Lady Susan, the Watsons, Sanditon

CONTENTS

Introduction

Further Reading

Social Background

A Note on the Text

LADY SUSAN

THE WATSONS

SANDITON

Notes

Chronology

LADY SUSAN . THE WATSONS . SANDITON

JANE AUSTEN was born on 16 December 1775 at Steventon, near Basingstoke, the seventh child of the rector of the parish. She lived with her family at Steventon until they moved to Bath when her father retired in 1801. After his death in 1805, she moved around with her mother; in 1809 they settled in Chawton, near Alton, Hampshire. Here she remained, except for a few visits to London, until May 1817, when she moved to Winchester to be near her doctor. There she died on 18 July 1817.

Jane Austen was extremely modest about her own genius, describing her work to her nephew, Edward, as ‘the little bit (two inches wide) of ivory, on which I work with so fine a brush, as produces little effect after much labour’. As a girl she wrote stories, including burlesques of popular romances. Her works were published only after much revision, four novels being published in her lifetime. These are Sense and Sensibility (1811), Pride and Prejudice (1813), Mansfield Park (1814) and Emma (1816). Two other novels, Northanger Abbey and Persuasion, were published posthumously in 1818 with a biographical notice by her brother, Henry Austen, the first formal announcement of her authorship. Persuasion was written in a race against failing health in 1815–16. She also left two earlier compositions, a short epistolary novel, Lady Susan, and an unfinished novel, The Watsons. At the time of her death, she was working on a new novel, Sanditon, a fragmentary draft of which survives.

MARGARET DRABBLE was educated at the Mount School, York, and Newnham College, Cambridge. She has published fourteen novels, including The Millstone (1965) and The Peppered Moth (2001), and biographies of Arnold Bennett and Angus Wilson. She is the editor of The Oxford Companion to English Literature (fifth edition, 1985; sixth edition, 2000). She is married to the biographer Michael Holroyd.

JANE AUSTEN

LADY SUSAN

*

THE WATSONS

*

SANDITON

EDITED WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY MARGARET DRABBLE

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This edition first published 1974
Reprinted with a new Chronology and Further Reading 2003

Editorial material copyright © Margaret Drabble, 1974,2003
Chronology copyright © Claire Lamont, 1995,2003
All rights reserved

ISBN: 978–0–141–90790–1

INTRODUCTION

THERE are some great writers who wrote too much. There are others who wrote enough. There are yet others who wrote nothing like enough to satisfy their admirers, and Jane Austen is certainly one of these. There would be more genuine rejoicing at the discovery of a complete new novel by Jane Austen than any other literary discovery, short of a new major play by Shakespeare, that one can imagine. As there will be no such discovery, her readers will have to satisfy themselves with re-reading her six masterpieces (and it is generally agreed that they bear re-reading exceptionally well), and with her lesser and unfinished works.

This volume contains one finished novel, Lady Susan, which was not published in her lifetime, and two unfinished fragments, The Watsons and Sanditon. They cover the three periods of her writing life: Lady Susan belongs to the first period, when she was writing versions of what were to be Pride and Prejudice, Sense and Sensibility and Northanger Abbey: The Watsons belongs to the unhappy and, on the whole, silent middle period, when the Austen family had moved from Steventon, their family home, to Bath: and Sanditon was the last work she ever wrote, interrupted by her death and thus concluding the last period which produced Mansfield Park, Emma and Persuasion. Obviously these fragments from a major writer who died young (she was forty-two when she died) would have been of interest as literary records and curiosities, even if they had been of little intrinsic value, but as it happens they are all of them of high quality, well worth reading for their own sakes, and for pleasure as well as study. It is frustrating not to know precisely how the two later pieces would have ended, but they are enjoyable and suggestive in the form in which we have them, and have given rise to much interesting speculation, as well as to several attempts at sequels.

It is impossible to know whether or not she would have wanted them published. She was a private and modest person, and even when fame and recognition came her way, she did not move a step to meet them, politely refusing invitations to meet other celebrities, and continuing in her own quiet domestic circle. Unlike Charlotte Brontë, who craved for recognition and excitement, and found herself temperamentally unable to cope with them when she got them, Jane Austen seems to have been secure and confident in her choice of privacy. Was she aware of the enduring quality of her own works, and of the reputation she would enjoy? It is impossible to say. She certainly cared deeply about her novels, was excited by their publication, and involved in their fate: she refers to them several times as her ‘children’. But one suspects that she was morally incapable of the kind of arrogance that would have let her think of herself as a great or important writer, and that she would have been surprised to see the kind of respect that posterity would pay not only to her novels, but also to her letters, her Juvenilia, her doggerel verses. Even her own nephew, in a highly laudatory account of her, refers to Walter Scott as ‘a greater genius than my aunt’, a judgement which few would now endorse.