Jane Austen’s unfinished works: Lady Susan/The Watsons/Sanditon (PR4034 .L3 1982)
What do you do after you’ve finished Jane Austen’s six major novels? Probably the best thing would be to wait awhile and then go back and start them again. You can do this indefinitely, and should, but at some point you might be tempted to veer off and Austen’s first novel, Lady Susan, whose story is told as a series of letters. The main character is the manipulative, immoral recent widow Lady Susan, whose goal it is to find rich husbands for herself and her daughter. It’s very funny, and, this being Jane Austen, everything ends happily for the main characters. Austen probably wrote Lady Susan when she was about 18 and apparently never attempted to get it published.
Jane Austen also left two fragments of novels: five chapters of The Watsons (four sisters and a brother with a need to marry) and twelve chapters of Sanditon (the development of a seaside resort; Austen’s only work featuring a mixed-race character) that start off intriguingly and then end abruptly. It’s not clear why she abandoned the books, although she was working on The Watsons at the time of her father’s death, and on Sandition just months before her own death. Other enterprising authors have attempted to finish the books, anticipating plot developments that Austen might have made, but none has been entirely successful. The notes explaining Austen’s revisions to the text, written by Margaret Drabble, are surprisingly engrossing, showing some insight into Austen’s writing process.
