The Watsons
The fragment was given the title of The Watsons and published in 1871 by the novelist's nephew, James Edward Austen-Leigh (1798–1874), in the revised and augmented edition of his A Memoir of Jane Austen.
There are erasures and corrections to the manuscript and in three cases there were substantial revisions written on small pieces of paper and pinned in place over the cancelled portions.
An act of kindness on her part also acquaints her with Mrs Blake, who introduces Emma to her brother, Mr Howard, vicar of the parish church near Osborne Castle.
An earlier article by Joseph Wiesenfarth disagreed with the speculation that the novel was unfinished because of the unhappy associations for the author of the time it was written and that it covered a theme too close to her own circumstances.
He felt that situations first foreshadowed there were eventually reworked with more skill in novels that Austen had already begun, such as Pride and Prejudice, or would write later, so that "it would be redundant to use them again in a completed version" of The Watsons.
Moreover, it is not until the opening paragraphs of Chapter 2, following a digression on the style of ball-dresses over the centuries, that Mrs Hubback announces the period in which her novel is set.
[10] With these clues, the reader is guided to expect a pastiche of an Austen novel, a Regency era situation described from the point of view of mid-Victorian times.
Then came The Watsons – A Fragment by Jane Austen & Concluded by L. Oulton, published in 1923 and prefaced by Austen-Leigh's original introduction of 1871, as if to give it authenticity.
[12] A contemporary reviewer for The Spectator certainly noticed, however, commenting that "soon after she has taken up the tale, we become aware that all the rich reality has faded out of it and from being, as it were, a perfect little Dresden group, it has shrunk to a two-dimensional drawing", for all that the author "is often successful in hitting off Miss Austen's style and intonation".
A postscript surveyed the history of the family continuations and criticised the Brown version which "so greatly compressed the plot's development that it did less than justice to Jane's own work when all it yielded was so perfunctory a conclusion".
A further continuation came from John Coates (1912–1963), a writer with no family connection but who had earlier written a time-travel novel, Here Today (1949), featuring a man who claimed to have wooed Jane Austen.
[19] In his postscript (pages 314–18) he admitted to having rewritten the original fragment in order to develop the characters differently, including renaming Emma Watson as Emily.
As a result of giving himself this extra leg-room, his version of the story has been judged "more successful in capturing the feel of early 19th-century society than many of the other sequels, but [is] probably much lighter and cheerier than Austen had originally intended the book to turn out".
[26] Yet another continuation was written by Irish author Rose Servitova, whose earlier The Longbourn Letters (2017) had been based on the world of Pride and Prejudice.
The first, Emma and Elizabeth (2014), according to its back cover, "blends passages from the original fragment into the narrative, creating a unique story which is faithful to Jane Austen's style and subject matter".
[31] In another adaptation (that reverses the direction of the time-travel) a metatheatrical intrusion from the present day occurs in Laura Wade's play The Watsons, a dramatisation of the unfinished novel.
