Jane Austen July 2025 discussion

The thread in which to discuss our readalong of The Watsons !

(As The Watsons is just a fragment, not a full novel, I'm not going to set up a spoilers thread.)

Hi Katie,

Again as for "Sanditon" I enjoyed the fragment of "The Watsons."

There is more melancholy in this than in her other novels.

Emma is lovely heroine but her sisters are very unlikable.

This is my favorite Austen work. I love her venture into realism and wish she had finished it, though I can see all sorts of reasons why she didn’t.

It inspired me to start a histfic series set in the neighborhood she’s writing about, Dorking in Surrey. My research for that project taught me a lot about The Watsons. It’s interesting that the opening scene, which mentions certain landmarks as Elizabeth is driving Emma into town for the assembly, tracks very precisely with what someone would have seen when driving into Dorking from the north in 1800. Based on maps and paintings from the era, you can identify even what house she imagined the Edwardses living in.

Austen was familiar with the area because her godfather was the clergyman of a parish nearby (to the northwest), and the Austens often stopped briefly at his house when traveling between Chawton and London. Also, in 1799 her cousin Eliza de Feuillide stayed in Dorking (which was believed to have healthful air) for six months with her son Hastings, as his health was in decline. I think Austen pictured the Watsons living not in her godfather’s parsonage but closer to Dorking, in Mickleham. There’s a castle for the Osbornes just east of Dorking (now in ruins); at the time she was writing The Watsons, the castle stables were being redesigned by Soane, which might explain why she had the Osbornes hiring a carriage to go to the assembly instead of riding in their own carriage.

I think one reason she stopped working on the book was that she didn’t like having the “oppressed victim” heroine at the center of the story. I agree with those who speculate that she moved her to the sidelines, turning her into Jane Fairfax in Emma. Another reason is that the storyline called for Emma Watson’s father to die, and Austen really struggled to write about death. If you read the letters she wrote about the death of her father (which happened around the time she stopped work on this book), they are totally cringey and don’t sound like her at all. They’re a combination of mawkish and ghoulish, awkward and stiffly unnatural.

I could go on forever about The Watsons but will yield to others.

Abigail wrote: "This is my favorite Austen work. I love her venture into realism and wish she had finished it, though I can see all sorts of reasons why she didn’t.

It inspired me to start a histfic series set in..."

I also love this one and heard, somewhere, that she quit on this one about the time her father died. I was so sad there wasn't more.

I don't reread this one. It's too depressing and doesn't go anywhere. I think Jane struggled to write a heroine who lost her father and lost everything. Not when life was imitating art.

Hi everyone,

Please do try a continuation the "The Watsons" by Rose Servitova.
It is so lovely and I thought faithful to Jane Austen.
If you have read it let me know your thoughts.

Has anyone come across the author John Coates?
He wrote a continuation of The Watsons and also wrote Here Today a science fiction time-travel book where the traveller goes back in time to woo a certain Jane Austen

I read Coates’s completion of The Watsons way back in the 1970s and didn’t think much of it; but then I haven’t really liked any of them. I thought Coates changed the characters to suit his plot.

I read John Coates' completion of The Watsons back in the 1970s, too. I had to buy the paperback because my name was Watson! I don't remember much about it even though I probably reread it years later. This book was my first brush with Jane Austen. In the 80s, I discovered her works of art on my own. Generally, I don't get on much with completions and fanfiction rewrites. However, I do have the Rose Servitova versions of The Watsons and A Season at Sanditon on my future JAJ TBRs.

Hi Lorri,

What a lovely idea.
Let me know what you think of Rose's completions/continuations.
Happy reading.

Michelle Hyland wrote: "Hi Lorri,

What a lovely idea.
Let me know what you think of Rose's completions/continuations.
Happy reading."

That's a good suggestion, I will definitely have a look (TBR turns into a castle size now!) , as I was frustrated "The Watsons" was so short! Thank you for sharing :)

Hello,

You are very welcome.

I just finished my re-read of The Watsons. It's such a promising beginning for a novel, I was immediately hooked on the story and the characters!

Pity that she never finished it, but I do find some consolation in the theory that she abandoned it because she had re-used (or would re-use) many of its elements in her other novels: Sense and Sensibility, Pride and Prejudice, Persuasion and Emma. The latter not being my favourite Austen heroine, I would have loved to read that story from Jane Fairfax's point of view! Admittedly, that would have been a more serious book than Emma, but since I much prefer Persuasion (and Anne Elliot!) over Emma (Woodhouse), I would very likely have loved it.

If you want to read further into this, please see J. Wiesenfarth's very interesting article here: https://jasna.org/persuasions/printed...
This would also help to explain my confusion at the repetitive nature of this work in terms of names (e.g. Emma W., Musgrave), which is unusual for Jane Austen.

So nothing was lost, just (better) used (and enjoyed) elsewhere.

I have not read any of the continuations as it seems impossible to me to successfully imitate Jane Austen's writing. Maybe if Georgette Heyer had attempted it, probably lightening it up a little on the way, but that's wishful thinking 😉

As some of the others here, I also thought of Jane Fairfax reading this story. But I did love it. I liked Emma W. and Elizabeth, and I found the story immediately engaging and not as sad some find it. I do think that the specific place where it ends, with Emma contemplating how much her situation has changed for the worst, seems sad. However, I guess between the observation that Emma is "naturally cheerful" and not "plunged [...] in despondence," and the fact that this is, after all, a Jane Austen story and therefore I cannot imagine that the turns it would take next, the ending, being all so tragic, this very much feels like just the set up, just the sad place from which a happier story will grow. We see a similar set up in Sense & Sensibility, where the story begins with the death of the patriarch and the sad change of situation for his family. Persuasion, a favorite of mine, similarly has a disappointing beginning.

To go back to the idea that this is a Jane Austen story and she'd rather "let other pens dwell on guilt and misery," while she "quit[s] such odious subjects as soon as [she] can, impatient to restore everybody not greatly in fault themselves to tolerable comfort," the edition I read, Sanditon, Lady Susan, & The History of England, did have a biographical note that said that Cassandra had been told by Jane where she intended the story to go, and the rough outline of that seemed to coincide with my wishes and hopes for how the story would go so well, that I can't think of this story as sad but simply incomplete. I will definitely be adding Rose Servitova's effort to complete the story to my TBR for next July. It has great ratings on GR, so I'm hopeful of a satisfying fleshing out of Austen's plans for the story.

I have used the excuse of The Watsons read-along, to make a video where I elaborate my wild a crazy theory about just why Jane Austen turned down Harris Bigg-Wither.
https://youtu.be/uOgr2zMVK3s