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A rare Jane Austen manuscript has sold for £993,250 ($1.6m) in London, three times more than its estimated price.
Auction house Sotheby's had originally valued the unfinished novel - entitled The Watsons - at £200,000-300,000.
It is thought Austen wrote the tale, about a young woman who returns home to her father's household after being brought up by a wealthy aunt, in 1804.
The work is particularly important because few of Austen's draft works have survived, with the exception of two draft chapters of Persuasion, Lady Susan, and Sanditon.
Sotheby's specialist Gabriel Heaton said this piece of Austen's work is "particularly informative" because it is "very much a working draft".
Every page is littered with crossings out, revisions and additional text between some of the lines.
"We are thrilled by the sale of the earliest surviving manuscript for a novel by Jane Austen today," Mr Heaton said.
The BBC's arts editor Will Gompertz, who attended the auction, said there had been a very real possibility of the manuscript being sold to a foreign buyer.
When he asked on whose behalf he had bought the manuscript, all the winning man would reply was "an institution".
That could quite easily have been the Morgan Library in New York which already owns an eight-page element of the manuscript.
But it was in fact The Bodelian Libraries in Oxford who acquired the unfinished novel, with the help of a substantial grant from the National Heritage Memorial Fund (£894,700).
"Judging by the size of the grant their success was a close run thing - many more leaps of £20,000 in the bids being invited by the auctioneer and it would seem that they might have been out of the running," said Gompertz.
Austen published six complete novels, including Pride and Prejudice and died in 1817 at
the age of 41.
source: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-14152092
the age of 41.
source: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-14152092
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