In ch.19 Miss Bates appologizes that Jane Fairfax´letter was shorter than usual:

"...only two pages, you see, hardly two, and in general she fills the whole paper and crosses half. My mother often wonders that I can make it out so well. She often says...'Well, Hetty, now I think you will be put to it to make out all that chequer-work'"

In the footnote of my translation it says that in JA´s time it was popular to write letters in a "chessboard-pattern", which meant that you wrote right across over the allready written text.

Now my question is wether there is an example to be seen as I can hardly imagine how a text written over by another text can be deciphered at all...