Lady Susan, The Watsons, Sanditon (Penguin Classics) (edition 1975)

Since this is three short works, I’ll tackle this individually.

Lady Susan: While it’s different to have a novel mostly told through the perspective of a villain—I hesitate to use antagonist—this is really over-the-top. Lady Susan pettily laughs, her daughter sobs every five seconds, and everyone else goes “Oh no! What a horrid woman!” It’s like if Catherine from Northanger Abbey tried writing a novel, with the wild characterization and the way the book ends.

The Watsons: The problem with this and Sandition is that the text just stops with little or none explanation or idea of where the plot was going. The Watsons starts off as atypical Austen—young lady in society, is courted by wealthy and handsome gentlemen, but the fact that the book stops right as the plot is really beginning makes it hard to connect with. The editor’s note of Austen’s plans for the book doesn’t reveal much, either, as there are only vague plot details.

Sandition: Much like The Watsons, the plot stops as it’s getting started, but we’re not left with a short description of what could have happened. While these give some different styles Jane Austen worked on during her life, I’m really not a fan of unfinished products, if only because it’s so jarring to have the book end and knowing that you can’t really recreate the rest.
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For once, the Penguin Classics introductory material adds to the experience of reading the main work, rather than giving away too much, though, of course, all the works included here are more or less not completely finished. Although the editors posit that one will find Lady Susan to be the least satisfactory, I found Sanditon to be dull and a chore to read, whereas Lady Susan, however limiting its epistolary form might be, is certainly fascinating. ( )

Wonderful decipher of the life of an invalid put the emphasis on the second syllable.

This definitely shouldn't be your introduction to Jane Austen, and imagine it would only be picked up by avid fans like myself having read and reread her six mature completed novels and hungry for more. Lady Susan, which feels truncated, is a very early epistolary novel, and The Watsons was abandoned and Sandition left incomplete upon Austen's death. (And incidentally, if you have the version with an introduction with Margaret Drabble, you might want to read it aftewards--she gives too much away.)

Lady Susan, which starts this volume, is really a novella, not a novel--it's only 23,021 words. It was written in 1794 when Austen was still in her teens. I found it hard to get into at first. Unlike her mature, completed novels, this is an epistolary novel told in letters, not third-person narration. The story feels thin compared to those other works as a result, although about halfway through we got more of a sense of scenes, with actual dialogue. It's not that I don't find it worth reading. This is very different in tone than Austen's other novels--her titular heroine is a villain--a catty and malicious adulteress trying to force her daughter Frederica into a marriage of convenience. But if I weren't an Austen fan, I doubt I'd have persisted in reading it far enough for the fascination of Lady Susan's machinations to take hold, although take hold they did. The ending nevertheless feels abrupt to me. (I understand Phyllis Ann Karr did a third person narrative adaptation of the story. Particularly since she's an author I've liked, I'd love to read that. Sadly it's long out of print.)

The Watsons is an abandoned novel of about 17,500 words written in Austen's largely "silent" middle period after Sense and Sensibility and Price and Prejudice but before Mansfield Park and Emma and Persuasion. The protagonist in this novel, Emma Watson, is very likable. Like Fanny Price, she's someone who was raised away from her birth family by a rich relation--except she had expectations of being an heiress, which were disappointed by her rich aunt marrying again, throwing her back to her original family. Her family is respected enough to be able to mix with the best families, including a Lord interested in Emma, and comfortable enough to have a servant, but in the circles they run around in are considered "poor." Only nineteen, Emma has a lot more confidence than Fanny Price, and a lot less snobbishness than her namesake Emma Woodhouse. She endeared herself to me when she goes to the rescue of a ten-year-old boy stood up at a dance. I'm only sorry there wasn't more, and we had to leave Emma soon after a ball parting from her brother and his wife. I'm sure that if Jane Austen had been able to complete this novel, I'd be rating it five or four stars as an equal to Pride and Prejudice or Emma. As it is, this had me running to read Joan Aiken's "continuation" Emma Watson immediately afterwards hungry for more--but was, alas, disappointed. I'm afraid I'll just have to be happy with what Austen left us.

Sanditon was left uncompleted by Jane Austen's death, and I loved what I read to pieces, even more than The Watsons, and can only mourn that her death left Sanditon forever incomplete. It had such possibilities! I really liked our heroine Charlotte Heywood, with her obvious intelligence, lack of pretension and good sense. In the eleven chapters of 26,000 or so words we have left to us, Lady Denham and the three Parker hypochondriac siblings strike me as brilliant comic creations. Then there's Sir Edward Denham, who models himself after rakes like Richardson's Lovelace and schemes to seduce, and if not, abduct, Clara, his rival for Lady Denham's inheritance. Then there's Miss Lambe, "a young West Indian of large fortune," who is "about seventeen, half mulatto, and chilly and tender." What an interesting character to find in an Austen novel! After my experience with Aiken's Watsons completion, I didn't expect much from the 1975 completion by "Another Lady" For what it's worth, I loved it. No, I'm not saying she's Austen's equal. But she tacked on her story seamlessly from where Austen ended, developed the characters very nicely, seemed to get the period details right, and I ended reading the story with a smile.

This book gets only three and a half stars because I can't imagine anyone but us hardcore Austen fanatics or scholars wanting to read incomplete novels and an unpolished bit of juvenalia, and these can't compare to her mature novels. But I did love reading these. ( )

The book contains three different works, collected together because of their size. But they belong to different parts of Austen's life.

Note: Don't read the introductions for each of the parts unless if you had read the novel before -- they are a good introduction if you do not mind being told what you are about to read... and I prefer to hear about that from Austen and not through the retelling of an editor.

Lady Susan is the only finished piece here - it is a short novel about a wicked oldish woman which seems to believe that the world revolves around her. This is the only epistolary novel that she left (Sense and Sensibility had been initially started in the same way but then edited) and the clever conversations which are the trademark of Jane Austen are mostly missing - the format does not suit them well. But it does not make the novel a bad one - it has a somewhat abrupt ending, almost as if Austen got tired of writing it and wanted to wrap it up but it is an enjoyable little story. And even if there is almost no fully fleshed character besides Lady Susan, the few secondary ones are the likable ones and the ones that bring the whole story to life. What seems almost impossible happens here - the book delves into hard topics (adultery, forces marriages and so on) and remains an amusing piece of prose - not as polished as the 6 main novels but a little gem that could have published to brilliancy (and gifted with a better ending - even if it essentially remains the same, the way it is done is ruining the whole impression from the novel).

The Watsons is a lot more traditional... and unfortunately unfinished. Siblings rivalry, unmarried sisters, a sibling growing up away in a better environment and returning, poverty, the main character catching the eye of a rich man and at the same time liking someone that is not that rich - if all that sounds familiar then don't think you've read the wrong book. While I was reading "The Watsons" I could almost see where some of those ideas were used in her later novels - Emma, Mansfield Park and Persuasion -- it is almost as if Austen used The Watsons as a draft and decided that all these elements in the same novel are too much and split them between the other books. But the piece that she wrote is vibrant and alive -- there are enough characters' actions to start liking some of them (and hating some of them). I wish she had finished the book - because even though we know how it was supposed to finish (from a letter Jane Austen wrote to her sister), the ending of a novel had never been what is the most important in her books - almost everyone can guess how all will end and almost anyone reading her books these days know how they end -- but that does not make them less readable. It is all about the way the end is reached.

Sanditon is the last work she started, shortly before her death. And in its 12 chapters it is shaping up as a novel quite different from any of the previous 6 (or 7 if we count Lady Susan). It still has the maids that need to be married, it still has the title-owing man, the rich old lady and the small village that is so familiar from Austen's works. But it also have very eccentric family (Mr. Parker and all his siblings) and the village as a place being part of the novel - something that rarely happened in the early novels (in most places it is there to indicate the small dimensions but here it sounds like it will be one of the main characters of the story). And just like that, it ends. Noone knows how it would have ended, noone knows what Austen planned to do with it in the future. It remains as a beginning that could have led to the next great novel (or could have been abandoned as The Watsons). But even these initial 12 chapters are enjoyable - the Parker siblings are so comical that I could not resist laughing in a few occasions.

I am aware that there are a few authors that finished that novel... and I am not sure that I want to check what they decided the intention had been. The novel is in such early stages that I am not convinced that we had met all of the main players yet (even if it is even longer than The Watsons, it feels a lot less finished and framed, it feels like a canvass in progress where the main elements are not yet fully there.

On a whole reading this collection was an enjoyable experience. Austen's voice is clear and detectable in all of the stories and it is a good thing that these are made available - especially the unfinished pieces. But I doubt that someone that does not like her novels will like these stories. ( )