The Watsons by Jane Austen
This Unfinished Work Lacks the Spirit of Austen’s Other Novels
Jun 28, 2009
When Jane Austen’s father died, the Austen family moved from Bath to a temporary home before finally settling in Chawton, where Jane Austen was most productive.
Perhaps The Watsons was never finished because parts of the plot were too painfully close to Jane Austen’s life at that time, and she could not bear to explore them with the complexity and sharp wit she used for her other novels.
The Plot of The Watsons
As Jane Austen felt sad and displaced, the novel begins with Miss Emma Watson just returning to her family after being raised for 14 years by a wealthy aunt and uncle, who had died. The aunt remarried and Emma is no longer welcome in her aunt’s household.
Her family accepts her return with the appearance of gladness, for what else could they do, but the real feeling is put into words by her brother Robert:
“What a blow it must have been upon you! To find yourself, instead of an heiress of 8,000 or 9,000 l., sent back a weight upon your family without a sixpence.”
- Emma’s father, like Jane Austen’s, is a clergyman who is in frail health.
- According to James Edward Austen-Leigh’s Memoir, Mr. Watson was to die soon, and Emma would once again be uprooted and be dependant on her unkind brother for a home.
- These elements echo the events happening in Jane Austen’s life and perhaps paint a picture of her uncertainty and sadness.
Echoes of Other Works
Emma and some other characters offer wisps of similarities to some of Jane Austen’s other works, although they are pale comparisons.
- Emma shows the sort of spirit present in Elizabeth Bennet from Pride and Prejudice when, at a ball, she dances with a young boy slighted by the daughter of the neighbourhood’s finest family, the Osbornes.
- Lord Osborne is a pale shadow of Mr. Darcy from Pride and Prejudice. Emma says of him: “He would be handsome even though he were not a lord, and perhaps, better bred; more desirous of pleasing and showing himself pleased in a right place.”
- The long-suffering sister Elizabeth Watson offers a faint reflection of Anne Eliot’s quiet grief and dutifulness, but Elizabeth’s willingness to nurse the ailing Mr. Watson is nothing like the abuse and sadness Anne Eliot long endured in Persuasion.
The Bare Bones of a Book
The Watsons reads almost like a first draft. The action is choppy and simple, with holes in the plot. It is as if bits of conversation and action are missing that Jane Austen intended to come back and fill in later.
- For instance, when Mr. Watson is introduced, he takes no notice of Emma, just returned to the family Readers are only given a quick sketch of him as educated and well-bred. And if this is true, he, being a well-bred clergyman, would certainly take notice of a lovely young daughter just returned to the family.
- Plot details are vague. Jane Austen writes: “A week or ten days rolled quietly away after this visit…” Her other novels are much more precise regarding time and dates.
- One of the basic tenets of good writing is “Show, Don’t Tell.” In The Watsons, Jane Austin tells readers details more than showing them, as when Elizabeth describes the other two sisters, not yet met, to Emma. One sister is finally met, whilst readers never meet the third, reputed to be a quarrelsome, unpleasant sort of person.
The Watsons, which Jane Austen was working on in 1805 when her comfortable world was turned upside down by her father’s death and then a second move (Bath being the first from the family’s long-time home at Steventon), was never finished.
She never went back and fleshed out the characters and the plot and added the spirit and the keen observations and wit that are characteristic of her other novels.
She did talk to her beloved sister Cassandra about the work and what was to happen, according to Austen-Leigh’s Memoir, but she never sat down with it again to finish it.
Perhaps it was too painful to write about an infirm parent who was soon to die, when her father had just passed away, and she could find no comfort in writing about upheaval and a sense of not belonging.
Perhaps during this time she decided to read, to escape from the chaos and sadness she felt in books, as she has Emma Watson do:
“The evils arising from the loss of her uncle were neither trifling nor likely to lessen, and when thought had been freely indulged, in contrasting the past and the present, the employment of mind and dissipation of unpleasant ideas that only reading could produce made her thankfully turn to a book.”
This is indeed a sentiment to which all readers can relate, and it is somehow comforting to know that Jane Austen is also among those who count books as excellent friends and companions.
Source: The Watsons, by Jane Austen, Hesperus Classics, 2007. Excerpts from A Memoir of Jane Austen, by James Edward Austen-Leigh, 1870.
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