Jane Austen, Lady Susan, The Watsons, Sanditon. Penguin Classics pb 1987, first published 1974; 222 pp, including notes at the end
It’s been a quiet few weeks at Tredynas Days; first we went for a trip to Spain to visit family, spending a few days beforehand in the delightful city of Tarragona, whose Roman city walls and buildings easily outshine Chester’s. Then I had knee surgery, which has severely curtailed my mobility for a couple of weeks, and we had visitors over Christmas – so there’s not been much opportunity to post. I’ll try and catch up over the next few days or weeks. Season’s greetings to you all, and a happy new year.
These three short, unfinished works of fiction by Jane Austen have sat on my shelves for many years. I’ve finally got around to reading them. Was it worth the effort? I’d say a qualified yes. Anyone who admires her work, which is surely pretty much everyone, will find something to please them here.
According to Margaret Drabble’s Introduction to this edition, Lady Susan was probably written about 1793-4, when Jane Austen (1775-1817) was in her late teens, and about the time she was starting to work on early versions of Sense and Sensibility. It’s the unfinished start of an epistolary novel, and Drabble suggests that the reason it remained unfinished was that the author became dissatisfied with that genre so popular in earlier 18C fiction.
The reason for that probably includes her increasing predilection for the complex third-person narrative voice that enabled her to inhabit the minds of her characters and subtly convey their thoughts and feelings, or comment on them. The plot is fairly unoriginal, but the titular central character is a splendidly wicked, 35-year-old beauty, a widow who needs to look out for a suitably wealthy husband to keep her in the manner she’s accustomed to. She also needs to do the same for her teenage daughter, who she neglects and bullies shamelessly.
It’s witty, silly and highly amusing. Susan is charming, clever and alluring – a cross between the aptly named Becky Sharp and Cruella de Vil, but Margaret Drabble finds Susan to be too attractive, and the ‘good’ characters too insipid. I disagree. There’s nothing wrong with an amoral grifter running rings round everyone in this kind of fiction – it’s never posited as anything other than great fun, and it’s easy to see a kind of morality working implicitly to counterpoint Susan’s schemes and machinations.
The Watsons was probably begun about 1803, and abandoned after Austen’s father’s death in 1805; this unfinished novel features the death of a central character’s father towards the end of the fragment, and it might have been too painful for her to continue.
The story concerns a variation on a familiar Austen situation: a spirited, attractive young woman who’d been raised in relative luxury by wealthy relations, but is then forced to return to the impoverished household of her parents (and the siblings she hardly knows). There follows a fairly pedestrian sequence of potential suitors, some roguish and dangerous, others more upstanding (but boring – this is like the flipside of Lady Susan’s world).
Sanditon was started early in 1817, when Austen was dying of Addison’s disease. She died before it could be finished. Drabble points out that health and illness features strongly in the narrative, with some characters being terrible hypochondriacs. It’s characteristic of Austen that she could make light of a topic that must have oppressed her heavily.
Sanditon is a newish seaside town, and is trying to emulate the more fashionable resorts like Weymouth, Brighton and Lyme. The novel’s theme is therefore, to quote again from the Introduction, ‘speculation, expansion, change and novelty’. There are the usual plots involving young women needing or wanting to find suitable husbands – but this short extract ends before it becomes clear who might be the right one for the various young single women.
It’s not a very engaging read, I found. Perhaps this is unsurprising, given the circumstances in which it was written. The dominant tone is satirical and playful, but with sombre undertones. The characters we meet aren’t as fully rounded as usual in Austen’s fiction, a bit colourless or caricatured. No doubt she would have rectified this if she’d lived to finish and polish the novel.
To sum up then: none of these extracts is in the same league as the novels she completed, but they all show flashes and signs of the author’s lively wit, shrewd eye for hypocrisy and duplicity, and literary genius.