sanditon and the watsons austen's unfinished novels

Similarly, personality traits of other characters are revealed through their style of card playing and choice of games. Pool sees Jane as revealing character through their subtler actions – the significance of Mr Howard preaching at the visitation as an assistant to the archdeacon indicates that he was well-regarded by the church hierarchy. “The informing narrator has stepped aside.” This may have been a reason why she did not complete the novel. Professor Litz apparently thought Austen was attempting to cast the novel in dramatic form and “fails to give us a double vision of her heroine.” The questions and confusions we experience are not at all what we experience in her other works. “The narrative voice of Jane Austen telling us the story, informing us, guiding us, shaping our responses, standing between us and her characters as we together watch them live their lives.” She was too closely identifying herself in the character of Emma Watson rather than clarifying. Heldman believes Austen was unable to establish her usual narrative voice distancing her from her characters. He says of the use of dance as a central event, “ The Watsons provides another instance of a pattern in which a ball is anticipated, takes place, and then becomes a topic of conversation for a long time afterwards.” This thoroughly modern way of telling a story is a mode of characterisation. Furthermore we learn the whole situation only over a series of conversations. During the three-mile carriage drive we learn much about the world of the Watsons. Wiesenfarth has noted the dialogic form, the gradual unfolding of character and the use of dance in the fragment. They represent a near tyrannical structure, one that closes off options and leaves the writer dangerously exposed – get it right the first time, for there are few opportunities for extensive reworking, rather the booklet challenges the writer to keep moving forward. The booklets reveal evidence of the writing challenge Austen set herself. She was making her novel according to the essay “Making Books: How Jane Austen Wrote in Jane Austen Writer in the World edited by Kathryn Sutherland. They include one later patched in page complete with sewing pins. These booklets suggest that not only was Jane very economical with her 1804 watermarked paper and controlled with her penmanship, she was competent in her intentions and purpose. The manuscript, worth £1,000,000, is in the form of 11 tiny homemade booklets, measuring 19×12 cms. This, in turn, has engendered many versions of the completed novel by others.

Fortunately, Austen did leave clues with Cassandra as to the rest of the story. It fascinates stylistically and has been the source of endless theories as to the reasons why it was never finished. Incomplete though it is, The Watsons has yielded us the only complete original manuscript of Jane Austen’s work. Book covers for Jane Austen’s The Watsons

Sanditon and the watsons austen's unfinished novels