Unfinished Austen: Interpreting "Catharine", "Lady Susan", "The Watsons" and "Sanditon"

By Joanne Wilkes

Unfinished Austen examines four texts that Jane Austen left incomplete: Catharine, or the Bower (1792–-3), Lady Susan (1795?), The Watsons (1803–-4?) and Sanditon (1817), none of them published till well after her death. Since very little in manuscript form survives from the six famous novels, these four manuscript texts offer insight into the novelist in the process of creation. They also problematize the romance plot prominent in the published novels by presenting this in a nebulous or incipient state that underlines its artificiality.

These texts sometimes show how the romance plot is inflected by the financial condition in which young marriageable women can find themselves. Moreover, the stories (other than Catharine) have aroused the interest of many later writers—including writers for theatre and screen—who are eager to complete or to amplify them. They may do this through developing the stories to some kind of dénouement. Perhaps more intriguingly, however, these texts induce some writers to question the very enterprise of concluding an unfinished text.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Anthem Press
• Release date: Sep 5, 2023
• ISBN: 9781839986031

Book preview

Unfinished Austen

Unfinished Austen

Interpreting Catharine, Lady Susan, The Watsons and Sanditon

Joanne Wilkes

Anthem Press

An imprint of Wimbledon Publishing Company

www.anthempress.com

This edition first published in UK and USA 2023

by ANTHEM PRESS

75–76 Blackfriars Road, London SE1 8HA, UK

or PO Box 9779, London SW19 7ZG, UK

and

244 Madison Ave #116, New York, NY 10016, USA

© 2023 Joanne Wilkes

The author asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Library of Congress Control Number: 2023936805

A catalog record for this book has been requested.

ISBN-13: 978-1-83998-602-4 (Hbk)

ISBN-10: 1-83998-602-6 (Hbk)

Cover Credit: The Watsons Manuscript from Wikimedia Commons

This title is also available as an e-book.

In memory of my parents Marie Olive Wilkes (1928–2004) and Gerald Alfred Wilkes (1927–2020)

CONTENTS

Acknowledgements

1. Introduction

2. Catharine, or the Bower

3. Lady Susan

4. The Watsons

5. Sanditon

6. Conclusion

Bibliography

Index

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I first published on Jane Austen in 1991, and although I have written about many fine writers since then, her work has always delighted and intrigued me. I am therefore very pleased to have the opportunity to examine it again in print.

A lot has happened since 1991. My late parents were both very supportive of my writing throughout my career, and my father, as a distinguished academic himself, modelled that life for me. This book is dedicated to them.

I have had the chance to teach nineteenth-century literature, including Jane Austen, with a variety of colleagues at the University of Auckland. So I am grateful to Aorewa McLeod, Rose Lovell-Smith, Claudia Marquis, Brian Boyd, Alex Calder and the late David Wright. I am also thankful to the many students with whom I shared my enthusiasm for Austen over the years, as well as to the retiree group of women appositely called the ‘Minervas’, with whom I have discussed her most recently . Harriet Allan of Penguin (New Zealand) was helpful too in alerting me to a new Austen monograph during the pandemic.

I am grateful to the editor of Persuasions for permission to use here material based on my article ‘Jane Austen’s Textual Revisions in The Watsons: A Preliminary Study’, from Persuasions 41 (2019): 223-32.

Finally, like all of us living in New Zealand since the beginning of 2020, I owe much to all the health experts, practitioners and administrators who made the country one of the safest places to be, amidst difficulties of all kinds. One thing reading Austen’s Sanditon brings to light, indeed, is that not only does medicine have a long history, but so does medical misinformation.

Joanne Wilkes

Auckland

New Zealand

Chapter 1

INTRODUCTION

Towards the end of her career, in 1816, Jane Austen produced a comic manuscript which she called ‘Plan of a Novel, according to hints from various quarters’. She noted in its margins the origins in her own circle for some of these ‘hints’, but another source was clearly the Rev. James Stanier Clarke, Librarian to the Prince Regent. In 1815, he had invited Austen to dedicate her forthcoming novel, Emma, to his master. Austen did this, unenthusiastically, but also found herself in a correspondence with Clarke about potential topics for another novel, one of which was obviously founded on Clarke’s own view of his personality and career. Austen famously declined, affecting ignorance and incompetence, and declaring that she was ‘the most unlearned & uninformed Female who ever dared to be an Authoress’.¹ She had been obliged to be polite, but she allowed herself some light relief in her ‘Plan of a Novel’.

What this late text does is to ridicule, pointedly and succinctly, some of the conventions of contemporary fiction: in particular, characters represented as implausibly virtuous or vicious, overblown sentiments, hectic and unconvincing plotting, and extended interpolated narratives. Hence the clergyman in the novel was to be ‘the most excellent Man that can be imagined, perfect in Character, Temper & Manners’,² and his daughter, the heroine, would be ‘faultless’ and impossibly accomplished. The pair would always ‘converse in long speeches, elegant Language – and a tone of high, serious sentiment’ (228), and much of the novel’s first volume would be occupied by the father’s account of his life. Otherwise the plot would mostly consist of the daughter being pursued by suitors all over Europe, and constantly uprooted by one of these, a ‘totally unprincipled & heart-less young Man’ (227). There would be a hero, ‘all perfection of course’, and in general ‘the Good will be unexceptionable in every respect’, while the ‘Wicked […] will be completely depraved & infamous’ (227). After she has been ‘worn down to a Skeleton, & now & then starved to death’, the heroine and her father are forced to flee to Kamschatka, where he, ‘after 4 or 5 hours of tender advice and parental Admonition to his miserable Child, expires in a fine burst of Literary Enthusiasm’ (228). The heroine then faces ‘at least 20 narrow escapes’ from the villain, but eventually ‘runs into the arms of the Hero himself’ (229).

Although this ‘Plan’ is a late text of Austen’s, the part of her output that it most brings to mind is her earliest writings, produced in the late 1780s and early 1790s, and usually designated her juvenilia. She compiled these into three manuscript volumes, but they were – like ‘Plan of a Novel’ – not published in Austen’s lifetime. Many of these compositions have similar targets to the ‘Plan’, but the texts are more developed, with plots and characters dramatized. ‘Love and Freindship’, for example, is a frantic story where the main characters express high-flown sentiments while being revealed as totally self-centred, as they career all over the British Isles and experience (among other things) improbable coincidences. ‘Jack and Alice’ features a character who considers himself perfect, plus another who commits murder, not to mention potential long speeches that are comically aborted. ‘Frederic and Elfrida’ has a heroine with a fiancé, but she lets decades go by because she is too delicate actually to name the wedding day; in the same story Lucy, too polite to turn any proposal down, accepts two in one day and can only resolve her dilemma by drowning herself. In ‘Evelyn’, Mr Gower in his travels is treated with extraordinary generosity: at a first meeting, a family endows him with a large quantity of food, their house, plus their elder daughter and her fortune, all of which offerings Gower accepts as part of a normal course of events.

This study considers possible developments and continuities across Jane Austen’s literary career. In this context, the resemblances between her early writings and one of her last are striking. Rather than focussing primarily on the juvenilia, the ‘Plan’, or the six published novels, however, I examine four manuscript texts which encompass most of Austen’s writing career (1792–1817), but which she left incomplete and unpublished at her death in 1817. These are ‘Catharine, or the Bower’ (August 1792), Lady Susan (1794–1795?), The Watsons (1804?) and Sanditon (1817). Little is known about her plans for these works, as they are not discussed specifically in her letters and had no currency for many decades outside her family and friends. Thus there is uncertainty about why Austen abandoned them, and equally about how she may have completed them had this been possible. This is the first book to examine them as a group, to link them together and to consider the implications of their shared unfinished condition.

In addition, these four texts are illuminating because of their manuscript state – each of them shows, to a greater or lesser extent, Jane Austen at work, engaged in the creative process. For none of her published novels do the manuscripts survive: the only opportunity to compare her earlier thinking with her later revisions emerges from the surviving manuscript which contains her first version of the ending of Persuasion. But in the cases of these four manuscripts, we gain a sense of what aspects of the stories Austen decided to stress, including how she deals with settings, and how she worked on characterization, including through dialogue. For each of these texts, this study delves into the revisions and how they might be interpreted.

Another major focus of this study will be the completions that three of the four manuscripts have generated (the exception being ‘Catharine’). Although the texts are less known than the published novels, they do offer a challenge for writers to come up with their own plot developments and endings. Most completions are in novel form, and they extend from the mid-nineteenth to the twenty-first centuries, but there have been adaptations of other kinds as well. Indie director Whit Stillman produced a film version of Lady Susan in 2016, although he gave it the name of Love & Friendship, while The Watsons attracted a dramatic adaptation in 2018 from British playwright Laura Wade: it had productions at Chichester (2018) and London (2019), with a West End season scheduled for 2020 but aborted by the Covid-19 pandemic. As far as Sanditon is concerned, television adapter Andrew Davies, who came to public prominence with his adaptation of Pride and Prejudice in 1995, produced an eight-part series in 2019. The content of Austen’s fragment was covered in the first episode, while the series did not bring the central couple together in marriage. After various vicissitudes, two further series of six parts each were produced, screened in 2022 and 2023 respectively. Wade’s play and Davies’s television series are particularly interesting responses to what can be done when Austen’s material runs out.

The Four Works and Their Manuscripts

The earliest of these manuscripts, ‘Catharine, or the Bower’, dated August 1792 when Jane Austen was sixteen, is in the third of the three volumes mentioned earlier (together with ‘Evelyn’), and can be construed as part of the juvenilia. Yet it has often been seen as a transitional work. It contains literary parody, but whereas the protagonists of the juvenilia are comic, exaggerated and unchanging figures, the titular heroine of this slightly later work has some psychological depth. She also undergoes experiences which might engender the kinds of personal development and advances in understanding that are found in the protagonists of the later, published novels. As Juliet McMaster observes, ‘Catharine’, compared to the other contents of the three notebooks, is ‘much more like the mature novels both in theme and narrative tone’.³ At the outset of the story Catharine has lost the company of two dear friends, the Wynne sisters, to unfortunate circumstances, but is also widening her social circle as she meets relatives and attends a ball with an eligible bachelor from this family.

‘Catharine’ contains numerous manuscript revisions, and by more than one hand: Jane Austen herself and (probably) her nephew James Edward Austen (later Austen-Leigh) writing as an adolescent. Those of most interest are naturally the work of Jane Austen, but the nephew’s brief and abortive attempts to advance the story also show that he has picked up on key elements of it. Jane Austen’s own revisions, meanwhile, affirm the likely status of this text as a transitional work between the juvenilia and the published fiction. The heroine’s straitlaced aunt, Mrs Percival, waxes extravagant on what she sees as the dire political state of the country and how this may be aggravated by Catharine’s behaviour with young men. But Austen tones down some of this rhodomontade so that it seems more plausible, less like the exaggerated diction that she had put into narratives that were more obviously parodic. Similarly, in treating the text’s important motif of Catharine’s friendship with the two young women from whom she has been unwillingly separated, Austen’s revisions modulate Catharine’s overt expression of emotion.

Lady Susan, probably the second of the four manuscripts in chronological order, is not titled, but was given that name in correspondence between James Edward Austen-Leigh and his half-sister Anna Lefroy (children of her eldest brother James). This move was occasioned when they were preparing a second edition of the Memoir of Jane Austen that had first appeared under Austen-Leigh’s name in 1869. Allusions to Jane Austen’s unpublished works in the first edition had stimulated interest in this unknown material. The family accepted a dating of 1794–1795 for Lady Susan and included the text in the appendix to the second edition of the Memoir in 1871. This was a work composed mostly in letters, a format common in eighteenth-century fiction but less so by the mid-1790s. It is also a mode that Austen had essayed in some of the juvenilia, notably ‘Love and Freindship’ and ‘Lesley Castle’.

In these earlier texts, Austen had worked on revealing character through what the letter-writers disclose of themselves, usually unwittingly. ‘Lesley Castle’ brings out the tensions among the various correspondents through their competing priorities: one of them, Charlotte Luttrell, is totally obsessed with food preparation, so that when her sister’s fiancé dies suddenly, the sister grieves, but Charlotte’s main worry is the wedding feast that may go to waste. ‘Love and Freindship’ parodies the back-and-forth of epistolary fiction by having nearly all the letters going from an older woman, Laura, to a younger one, Marianne, to whom she is supposedly giving advice. The divisions among letters are arbitrary, and there are no replies, so the format here serves to highlight Laura’s complete self-centredness. In Lady Susan, Austen refines these ways of using correspondence to advance characterization.

As far as endings are concerned, ‘Lesley Castle’ breaks off, while ‘Love and Freindship’ has a consciously artificial conclusion where Laura enters a coach and meets nearly all the surviving characters in the story. Lady Susan, meanwhile, ends somewhat abruptly with a narrative summary of a few pages, offered by a third-person narrator who has not hitherto appeared. The reason for this structure is unclear, and its implications fascinating. So too is the text’s domination, before this narrative ending, by the title character, Lady Susan Vernon, who is a clever, scheming and duplicitous young widow trying to pursue an affair with a married man while seeking financial security for herself and her daughter. For the reader, Lady Susan is easily the most lively and entertaining figure in the work; she is a protagonist unlike any of those from the published novels, and appears too in a fictional format that Jane Austen does not essay in any of these. Post-dating ‘Catharine’, Lady Susan probably precedes the lost early versions of Sense and Sensibility and Pride and Prejudice which Austen produced in the late 1790s as ‘Elinor and Marianne’ (1795?) and ‘First Impressions’ (1796–1797?) respectively. The first of these lost texts was in epistolary format. Did writing Lady Susan reveal to Austen the risks of deploying such a protagonist, and such a format, in the contemporary marketplace?

There is however some critical debate about the date of Lady Susan. The fair copy is in Austen’s hand and the paper has a watermark of 1805. Compared to the other texts discussed here, this one has fewer revisions and deletions, although some of those that exist are of interest. Certainly this version could be based on a text composed earlier. On the other hand, because paper was valuable, people often used it some years after the date of its watermark, and with this in mind, Christine Alexander and David Owen argue that the copy could have been made about 1809. This was around the time when Jane Austen was generally revisiting earlier writings and inserted the date 19 August 1809 in ‘Evelyn’, which had been written originally in the early 1790s.⁴

Brian Southam believes that the story might have been altered over a period of more than 10 years, with the narrative conclusion added late. Some critics, however, contend for a post-1800 overall composition: Marilyn Butler argues for as late as 1810–1812 because she thinks the text draws on Maria Edgeworth’s story ‘Manoeuvring’ (1809) and her earlier novel Leonora (1806). Meanwhile Paula Byrne finds the story indebted to Mary Robinson’s The Widow (1794) and Madame de Staël’s Delphine (1802), novels which both feature devious widows. On the other hand, Janine Barchas bases her claim for a post-1800 dating on a possible connection between Austen’s story and a complicated court case which led to Frederic Vernon inheriting the Wentworth Castle estate in 1802, despite the shenanigans of relatives. In Austen’s text, by contrast, Lady Susan Vernon manoeuvres so that Charles Vernon, her late husband’s brother, cannot buy Vernon Castle, and thus she deprives Charles’s son Frederick of a possible inheritance.

All of these hypotheses would still position Lady Susan before the appearance in print of any of Austen’s published novels, if not necessarily long before. In this context, the hypothesis of Kathryn Sutherland about this text’s role in Austen’s career is especially relevant. For her, the fine physical appearance of the text means that whenever originally composed, the surviving version of Lady Susan was a fourth volume, to be added to the three manuscript volumes containing the juvenilia. The text thus represents the culmination of a certain kind of writing, not least the epistolary style which is shared by several of the juvenilia. But it also means the writer’s drawing of a line under such texts, as Austen moved on to the very different style and format in The Watsons.⁵

The Watsons is a manuscript of about 17,500 words which, like Lady Susan, was included in Austen-Leigh’s second edition of the Memoir of Jane Austen and given the title by the Austen family. The text’s strong focus on one family makes this choice apposite. This manuscript is the least polished of the four, and for this reason is the most textually rich. It contains no pagination or chapter divisions, nor clear paragraphing. The revisions are numerous, and there are three insertions of new material. There is ample evidence, therefore, for investigating how Austen refined her characterization and the dialogue that animated this, tweaked her descriptive emphases, added drama and movement to her scenes and developed the atmosphere of her settings.

The date of composition for The Watsons is somewhat uncertain, if less so than that of Lady Susan. A watermark of 1803 is visible, and a dating of 1804 comes down from Fanny Caroline Lefroy, daughter of Anna Lefroy née Austen. She probably took it from Jane Austen’s sister Cassandra, owner of the manuscript after Jane’s death.⁶ If we take Lady Susan as dating from the 1790s, then this later manuscript is, as Todd and Bree put it, ‘the only original prose work extant from the long period between the completion of a forerunner of Northanger Abbey in 1799 and the beginning of Mansfield Park in 1811’.⁷

The Watsons is the bleakest of the four texts under discussion, as its heroine, Emma Watson, begins the story in a newly dispossessed state, when the household which has brought her up and made of