 
The Watsons
This fragment
of a novel was written by Jane Austen about 1803-1805, but was not published until 1871, as part of James Edward Austen-Leigh's
Memoir (Jane Austen had left it untitled; the title The Watsons was provided by Austen-Leigh). It describes Emma
Watson's return, after a long absence, to her family, who are on the lower financial fringes of the "genteel". She attracts
the interest of a nobleman (and according to tradition in Jane Austen's family, she was later to receive and refuse an offer
of marriage from him, and marry a clergyman). It is not clear why Jane Austen did not continue this fragment -- perhaps because
of her father's death; or because she was discouraged by the fact that after she succeded in selling her first novel (Susan,
an earlier version of Northanger Abbey, for a nominal sum in 1803), the publisher decided not to publish after all,
and sat on the manuscript; or because she did not want to sustain the tone of almost "painful realism" (according to Jenkins)
with which she had begun.
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Love and Freindship
Along with a satirical "History of England", Love and Freindship (usually cited in Jane Austen's original
spelling) is the most famous of her Juvenilia. This is an exuberant parody of the cult of sensibility, which she
later criticized in a more serious way in her novel Sense and Sensibility. For the main characters in Love and
Freindship, including the narrator Laura, violent and overt emotion substitutes for morality and common sense. Characters
who have this "sensibility" fall into each other's arms weeping the first time they ever meet, and on suffering any misfortune
are too preoccupied with indulging their emotions to take any effective action. They use their fine feelings as the excuse
for any misdeeds, and despise characters without such feelings:
"They said he was sensible, well informed, and agreeable;
we did not pretend to judge of such trifles, but ... we were convinced he had no soul [because] he had never read The Sorrows
of Werter [by Goethe]."
|
|
|
Sanditon
Jane
Austen wrote this fragment in the last year of her life (1817), while she was still well enough to write. Much lighter in
tone than her last novel Persuasion, which she had recently finished, it describes the visit of Charlotte Heywood
to the seaside village of Sanditon, recently developed and promoted as a resort, and the various amusing and/or unpleasant
characters she meets there. This fragment is particularly frustrating in that it breaks off just as it has finished setting
the scene and introducing the characters (in a very promising way), and the "plot" proper is to begin. This is why it is a
favorite with continuators (see David Hopkinson's article in Grey et. al. and the bibliography of Jane Austen sequels; a recent
fairly well-received completion to Sanditon, by Anne Telscombe, was published in 1975).
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
