smell the coffee.
