In a report about Jane Austen, the Oxford professor Kathryn Sutherland is quoted as saying that "much of the credit for her elegant prose must go to publisher's reader and editor William Gifford" (Dashing Austen was not such a stylish writer, 23 October). Sutherland's story of the diminished female author and stylish male editor has been on the Today programme and in every national newspaper; it has circled the globe with headlines such as "Jane Austen's ghostwriter" and "Jane Austen: ¿una 'impostora'?". Last year Sutherland accused another Austen scholar, Claire Harman, of plagiarising her work, claiming that it was "being affected by the publicity surrounding Harman's book". This was robustly denied by Harman. Surely the battle for publicity has now been won. Sutherland's views on Austen have gained global currency.

Your article claims that the old belief that Austen "was one of the most pristine literary stylists of all time has been exploded". How? Apparently by comparing manuscripts and printed texts. But there are no manuscripts of novels printed in Austen's lifetime, and all that exists are two cancelled chapters of the posthumously published Persuasion, the first quite different from the final book. As for the letters and unfinished prose manuscripts, they tell us very little. Letters of most female (and many male) writers from this era proceed with little punctuation except the dash. That editors change authors' spelling and punctuation is common knowledge; even had most of the punctuation been altered by Gifford – which we have absolutely no reason to suppose – this would hardly substantiate the claim that Austen's style was very "different from the cool, ironic, detached stylist of legend".

The article further states: "The Austen myth was fuelled by her brother Henry in 1818, a year after her death: 'Everything came finished from her pen,' he wrote". The press release that accompanied this story from Oxford University Press adds, "commentators continue to share this view today". I know no Austen critic who believes this. Virginia Woolf only slightly exaggerated when, on reading the manuscript works, she claimed that Austen went through "pages of preliminary drudgery" and was no "prolific genius".

The many manuscript pages of Austen are well known to scholars, and have been published several times before in various editions; all the prose and poetry most recently in the Cambridge edition of the works and manuscripts in eight volumes. The final volume was published in 2008 with a lengthy introduction about Austen's writing habits and line-by-line transcriptions of the unfinished novels. For the combined edition, the editors – Linda Bree, Peter Sabor, Antje Blank and I – following the earlier work of the Austen authority Brian Southam, studied first-hand all the writer's manuscripts. This edition complements the edition of the letters by Deirdre Le Faye.

All of us working on the texts of Austen must be delighted at having an online digital version of the author's work; the real achievement is not enhanced by exaggerated and sensational claims.