Don't [sic] Jane Austen

"A woman, especially,if she have [sic] the misfortune of knowing anything,should conceal it as well as she can."
Jane Austen,
Northanger Abbey

Back to Jane Austen and subjunctives from my previous post...
The picture above is from page 11 of Masterpiece's The Complete Guide to Teaching Jane Austen, a beautiful, full-color, teaching guide aimed at educators who want to use the film adaptations of Jane Austen's works in the classroom. I was looking through the guide and came across the above-referenced quote with the bracketed [sic].

Inserting a [sic] in a quoted text draws attention to the fact that an apparent error in spelling or grammar is part of the original and not an editorial blunder:
Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English defines sic as follows:

sic: Latin used after a word that you have copied in order to show that you know it was not spelled or used correctly.

and the The American Heritage® New Dictionary of Cultural Literacy:

sic: A Latin word for “thus,” used to indicate that an apparent error is part of quoted material and not an editorial mistake.

So, what's wrong with the quote? Obviously, a present-day speaker would most likely say, "A woman, especially,if she has the misfortune of knowing anything...", well actually a modern speaker probably wouldn't give this kind of advice to a young woman, but that's a cultural difference and we're talking about grammar here. And then there's the author's intent, Jane Austen was a master of verbal irony and satire, so even though she seems to be telling women to hide their "smarts", she is really exposing such a view to criticism, but again, I digress from the grammatical point I was making.

Back to the point, is "if she have the misfortune of knowing anything..." grammatically incorrect? Should it be, "if she has the misfortune of knowing anything..." The answer lies in the grammatical mood (also called mode) of the verb (have/has), and progressive dwindling of the use of the subjunctive in English. The word if, lets us know that this is a conditional statement.

The mood or mode of a verb is "the manner in which the action, being, or state is expressed. There are five modes: the indicative, subjunctive, potentioal, imperative, and infinitive. The indicative mode asserts a thing as a fact, ... as, "The man walks,"

"The subjunctive mode asserts a thing as doubtful, as a wish, a supposition, or a future contingency; as, "If this be true, all will end well,..."(Harvey's Revised English Grammar)

So what form should the subjunctive of the verb "to have" take in the quoted sentence, "A woman, especially, if she have the misfortune of knowing anything, should conceal it as well as she can."? To find the answer to this, (I know my readers are burning up with desire for the answer to this question, as I was.) I had to look at 18th century English grammar:
from : The Treatment of the Subjunctive in Eighteenth-century Grammars of English by Anita Auer:

White (White, James. The English Verb (London, 1761))describes the formal aspect of the subjunctive by explaining the way it differs from the indicative mood:
All the difference, then between the Present of the Subjunctive Mood, and the Present of the Indicative, is; that the word expressive of the Verb undergoes changes of termination in several of the persons of the Present Tense of the Indicative, but none in the persons of the Subjunctive. Thus, in the Present of the Indicative, have changes into hast or have, has or hath, in the Person of the Singular Number, before in the Plural it return again to have; whereas, in the Subjunctive Mood, it continues have without variation, in every Person of each Number.

There it is! Eureka! The subjunctive form of the verb "to have" stays the same, "have", even in the singular, "I have", "You have", "He, she it have".

I rest my case! Don't go [siccing] Jane Austen! She was a master of polite English grammar, and knew her subjunctives from her indicatives; we should all be so nice!

(To see Henry Tilney's lamentation over the degradation of the word nice in Northanger Abbey, click on the bold word nice, and read the page, or after clicking, search on the page for nice.)