Austen in August: The Watsons and Emma Watson...Review and Giveaway

The problem with completions of unfinished works is that the reader inevitably compares the completed work to that of the fragment by a hallowed author.  The resultant work inevitably falls short because the author of the completed work seeks to both pay homage to and shine beside the hallowed author. There is no better example of this phenomenon than in Joan Aiken's Emma Watson, acompletion of Jane Austen's The Watsons, which I read for Austen in August.

If Emma Watson wasn't inextricably tied to The Watsons, then I would say it was a reasonably good Regency Romance.  Not on par with a Georgette Heyer, but not bad.  It has a spirited heroine, an unattainable Lord, a nasty Lady, a sympathetic ingénue, a flighty aunt, an unconventional hero, a wonderful red herring, a rattle, a passel of siblings (some rotten, some sound), and a sympathetic parent.  But, it also has a suicide in addition to several other deaths, most of which affect the heroine directly and direly. Did Aiken not read Austen?  Did she not know that other pens may dwell on misery but Austenland harbors no purveyors of gothic misery?  The bit of ivory two inches wide is meant to contain a recognizable world, filled with realistic people who have common human failings but whose stories are worth telling.  The stories in Emma Watson, while somewhat interesting, aren't memorable because they basically are contrived.

The many ways in which Aiken pays homage to Austen range from sweet to cloying.  The Watsons was written between 1803 and 1805, while the Austen family (mother, father, Jane, and Cassandra) were living in Bath after Mr. Austen retired.  She abandoned it after her father died in 1805.  It is assumed that the story itself--that of sisters whose father is ailing and who hasn't enough fortune to enable his daughters to live independently--was too close to home, too painful for Austen to complete. Plus, she didn't have time to write.  She needed to figure out how to live.

Aiken writes the father's death into her story, casting Emma into a den of lions (aka siblings).  She also manages to kill off a lovely friend of Emma's, Anna Blake, echoing the tragic death of Austen's beloved friend and mentor, Anna Lefroy, who died in a riding accident shortly before Mr. Austen's death. I was personally shocked by this fictional death, and even more so by Aiken's cold-hearted murder of Anna's delightful son, Charles, with whom Emma dances in Austen's manuscript (one of the sweetest scenes Austen ever wrote in my 'umble opinion). 

Aiken dips into both Austen's life as well as her published novels for plot points, turns of phrase, and characters. Emma's older brother Robert and his wife Jane bear a remarkable resemblance to John and Fanny Dashwood from Sense and Sensibility.  Admiral Crawford and his nephew Henry (Mansfield Park) rent an estate from the nasty noble family.  Emma Watson is offered the opportunity to dedicate the next volume of her late father's sermons, which she is publishing, to the Prince Regent, and actually meets him!  I confess that my eyes got a definite aerobics workout with all the eye-rolling I indulged in.

Yet...despite all these allusions to Austen, the one thing that Aiken wasn't able to emulate was Austen's wit.  The plot was convoluted and the characters were outrageous, but it just wasn't much fun.  I love the humor in Austen--her sly barbs, her razor sharp remarks that bite through the shrug of recognition, her compassionate understanding that is tinged with grace and goodwill and a smile.  There was none of that in Emma Watson. Truth be told, there was precious little of it in The Watsons.  I like to think that if Austen had lived longer, she might have revisited this story and imbued it with more humor than she could muster when she started it.  

I think the premise of The Watsons is sound, and I think that Emma Watson has all the trappings of an Austen heroine.  I don't think that Aiken did justice to her and I likely won't bother with another of her continuations or completions, but I did enjoy getting to know Austen's fragment again...and I know that she never would have killed off that charming Charles Blake! Grrr!

If you want to see for yourself whether I'm hopelessly prejudiced or not, I am holding a giveaway for my copy of The Watsons and Emma Watson.  I'm happy to send it anywhere in the world.  Simply post a comment below along with your email address.  I will be accepting entries until Friday, August 29 at 8 pm MT.

Final note on The Watsons—I found this fascinating article recently, Jane Austen Used Pins to Edit Her Abandoned Manuscript, The Watsons.  Basically Austen edited this manuscript by pinning strips of paper with new text over the existing words.  The original “cut and paste” editing technique. My first thought was that this was a technique that wouldn’t have occurred to a man, and then I wondered whether she invented and used it more than just for The Watsons.

Giveaway winner: Mary Preston from Australia!

Austen in August - heads up for review and giveaway

The 3rd annual Austen in August blog event kicked off last Friday, August 1 at Lost Generation Reader.  Thanks to Jenna for hosting what promises to be a really fun reading/blogging experience.

I've signed up to do a review/giveaway on August 26 of The Watsons and Emma Watson: Jane Austen's Unfinished Novel Completed by Joan Aiken.  The giveaway will be open through August 30 and will be available for international as well as U.S. residents.  So mark your calendar so that you can come back and enter the giveaway.  The Watsons is one of Austen's unfinished works and was not published until the 1870s.  Many have speculated as to why Austen never finished it--I've read it a couple of times and read one continuation (by A Lady) but am looking forward to see what Aiken did with it.

I'm also planning to read Jane Austen's First Love, by Syrie James as well as Jane Austen and Names by Maggie Lane.

And I am planning on enjoying reading everyone else's blog posts about my favorite author.

Though it's not part of Austen in August, here's a link to a blog post I did on Mansfield Park when I reread it earlier this year: What is the Matter With Fanny?

Travelogue: Finding Austen in New York City

I had a business trip this week that started on Monday with a flight to Tampa and ended on Friday with a free day in New York City. Doing what any sane Janeite would do, I visited the Morgan Library and treated myself to an hour and a half at the exhibit entitled "A Woman's Wit: Jane Austen's Life and Legacy."

The exhibition is primarily displays of documents that Austen wrote and that J.P. Morgan and his heirs acquired in the early years of the 20th century. Because Jane's sister Cassandra destroyed most of Austen's handwritten documents, the Morgan Library bulked up the exhibit by displaying first editions of Austen's works, examples of various illustrations of the novels over the two centuries since they were first published, and related documentation, for example the letter from James Stanier Clarke to Austen letting her know that she would not be turned down should she dedicate her next work to his boss, the Prince of Wales, the man who would become King George IV.



I enjoyed the exhibit immensely. As others have done, I marveled over Austen's neat, straight lines of tiny handwriting; was impressed upon seeing the copperplate manuscript of Lady Susan; enjoyed the illustrations, especially those of Isabel Bishop, with my two favorites shown here.

I wandered around, looked at everything, watched the movie, and kept on waiting for the WOW moment. I was starting to think that I was just too jaded, had seen too many facsimiles to be truly touched by the genuine article, and then at the center of the room I took my turn to view a front/back display of a page from Austen's unfinished work The Watsons. This document made me catch my breath because it, more than anything else there, caught Austen in the creative act. The Lady Susan document is a copied version and so has a sterile, frozen aspect to it. The letters are chatty glimpses into her life. The illustrations are other artists renderings of the images her words created. But The Watsons is forever a work in progress. It shows Austen's thought process. It shows her hand, unpolished and real. Some words she scratched out, and others are inserted. It has a vibrancy that touched me, perhaps because I know that she never finished it but might have had she lived even a few more years. I wonder why Cassandra didn't burn this document. Why save this one and not any of the other drafts? Maybe Austen herself destroyed her drafts when she finally got the story to the place where she wanted it to be. Maybe Cassandra thought there was something good albeit rough in The Watsons and couldn't bring herself to end its life.

In writing up this post, John Keats' Ode to a Grecian Urn sprang to mind and I thought about how he had written about everlasting fleetingness of the maidens and the men frolicking across the vase, "...For ever piping songs for ever new." Seeing the rough manuscript of The Watsons made me realize that it, like the maidens and men, is forever new. Wow!