The manuscript chapters of Persuasion (Egerton MS. 3038) exist in a single gathering of 16 leaves (32 pages) and a pasted-in slip of paper (p. 313). The pages are 6 inches in height by 35/8 inches in width (ca. 15 × 9 cm) and are unnumbered. The watermark on the paper is 1812. The manuscript material is divided into two chapters: 10 and 11.

An early transcription was made of the original chapters 10 and 11; it is now in the Hampshire Record Office, Winchester (23M93/64/4/2). The manuscript chapter 10 was first published as a tidied-up transcription in 1871 as part of the second edition of James Edward Austen-Leigh's A Memoir of Jane Austen; in this volume Austen-Leigh made the erroneous claim that for her final version of the novel Jane Austen had condemned all of the original chapter 10 and written ‘two others, entirely different, in its stead’ (p. 157). In 1923 in his volume of Northanger Abbey and Persuasion (volume 5 in the Clarendon Press edition of the novels), R. W. Chapman reproduced Austen-Leigh's transcription of the cancelled chapter 10. When the manuscript was deposited in the British Museum in 1925, R. W. Chapman produced a transcription of chapters 10 and 11. This was published in a volume entitled Two Chapters of Persuasion (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1926). The transcription was accompanied by a facsimile of the original manuscript. He did not on this occasion include the published text of Persuasion.

The two manuscript chapters are superseded in the published work by chapters 10–12 of volume 2. For publication, most of manuscript chapter 10 was radically rewritten by Jane Austen, the resulting material being divided into two chapters (volume 2, chapters 10 and 11). Manuscript chapter 11 became published volume 2, chapter 12, with sometimes moderate and sometimes only light revision.

The first 28 pages of the manuscript of the cancelled chapters form a continuous sequence. Following this sequence is a section beginning, ‘He was very eager’, and concluding, ‘my last day in Bath’ (facsimile on pp. 309–12), which was an afterthought, added when Jane Austen had completed the original version of both manuscript chapters 10 and 11 and ended the manuscript twice with ‘Finis.’