Novels of Jane Austen

• Emma
• Mansfield Park
• Northanger Abbey *
• Persuasion *
• Pride and Prejudice
• Sense and Sensibility
• Lady Susan *
• The Watsons (unfinished)*
• Sanditon (unfinished)*

Emma

...That was how I wrote it on Everything 1. Now here's some more (written 11th April 2001) for Everything 2...

Emma is the brightest of Jane Austen's comedies. Emma Woodhouse is a very intelligent and personable young woman with a lively sense of fun - or as the opening sentence says it far better than I can, "Emma Woodhouse, handsome, clever, and rich, with a comfortable home and happy disposition, seemed to unite some of the best blessings of existence; and had lived nearly twenty-one years in the world with very little to distress or vex her."

She has a keen eye for romance and sees herself as a matchmaker. She believes herself instrumental in the marriage of her former governess, now mother-figure and friend, Miss Taylor, to their neighbour Mr Weston.

She does not envisage a romance or even a marriage for herself, which is oddly blind of her, for the reader knows upon his first appearance that she is to marry Mr Knightley, an old family friend, who has borne with her as a child and stood up to her freaks and foibles, the only person not dazzled by her superior talents. He cautions her against the folly of her matchmaking endeavours, but she playfully persists, believing that in such matters she has the superior discernment, skill, and subtlety.

Emma plucks from obscurity an artless, amiable, unintelligent creature called Harriet Smith, a "natural daughter" of some unknown gentleman, deposited at the local school: in her Emma sees potential for transformation into a goodly lady. She sets Harriet's sights on Mr Elton, the new clergyman. He however mistakes the intentions for those of Emma herself, and so encouraged, leaps upon her in a carriage and fulsomely woos her, which she rejects with horror.

With this her plans for poor Harriet are in ruins, and this reveals to herself the follies of playing at Lady Bountiful with other people's affections.

Her insight keeps failing her, yet she persists. Two new characters appear on the scene. Frank Churchill is Mr Weston's estranged son, prevented from attending on him as much as he would like by a superior foster-parent; but now Frank turns up in the village of Highbury and makes himself very popular. Even Emma begins to think that in him she might just possibly have met someone worthy of her hand. Another is Jane Fairfax, also that rare thing the equal of an Emma Woodhouse: as beautiful and talented and refined, but reserved where Emma is forthright. She and Mrs Weston worry whether Mr Knightley might not be paying too much attention to Miss Fairfax. Miss Woodhouse feels natural feminine feelings on this point, and cannot like Miss Fairfax entirely, however much she tries.

Jane is the granddaughter of Mrs Bates and niece of Miss Bates, two poor but honest worthies who are the object of Emma's kindly attentions. Mrs Bates is deaf, and proud of her Jane; Miss Bates is silly, and chatters too much: she is one of the many good comic creations of the novel. A serious point is made against Emma when in a pleasure expedition they all make to the local scenic viewpoint of Box Hill, Emma carelessly says something slighting and less than wholly kind about Miss Bates, within her hearing. Mr Knightley's reprimand mortifies her. This is another element that makes her think seriously about herself.

As does her remarkable discovery that Harriet, recovering from her slight at Mr Elton's hands by the well-meaning notice of Mr Knightley, now thinks that she might aspire to his heart: and Emma, to her growing horror, realises that she cannot rule it out on his part, but wants dearly to, for if anyone is to marry Mr Knightley, she, Emma, must.

Another comic character is Emma's valetudinarian father, who subsists on gruel, very thin gruel, and fears his guests will be harmed any food they take, unless they be very small portions. He recommends his own doctor to anyone at the slightest hint of any illness.

Emma was the fourth and final novel published in her lifetime. By now Jane Austen was very famous indeed. The Prince Regent loved her novels and had copies in all his residences: by the intercession of his chaplain, who conducted a chatty correspondence with Jane Austen, he begged for the honour of having a novel dedicated to him. She did so, coolly, for she did not much approve of the Prince Regent. It appeared at the beginning of 1816, and with that she turned her hand to her last and greatest novel, Persuasion.

Mansfield Park

...That was how I wrote it on Everything 1. Now here's some more (written 10th April 2001) for Everything 2...

Mansfield Park is about a rich family, a poor family, and a dashing family. The Bertrams are rich, the patriarch Sir Thomas Bertram having estates in the West Indies and a large house. The Prices are their poor cousins, and Sir Thomas and his wife offer to foster one of their young cousins as a good turn, so Fanny Price is dispatched from Portsmouth to the country, and grows up amid her rich cousins. None of them is truly unkind to her, except the detestable and hypocritical Mrs Norris, but she is still an ugly duckling or Cinderella, neglected and not fully part of them. She falls quietly, sadly, hopelessly in love with her cousin Edward.

Now the dashing family enter, Mary Crawford and her brother Henry Crawford. These are both people with excellent qualities, great understanding, and hearts capable of much; but they are... well, I think the problem might just be that they are Londoners, fashionable and urbane and with different ideas of morality. Mary rather fancies Edward, and he is smitten with her. It pains him, for he is to be a clergyman, that she is so light and free with serious subjects, but her other virtues suppress his scruples.

Meanwhile, Henry, after carrying away the hearts of the sillier cousins, now sets his sights on little Fanny. At first intending it just as an amour, he finds himself truly falling for her. She however refuses to have him, or even to entertain that he is serious.

Now we come to the difficulty, which is that Fanny Price is a quite enormous prig. Most modern readers, most readers of the twentieth century at least, have found her utterly horrible. She is so superior, and inflexible, and intransigent, while hiding it under a self-deprecating mousy facade that makes you want to shake her. Can she possibly have been seen as a good sort of heroine back in Jane Austen's day? But we react in the right way to all the other characters in her novels; the depictions of an Anne Elliot or a Jane Fairfax are touchingly true, and we see the mousy type mocked in the dull and prosy Mary Bennet. So we can't be missing anything, I think: and we have to conclude that Jane Austen wrote her that way, and meant her to be taken as unlikable, even though she was the heroine, and morally in the right, and gained the love of the good man in the end.

There are three crises in the book, one the sudden return by Sir Thomas to discover that the younger people in his absence had been rehearsing to do some play-acting, a wholly inappropriate activity, since the play is so blunt and indelicate. (It's Lovers' Vows by Elizabeth Inchbald*, adapted from Kotzebue.) Also, the elder son Tom suffers a dangerous fall while living a dissipated life, and his life is imperilled for a while. Finally Henry elopes with one of the others, then abandons her, showing his true character.

It is a disturbing book: you never feel at ease knowing who to side with. On learning of the elopement, Mary condemns her brother's behaviour, but it is not a true moral condemnation, but a despair that he did not make a success of it or be more circumspect. One cannot sympathise with Fanny Price at all. Edmund Bertram is uncertain and vacillating because of his attachment to Mary - and of course one cannot forgive his marrying Fanny. I read all Jane Austen's works repeatedly because of how much I learn from them, but I can never enjoy Mansfield Park. It is not a gothic novel, but it is as dark and brooding in its own way.

* See an excellent write-up by mauler on the actor and writer Mrs Inchbald for more details of this person who, to me, was literally just a footnote to Mansfield Park.

Northanger Abbey

...That was how I wrote it on Everything 1. Now here's some more (written 15th April 2001) for Everything 2...

Northanger Abbey is a mockery not only of the Gothic novel but of the ordinary silliness of people, especially young women as exemplified by her heroine Catherine, who mistakes innocent daylight things for the horrid adventures to be found in the most excessive novels.

She began writing it around 1798, when the Gothic was in full fashion, and completed it and sold it to a publisher in 1803 (as Susan), but it was not published. Years later she bought it back and began revising it, but it was probably too outdated to be easily modernised, and she put it aside in 1817 to work on her newer books. So it's not clear how much of the text is late Jane: it reads remarkably well, a lot less stiffly than Sense and Sensibility. The copyright cost only £10, and after Jane's brother had negotiated the repurchase, he had the satisfaction of telling the bookseller this unregarded, unpublished manuscript was by the now hugely famous author of Pride and Prejudice

The very opening sets the tone. Catherine is plain, not beautiful. She is boyish and likes rolling down grassy bank and playing cricket and baseball. (Incidentally this is the first recorded mention of baseball!) And her upbringing lacks what a heroine's life should have. Her father did not imprison her, her mother did not die in childbirth, and there were no lords or mysterious foundlings in the neighbourhood to seek her hand. When a family friend, Mrs Allen, takes her to Bath to see the world, her mother, far from cautioning her about wicked barons who will kidnap her in a chaise drawn by fast horses, merely adjures her to wrap up warmly.

In Bath she meets an amiable young man, Henry Tilney, with a penchant for gentle mockery, so much so as to confuse her, though she likes him, and is keen to see more of him. Much of the true romance of the novel is in these first flutters of uncertainty about a new acquaintance one suddenly takes a liking to, and who might possibly return the regard.

Catherine also meets Isabella Thorpe, who is acquainted with her brother James Morland, and they become fast friends immediately, and naturally discuss all the latest sensational novels and how terrified they were all through them. Here Jane Austen allows herself a playful two-page philippic against reviewers and in defence of novels, including the famous passage: "some work, in which the greatest powers of the mind are displayed, in which the most thorough knowledge of human nature, the happiest delineation of its varieties, the liveliest effusions of wit and humour are conveyed to the world in the best chosen language."

Isabella's brother John Thorpe is a very foolish boor who can think of nothing but horses and carriages, and how good is own are, and how much better at driving and judging he is than anyone else. Naturally, with someone so blind, he fancies Catherine is happy in his company, and he enquires how rich and childless her present guardian Mr Allen is.

A vastly better discovery is Henry's sister Eleanor Tilney (who deserves a novel of her own, I always thought). Eleanor and Henry have also read the latest novels, among many other and better works, but they are sensible people, subtle and kindly. He mocks the ladies' use of "nice" to mean "pleasant". (Another early instance by Jane Austen! People still do this.) Under Eleanor's influence she finds pleasure in country walks and nature.

The blind fatuity of Mr Thorpe and the shallowness of his sister now cause mischief between Catherine and the gentle, right-hearted Tilneys (and Mr Thorpe sort of kidnaps her, briefly), but it's made up when she is introduced to their father General Tilney and invited to spend some time at their home, Northanger Abbey. The General is not a nice man, he is stern at least; and in his home Catherine's foolish propensity for high romance leads her to suspect the most ridiculous things: that there are secret passages and midnight visitants, and that he had murdered his wife in the children's absence!

Her growing suspicions on this contrast with the natural pleasantness of the place, and the goodness of Henry and Eleanor towards her, and what should be her developing love for Henry. It does, of course, work out in the end, though there is true emotional peril in the General's treatment of her. Catherine grows up and sheds some of the silly girl that she was. Perhaps with Henry's love to give her bloom, she even becomes pretty.

Persuasion

...That was how I wrote it on Everything 1. Now here's some more (written 10th April 2001) for Everything 2...

The love story between Anne and Captain Wentworth is slow and painful, but when it comes into the open once more the renewal is so natural: I think this is in part due to the character of Anne, whose heart is delineated so well, better than any other character I know in fiction. She is someone to whom one can and would be faithful: her regard rewards one who wins it. And although she and Wentworth were very young when they formed their first attachment, they recognised the sound qualities in each other, and kept the memory of them alive through the years of separation.

Anne's father is Sir Walter Elliot, an exceedingly vain man, whose sole delight is the dignity of his house and baronetcy. Her mother lived long enough to embue good sense into Anne, but not enough to see her affections for the young sailor who arrived in their neighbourhood. Lady Russell was a friend of the family who was part mother and part friend to Anne, but she too valued the dignity, and persuaded Anne to break off the match. Anne thought it right to submit, at that age. Frederick Wentworth was hurt and angry.

Years later, Anne has lost her bloom, and turned down a comfortable offer of marriage, and tries to keep her father's and elder sister's extravagances in check. They need money, and the vain Sir Walter is eventually persuaded that he can keep his dignity while moving to a cheaper house in Bath, while letting his ancestral estate, Kellynch Hall. The tenants they acquire are an Admiral and Mrs Croft. It turns out (to Anne's shock) that Mrs Croft is the sister of Frederick Wentworth, who is now (she has been following the newspapers during the war against Napoleon) a rich and successful captain. She strolls outside to cool her fevered cheeks and sigh that perhaps soon he will be walking here.

The first meeting is awkward, but they are soon in each other's company enough that they can be at ease. The past is never alluded to. He seems to be taken an interest in on or both of her cousins, Louisa and Henrietta Musgrove. A party is organised to Lyme, a seaside resort, and here they fall in with two fellow captains. They day trip is going swimmingly and they're about to go hom, when, in the dramatic central scene of the novel, the light-hearted Louisa Musgrove, teasing Captain Wentworth by jumping from the sea wall (the Cobb) into his arms, misjudges, and dashes herself unconscious on the stones.

The crisis turns all their relations upside-down. Captain Wentworth, momentarily stunned and helpless with horror, appeals to Anne as the most sensible and proper person to do something. Louisa is carried to Captain Harville's house and attended by a surgeon. The rest try to decide who should go and tell her parents, and by ill luck, for neither of them would have wished to be forced to go in company like this, Anne and Frederick are deputed. This is beginning of renewed intimacy between them; and Frederick has to reconsider his dalliance with Louisa.

Anne eventually joins her family at Bath. Here she is sought after, and almost wooed, by her father's cousin and eventual heir, Mr Elliot. When Captain Wentworth appears on the scene in Bath, he sees this. By now his feelings for Anne have opened up again. But now he thinks he may be about to lose her a second time. This pains him. He cannot know that Anne, though at first admiring Mr Elliot, cannot find in him those truest virtues by which she was bound to Frederick Wentworth. And her old school companion, Mrs Smith, now fallen on very hard times, is emboldened to tell Anne certain secrets about Mr Elliot's past that confirm that she could never respect him. Anne and Frederick want each other, they are available, their love has been tried in their own hearts for long enough now.

All someone has to do is speak. Finally, in one of two alternative endings for the novel - for it was not quite complete at Jane Austen's death, and she had not completely polished it all and finished revising -, Captain Wentworth overhears Anne debating with another over the constancy of men's and women's hearts. She avers that a woman has the power to love forever, even if the object is lost. Frederick knows he has a chance. He scribbles a note to her and thrusts it imploringly at her in passing.

And she catches up with him, and makes him happy.

This is the deepest picture of affections in any of Jane Austen's novels. Some commentators have said it must reflect her own feelings at her own broken engagement - in the early 1800s, in the period where her sister destroyed all the letters mentioning it. But of course she was a novelist; all her work draws on her own feelings and her knowledge of human nature. She said of Anne Elliot (somewhere in her letters) that she was going to write a heroine a little too good. And she makes gentle mockery of Anne from time to time.

This has always been my favourite, and I drew so much comfort from it every time I read it. It teaches that love can last, and that people can be true.

Pride and Prejudice

Mr Bingley is the amiable and eligible young man recently settled at Netherfield Park, in the vicinity of the Bennet family, with his two beautiful sisters and his surly, haughty, but unspeakably handsome (and rich) friend Mr Darcy. This sets Mrs Bennet aflutter in her quest to see her eldest daughter Jane Bennet married. It turns out that the sweet-tempered Jane and the amiable Mr Bingley do hit it off straight away, and his two catty sisters become instant bosom friends of Jane.

Mr Darcy observes and sneers and declines to condescend. He sees the second daughter, Elizabeth Bennet, and thinks her merely tolerable. Elizabeth however is not one to wish for or seek the odious Mr Darcy's good opinion. But when Jane is forced to stay awhile at the Bingleys' from having caught cold (which was her mother's intention), Elizabeth walks across the wet fields to be with her, to the horror of the Misses Bingley and to the dawning admiration of Mr Darcy.

Another newcomer to the town of Meryton is Mr Wickham, a dashing young ex-officer, very agreable (as it is spelled in JA), and who becomes friendly with Elizabeth. The presence of soldiers excites the giddy hearts of the foolish youngest girls, Kitty and Lydia (Mary is a bookish prig and uninterested), but Elizabeth and Wickham find much natural sympathy in each other. She is distressed to learn that Mr Darcy had been the cause of grave harm to Mr Wickham, having failed and been callous in his undertakings as a guardian to him, a responsibility inherited from his father. For this reason Mr Wickham is poor. This further increases Elizabeth's dislike of Darcy.

The five daughters of Mr Bennet will never be rich, because his property has an entail, which means it will go to a distant cousin, Mr Collins, a clergyman. On receiving a letter of introduction from him, proposing a visit, Mr Bennet, a lover of the absurd, is delighted, because it is clear that the Rev. Mr Collins is an exceptionally silly, unctuous, pompous sort of man. (The name of Collins has passed into the English language for his high-flown letters of empty gratitude.)

Mr Collins means to take a wife, and aware of his eventual depriving them of their estate, thinks a Bennet wife would be an honourable thing. His gracious and noble patroness, the (disgustingly haughty) Lady Catherine de Bourgh has condescended (in between arranging what the weather is to be) to inform him that it sets a good example for clergymen to be married. Lady Catherine's opinion is law, so he scuttles over and slimes his way into the Bennet household, and courts Jane.

On hearing a hint of Jane's attachment to Bingley, he drops her and courts Elizabeth. She rejects him politely. He rubs his hands and says that of course young ladies always make a coy pretence of refusing the one they mean to accept. Elizabeth (coy!?) tries to make it very clear that No means NO. Eventually Mr Collins gives up and proposes to the next-door neighbour, Elizabeth's best friend Charlotte Lucas, to her sadness. Charlotte wants an establishment and accepts.

Mr Bingley's party leaves the area before any definite engagement with Jane had been established. She is very cast down about this, but is so lacking in confidence of her own desirability that she puts up with it stoically; but Elizabeth is once more angry with Mr Darcy, who she knows was instrumental in forcing his easy-going friend to give up Jane.

Elizabeth visits Charlotte and consequently gets to meet the fearsome Lady Catherine de Bourgh. At this point Mr Darcy comes to visit his aunt. To Elizabeth's immense surprise she receives a proposal from him: she turns him down and tells him what she thinks of him, and that so much of his behaviour has been ungentlemanly. This shocks him into rethinking, and he explains his behaviour in a long letter. Now, with the truth about Mr Wickham revealed, she begins to doubt, and to respect Mr Darcy more.

She accepts an invitation from her aunt and uncle to tour the country with them, Derbyshire and the Lake District. In Derbyshire lies Pemberley, the magnificent seat of the Darcy family. They take the tour of it (Mr Darcy is not at home, fortunately): Elizabeth's feelings soften again (oh deary, I've begun crying as I'm typing) when she sees the love and devotion that his housekeeper and other old retainers show for Mr Darcy, holding him up as an example of goodness and rectitude and kindness.

Unlooked-for, Mr Darcy himself arrives. Disaster erupts when news of an elopement reaches them. He takes part in the search for the errant lovers; and Elizabeth sees what a truly good person he is. They do, of course, get reconciled and fall into each other's arms, and live happily ever after (as do Jane and Bingley). Their pride and prejudice are overcome.

Sense and Sensibility

Mrs Dashwood and her two daughters Elinor and Marianne, after the death of Mr Dashwood, are dependent on her son-in-law (stepson) Mr John Dashwood for continuance in their old home. He is kind enough, but weak, and is manipulated by his unpleasant wife, Mrs John Dashwood, the sister of Edward Ferrars. She does not wish to see the intimacy between Edward and Elinor encouraged.

So Mrs Dashwood takes her daughters from Sussex to Devonshire, to a cottage called Barton in the estate of a rich relative, Sir John Middleton. Here the impetuous young Marianne, rushing down a hillside, stumbles, and is taken up and brought home by the dashing and handsome Willoughby. Their love blossoms quickly, united in their passion for the same romantic books and arts and notions, and their strong sensibility. Their engagement is soon clear, in all but official announcement. Then Willoughby is suddenly called away on business, leaving Marianne distraught.

The elder sister Elinor has sense and self-command, whicch she has to use to the utmost when she become acquainted with the Steeles, two distant relatives of the Middletons who come to stay. Miss Lucy Steele, in particular, a pretty but sly and calculating creature, has an especial interest in Elinor. At last, with a saintly innocence, she shares her girlish secret: that she, Lucy, is engaged to Mr Ferrars, and has been these four years.

Then we have Colonel Brandon, an elderly gentleman (in his thirties) who watches the lovely Marianne without hope, and who has a secret in his past; the silly and amiable Mrs Palmer, heavily pregnant; and her droll and cynical husband Mr Palmer, one of my favourite characters in all Jane Austen, whose tongue is allowed free rein in his very laconic speeches. Then also there is Mr Robert Ferrars, the stylish and shallow younger brother of the good Edward; and their ogress of a mother.

The Miss Dashwoods are invited to London by Mrs Palmer and her mother, and here Marianne expects to meet and be lovingly reunited with Willoughby. But her world crashes in on her when the ratfink betrays her. Colonel Brandon lets Elinor know of his secret and his knowledge of Willoughby's true character. (A duel is fought, off-stage.)

Marianne falls deeply ill, and a remorseful Willoughby rides across the country to be with her before she die. She does not die; nor does she see him; but the explanation he is forced to offer Elinor is some slight palliation of his inexcusable behaviour. In passing so close to death, Marianne is reformed, sheds some of her more excitable notions, and is comforted by the presence and quiet good sense of Colonel Brandon.

If Mrs Ferrars had disapproved of the attachment between her son and the blameless and upright Elinor, how much worse she feels when she discovers Lucy Steele's claws in him. This disaster frees all parties to make the right matches, and, of course, all the good live happily ever after. (That is what fiction means.)

Lady Susan

The date of composition is unknown, but probably it was around 1795, when Jane was twenty, and had exercised herself in increasingly brilliant juvenilia. From the time she was eighteen or twenty she started writing full adult novels. As far as we know she wrote four novels in this early period. The others were Marianne and Elinor, First Impressions, and Susan (a completely different work). At this time she favoured the eighteenth-century epistolary style, where the parties are conveniently separated by such distances that they can tell the whole story in their overlapping letters. None of the other three novels survives in its early form, because in Jane Austen's mature period they were thoroughly reworked into three of her late novels. Only Lady Susan remains to show us how she tackled the style as an adult.

The manuscript can be dated from the paper to around 1805, when she had begun to take up her early work and revise it, make fair copies, and in the case of Susan (later Northanger Abbey) send it to a publisher. But nothing much came of this middle period. So we have a revised Lady Susan that falls between two stools: the now obsolescent convention of letters, and the greater sexual freedom of the previous century, combined with the more mature Jane Austen's serious thinking about how to do novels. She converted her other early works, but the sheer wickedness and licentiousness of Lady Susan perhaps proved impossible to translate into the more pious nineteenth century.

She is an extremely charming widow who has been having dalliances with two men in the one household, trying to set up the less amusing of the two as husband material for her 16-year-old Frederica, and when the repercussions of this finally blow up too much to be amusing, she flees to her brother-in-law's house. The main correspondence showing both sides of the situation is, on the one hand, between Lady Susan and her good friend Mrs Johnson, equally devoid of any morality but selfishness, and on the other her sister-in-law Mrs Vernon to her mother Lady De Courcy.

The interesting thing is that Lady Susan's side is told with a great deal more wit and panache than Mrs Vernon's. From the beginning Mrs Vernon is a little doubtful, but pretty sure that Lady Susan is a thoroughly vile, wicked creature, but even she falls to a certain extent under her charms. Everyone else is easy prey. Mrs Vernon's brother Reginald De Courcy comes prepared to scoff, having heard all about Lady Susan's notorious exploits, but becomes her devoted admirer. Poor naive Frederica falls for Reginald, and the furious Lady Susan has to exercise all her wiles to prevent Reginald seeing the truth. She is quite shameless; and disturbingly appealing.

The mature, moral Jane Austen would have had great difficulty shifting the focus in this story, keeping Lady Susan as charming and interesting as she was, while not seeming to cheerfully condone it. So we have a stepping-stone: a picture of how she worked in her earlier years, not converted into one of the late great novels.

In the last section she gives up the pretence of letter format and devotes a chapter with gentle mockery to why it could no longer be kept up, and spells out some of the eventual resolutions. Lady Susan has to settle for a lesser match, and the path seems to be cleared for Reginald and Frederica.

It was published by Jane Austen's nephew in 1871, along with some of her other minor works and letters, in his memoir of his aunt.

The Watsons

Emma Watson has been brought up by an aunt in Shropshire, and hardly knows the rest of her family in Surrey, but she returns to them as a young woman now that her aunt has remarried. The Watsons go to a ball at their better-off friends, the Edwards, and also meet a party from nearby Osborne Castle. All the oher girls admire the rakish Tom Musgrave, but Emma is too well brought-up to find him appealing; nor does she like his ill-mannered friend Lord Osborne.

Lord Osborne's former tutor is Mr Howard, who is clearly the hero, the one who will end up with Emma. She is widely admired as very pretty on her first appearance, but what makes her notable are her defiance of Musgrave and Osborne, and her generous impulse at the ball to dance with Mr Howard's ten-year-old nephew, Charles Blake.

I had thought of The Watsons as a bit dull, not getting far enough to establish an interest in the characters, but now that I've re-read it in order to write this, I revise my opinion. I do want to know a lot more about Emma and Mr Howard and what happens to them, and the machinations and follies of the others would have been quite as interesting as those in her completed books.

Sanditon

The Parkers are one of the main families in Sanditon. They are promoting it as a new health resort, building new lodgings and trying to attract suitably moneyed and respectable visitors. Most of the Parkers are a hypochondriac lot, in very different ways, full of the latest fads for self-treatment and deprivation; whereas Sidney is the robustly healthy brother who gently mocks them. Much is heard of him in mentions by his family but he only shows up in Sanditon in the final chapter, and gets introduced to Charlotte. We see none of the repartee or friction that would have enlivened their future history.

Charlotte herself is a very strange figure. She hardly speaks; she does nothing; it's as if Jane Austen was first concerned to sketch the plot and other characters, and was going to go back later and add wit, charm, depth, and humanity to her main character. That this is possibly part of how she worked is suggested by the fact that Emma Watson, heroine of the other incomplete novel, The Watsons, is likewise devoid of much personality.

In the cast of characters all are somewhat eccentric, but realistic; there is no-one very bad among them, unless it's the handsome, spirited Sir Edward, who has read far too many of the wrong novels and up-to-date philosophy, and can conceive nothing better than spouting fatuous and hyper-enthusiastic literary criticism, and being a dashing rake and seducer because it would look good in a novel. There's penny-pinching rich Lady Denham, there are the shallow Miss Beauforts, and there is the hugely wealthy half-mulatto heiress Miss Lambe, brought in but with no clue as to how she'll figure in the story.

There is also the lovely and sensible Clara Brereton, faithful companion to Lady Denham, seeing through the impostures of the seducing Sir Edward yet seeming to tolerate him: again, with frustratingly no clue as to what her tribulations in the full story would have been.

Through all this, Charlotte, the sensible, no-nonsense daughter of a gentleman farmer, watches with amusement: this word is constantly repeated, a sign of the unpolished state of the manuscript. Yet she is never witty, never exposes herself. She seethes inwardly at the silliness or meanness of the others, and when she does school herself to reply she almost snaps at them. When she sails close to the wind, the other is always too self-absorbed to notice it could have been rude or ridiculous. She's something like a heroine of Jane Austen's juvenilia, with a barely suppressed Pythonesque fury, and would like to put out the fire, open the windows, and fling all their useless medicines into or out of one or the other. In revising the novel, Jane Austen would certainly have filled her humanity out, but toned her down for public consumption.

What Sanditon does have in buckets is modernity. It's Jane Austen's first thoroughly nineteenth-century novel. It reads like Dickens in parts. These are speculators, building up a fashionable new resort, dominated by economics, talking about economics all the time. It's not the timeless pastoral village and halls of her earlier novels. It's not the time when people were reading about Nelson's victories with amazement and pride, but the time when they're naming things Trafalgar House and Waterloo Crescent because they'll sell better.

Sanditon is an extraordinary foretaste of what Jane Austen would have done had she lived out the life she should have.