Those are Jane's words...

 I don't care what Kathryn Sutherland wrote or said or believes. I don't care if Jane Austen's editor added a comma or two or a semicolon here or there. I love the stories and the characters and the events of the novels. I believe those words were written by Jane Austen herself and whether an editor or her sister changed a word or a mark of punctuation, it doesn't matter. She dreamed up those stories and had the courage to write them down at a time when most women didn't know how to write. She dreamed of being a novelist at a time when women were not supposed to dream of such things.

For more on this topic, there was a wonderful piece on NPR today by linguist Geoff Nunberg. Here's the link.

Don't mess with Jane!!!!