Next week, next year—surely she would hear soon. This hope must have remained with her, but the impulse to produce more novels withered.

A series of discouragements conspired against her in the middle of her life, and the resulting silence means that everything we know of her during this period is a guessing game, a question that leads around and around to an even greater silence.

14

THE LONG YEARS of silence had to be filled somehow. Jane Austen, restless and dissatisfied with life in Bath, busied herself with long hikes—she once described herself as “a desperate walker”—and with visits to Lyme Regis and other holiday resorts.

And in 1803 she began a new novel, The Watsons, which she never finished. We are left with about 17,000 words of promising dramatic action, perhaps one quarter of a finished novel, and then an abrupt halt in 1805, probably at the time of her father’s death—just as she was about to dramatize the death of Mr. Watson in the novel and leave Emma Watson an orphan.

Jane Austen was not, on the whole, an autobiographical novelist, but this fragment, The Watsons, presses closer to her own life and predicament than any of her other works. The four Watson daughters are unmarried, and they are poor. Their father is a clergyman and in poor health. With his impending death, their situation is about to worsen rather than improve—unless, that is, they can find husbands. Emma Watson, who in her vivacity and intelligence resembles Elizabeth Bennet, has been raised not within the family, but by a more cultivated aunt, somewhat in the same manner as Edward Austen, who was plucked out of the respectable but struggling family at Steventon and adopted by wealthy relations.

Even closer to the autobiographical bone may be the question of intense sibling rivalry between the Watsons—treachery, in fact, between two of the sisters. The altercation is shocking, and there has been speculation that a degree of difficulty existed between Jane and Cassandra Austen, who have commonly been regarded as being devoted to each other. But signs are apparent, and not just in The Watsons, that there was some strain between them. In their later years they were frequently separated, alternating their visits to relations, and these arrangements may have been deliberately put in place by a family that recognized the situation.

Jane, the younger sister, the writer of great novels, always, superficially at least, deferred to Cassandra, so much so that some of her letters to her older sister have a suggestion of appeasement, the wish to amuse at any cost and the refusal to take herself seriously as a correspondent.

Sisterly relationships are presented with great warmth in the early novels, but they cool noticeably in Mansfield Park, where the Bertram sisters are on poor terms, and in Persuasion, where Anne ardently dislikes her silly, snobbish sisters and makes no apology for her feelings. As for Emma Woodhouse and her sister Isabella, they are widely separated by age and geography so that they scarcely seem sisters at all.

There is no hard evidence that Cassandra betrayed her sister in any way, although she must have played an advisory role in the broken engagement with Bigg-Wither, something that Jane Austen couldn’t help adding to her stock of experience and that she may have carried forward, consciously or unconsciously, into the fabric of The Watsons.

As the novel opens, Emma has returned to her family and, like her sisters, is assumed to be in the serious business of husband hunting. Local society conspires with this drive, and the story takes off quickly in the direction of matchmaking. A number of available males are introduced, and Emma, again like Elizabeth, appoints herself the gentle judge of her suitors’ various moral achievements and failures.

The writing is often charming, with an openness of expression that signals a new determination to describe the plight of women, particularly the fact that women of Jane Austen’s class had nothing but marriage to rescue them from their parental home. A marriage of love was almost always out of reach in real life, though all of Jane Austen’s heroines, before and following The Watsons, achieve just that. The reality was that women without money were forced into marriages of compromise, which was what Jane Austen herself had recently rejected when she withdrew her promise to Harris Bigg-Wither. A number of misgivings must have followed that decision, since the alternative was spinsterhood, with its various shames and confinements.

Jane Austen was a writer who kept her manuscripts close at hand and who tinkered with them endlessly. Other writers burn or shred their unfinished efforts, but she had enough regard for her tentative drafts to keep them safe. The fragmentary story of the Watsons has survived and come down to a contemporary readership that appreciates its energy and promise and, most particularly, the light it shines on Jane Austen’s thoughts in the early years of the century while she was living in Bath with her parents, after having escaped marriage by a whisker.

She discussed the proposed trajectory of The Watsons with Cassandra, who passed on the novel’s narrative structure much later in life. There was to be a happy ending, which would surprise no one. Emma Watson would reject the attentions of Lord Osborne, who would have brought security and comfort to the whole Watson family, and marry a man of simplicity and sincerity, capable of offering the gift of love. The makings of a fairy tale are here: the poor but noble-spirited young woman—Emma Watson—who refuses to cave in to an unjust social norm. To pursue a man in order to improve one’s situation, she tells her sister Elizabeth, “is a sort of thing that shocks me; I cannot understand it. Poverty is a great Evil, but to a woman of Education & feeling it ought not be, it cannot be the greatest.” Elizabeth, an older, more experienced sister, is less sanguine. For her there is little to look forward to.

Why did Jane Austen abandon the project? She had invented an attractive heroine and placed her in a promising moral and social dilemma. She had established a firm narrative arc, and there is very little to support the idea that she might have turned the tables on her readers, investing Lord Osborne with an unsuspected worth.

A dazzling episode occurs in the opening pages of the novel. Emma attends a neighborhood ball, and instead of the familiar scene of the girl without a partner, we see a young boy, abandoned and longing to dance. Emma acts forcefully by rescuing him from his lonely humiliation: “ ‘I shall be very happy to dance with you sir, if you like it’ said she, holding out her hand with the most unaffected good humour.” She takes him as her dancing partner, spontaneously and joyfully, and with natural respect. She might have been thought silly or aggressive, but instead she is perceived by those at the ball to have acted with great tact and natural kindness.

There is not a great deal of love for children in Jane Austen’s work, which is not surprising since she was often saddled with the care of her many nieces and nephews.