But this scene from The Watsons draws on the early and more innocent response she had to the vulnerability of children—and to the pleasure of dancing.

The scene is a joyous set piece, a chance for the reader to know and appreciate Emma’s rare qualities. Soon after, though, the story of Emma and her sisters hardens. The desperate struggle to marry becomes a bitter impasse. Elizabeth, Emma’s older sister, puts it plainly: “You know we must marry—I could do very well single for my own part.—A little company, and a pleasant ball now and then, would be enough for me, if one could be young forever, but my father cannot provide for us, and it is very bad to grow old and be poor and laughed at.”

This subject, the impossible bargaining position of single women, becomes too quickly the only subject. The novel dwindles, narrows, and loses sparkle. The men are never brought fully to life. And perhaps this realization encouraged Austen to put the manuscript away.

The subject may have been too close to her own recent experience to permit the grace and humor and saving side stories of Pride and Prejudice. For a writer who had taken pains to avoid autobiography, the developments in the Watson family were becoming overly delicate to handle. And she must have been aware that she was covering the same territory as in her earlier novels, but with less buoyancy, bringing instead a harsh cry of rebellion and outrage.

Her nephew James Edward Austen-Leigh, known by his aunt as Edward, offered an interesting conjecture about Jane’s failure to finish the novel. She might have placed the four Watson sisters at too low a level of society, he believed, and “like a singer who has begun on too low a note, she discontinued the strain.” It is true that the Watsons are less fashionable and less financially secure than Austen’s other families, but they are not nearly as low on the social index as Fanny Price’s awful Portsmouth family in Mansfield Park; they are less desperate for respectability than the Bateses in Emma, less beleaguered than Mrs. Smith in Persuasion.

It is also true that Edward Austen-Leigh felt a custodial duty toward the Austen clan, wanting always to present the family in a respectable position. Low life frightened him, possibly, in a way that it did not frighten his aunt. Furthermore, the social balance in England had taken on immense freight between Jane Austen’s death in 1817 and the publication of Edward Austen-Leigh’s history at the height of the Victorian age, 1870. Nuances of politesse had multiplied. Certain social barometers had shifted. Ladies no longer helped with meals or with the washing of teacups. They had abandoned the spinning of fibers for the family linen. The wearing of pattens, crude, almost medieval shoes, was taken for granted by the practical Austen family, just the thing for muddy roads, but was seen by Jane Austen’s nephew as a sign of vulgarity. His history of his aunt and her family is full of such tensions. There is so much he cannot understand or refuses to understand, and so much family material for which he would like to offer up apology. The document is endearing for just this confusion of perceptions and for the light it casts on a shift of morals and manners in nineteenth-century England. We cannot read it today as precise truth, but we can appreciate its desire to map the life of his celebrated aunt in the light of his own time. The intensity of personal detail is a gift. As a young man he attempted to write a novel, and the memoir does move forward with a pleasing novelistic pace. Many of his conjectures are imaginative. Others are gross reductions: “Of events her life was singularly barren; few changes and no great crisis ever broke the smooth current of its course.”

Jane Austen is sometimes thought of as being confined by her extremely narrow social view, but her work reveals a far wider optic lens. The Watson family was old-fashioned; they were frugal; they were necessarily engaged in the ongoing domestic labor of their home, their laundry, their small economies.

It is telling that The Watsons is the only major work by Austen that was written in Bath, that alien territory. Her early work was composed at her girlhood home in Steventon, and the later novels—Mansfield Park, Emma, and Persuasion— in the settled tranquillity of Chawton. This single effort was brought to life—or at any rate to a stillbirth—in a city that she found uncongenial and at a time in her life when her self-confidence was at its lowest ebb.

15

THE ABILITY to sustain long works of fiction is at least partially dependent on establishing a delicate balance between solitude and interaction. Too much human noise during the writing of a novel distracts from the cleanliness of its over-arching plan. Too little social interruption, on the other hand, distorts a writer’s sense of reality and allows feeling to “prey” on the consciousness—to place Jane Austen’s (or Anne Elliot’s) own words in a slightly different context.

For every writer the degree of required social involvement or distance must be differently gauged, but novelists who take refuge in isolated log cabins tend to be a romantic minority, or perhaps even a myth.