THE CAMBRIDGE EDITION
OF THE WORKS OF

JANE AUSTEN

LATER MANUSCRIPTS

Cambridge University Press and
Janet Todd wish to express their gratitude to the
University of Glasgow and the University of Aberdeen for
providing funding towards the creation of this edition.
Their generosity made possible the employment of
Antje Blank as research assistant during the project.

THE CAMBRIDGE EDITION
OF THE WORKS OF

JANE AUSTEN

GENERAL EDITOR: Janet Todd, Lucy Cavendish College, Cambridge
and University of Aberdeen

EDITORIAL BOARD

Marilyn Butler, University of Oxford
Alistair Duckworth, University of Florida
Isobel Grundy, University of Alberta
Claudia Johnson, Princeton University
Jerome McGann, University of Virginia
Deirdre Le Faye, independent scholar
Linda Bree, Cambridge University Press

VOLUMES IN THIS SERIES
Juvenilia edited by Peter Sabor
Northanger Abbey edited by Barbara Benedict and Deirdre Le Faye
Sense and Sensibility edited by Edward Copeland
Pride and Prejudice edited by Pat Rogers
Mansfield Park edited by John Wiltshire
Emma edited by Richard Cronin and Dorothy McMillan
Persuasion edited by Janet Todd and Antje Blank
Later Manuscripts edited by Janet Todd and Linda Bree
Jane Austen in Context edited by Janet Todd

Frontispiece: First manuscript page of Jane Austen's poem ‘When
stretch’d on one’s bed’. See p. 253.

JANE AUSTEN

LATER MANUSCRIPTS

Edited by

Janet Todd and Linda Bree

CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS
Cambridge, New York, Melbourne, Madrid, Cape Town, Singapore, São Paulo, Delhi

Cambridge University Press
The Edinburgh Building, Cambridge CB2 8RU, UK

Published in the United States of America by
Cambridge University Press, New York

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Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9780521843485

© Cambridge University Press 2008

This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception
and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements,
   no reproduction of any part may take place without
the written permission of Cambridge University Press.

First published 2008

Printed in the United Kingdom at the University Press, Cambridge

A catalogue record for this publication is available from the British Library

Library of Congress Cataloguing in Publication data
Austen, Jane, 1775–1817.

Later manuscripts / Jane Austen ; edited by Janet Todd and Linda Bree.
   p.   cm. – (The Cambridge edition of the works of Jane Austen)
Includes bibliographical references.
ISBN 978-0-521-84348-5 (hardback)
1. Austen, Jane, 1775–1817 – Manuscripts. I. Todd, Janet M., 1942–
II. Bree, Linda. III. Title. IV. Series.
PR4032.T63 2008
828′.7 – dc22   2008035044

ISBN 978-0-521-84348-5 hardback

Cambridge University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or
accuracy of URLs for external or third-party internet websites referred to
in this publication, and does not guarantee that any content on such
websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

Contents

Appendices 257

ILLUSTRATIONS

GENERAL EDITOR’S PREFACE

Jane Austen wrote to be read and reread. ‘[A]n artist cannot do anything slovenly,’ she remarked to her sister Cassandra. Her subtle, crafted novels repay close and repeated attention to vocabulary, syntax and punctuation as much as to irony and allusion; yet the reader can take immediate and intense delight in their plots and characters. As a result Austen has a unique status among early English novelists – appreciated by the academy and the general public alike. What Henry Crawford remarks about Shakespeare in Mansfield Park has become equally true of its author: she ‘is a part of an Englishman’s constitution. [Her] thoughts and beauties are so spread abroad that one touches them every where, one is intimate with [her] by instinct.’ This edition of the complete oeuvre of the published novels and manuscript works is testament to Austen’s exceptional cultural and literary position. As well as attempting to establish an accurate and authoritative text, it provides a full contextual placing of the novels.

   The editing of any canonical writer is a practice which has been guided by many conflicting ideologies. In the early twentieth century, editors, often working alone, largely agreed that they were producing definitive editions, although they used eclectic methods and often revised the text at will. Later in the century, fidelity to the author’s creative intentions was paramount, and the emphasis switched to devising an edition that would as far as possible represent the final authorial wishes. By the 1980s, however, the pursuit of the single perfected text had given way to the recording of multiple intentions of equal interest. Authors were seen to have changed, revised or recanted, or indeed to have directed various versions of their work towards different audiences. Consequently all states had validity and the text became a process rather than a fixed entity. With this approach came emphasis on the print culture in which the text appeared as well as on the social implications of authorship. Rather than being stages in the evolution of a single work, the various versions existed in their own right, all having something to tell.

   The Cambridge edition describes fully Austen’s early publishing history and provides details of composition, publication and publishers as well as printers and compositors where known. It accepts that many of the decisions concerning spelling, punctuation, capitalizing, italicizing and paragraphing may well have been the compositors’ rather than Austen’s but that others may represent the author’s own chosen style. For the novels published in Jane Austen’s lifetime the edition takes as its copytext the latest edition to which she might plausibly have made some contribution: that is, the first editions of Pride and Prejudice and Emma and the second editions of Sense and Sensibility and Mansfield Park. Where a second edition is used, all substantive and accidental changes between editions are shown on the page so that the reader can reconstruct the first edition, and the dominance of either first or second editions is avoided. For the two novels published posthumously together, Northanger Abbey and Persuasion, the copytext is the first published edition.

   The two volumes devoted to manuscript writings divide the works between the three juvenile notebooks on the one hand and the remaining manuscript writings on the other. The juvenile notebooks and ‘Lady Susan’ have some resemblance to the published works, being fair copies and following some of the conventions of publishing. The other manuscript writings consist in part of fictional works in early drafts, burlesques and autograph and allograph copies of occasional verses and prayers. The possible dating of the manuscript works, as well as the method of editing, is considered in the introductions to the relevant volumes. Their features as manuscripts have been respected and changes and erasures either reproduced or noted.

   In all the volumes superscript numbers in the texts indicate endnotes. Throughout the edition we have provided full annotations to give clear and informative historical and cultural information to the modern reader while largely avoiding critical speculation; we have also indicated words which no longer have currency or have altered in meaning in some way. The introductions give information concerning the genesis and immediate public reception of the texts; they also indicate the most significant stylistic and generic features. A chronology of Austen’s life appears in each volume. More information about the life, Austen’s reading, her relationship to publication, the print history of the novels and their critical reception through the centuries, as well as the historical, political, intellectual and religious context in which she wrote, is available in Jane Austen in Context, which forms part of the edition.

Janet Todd

PREFACE

This volume contains all the known manuscript works of Jane Austen’s adulthood, with the exception of the cancelled chapters of Persuasion, which are reproduced as an Appendix in the volume of Persuasion in the Cambridge edition. The manuscripts exist in many forms, and each is described in detail at the appropriate point in the volume. With the exception of ‘Lady Susan’ and some of the poems, none exists in a fair copy in Austen’s hand. Some survive only in draft form, some in versions written down by others; some have come down to us in multiple forms. Because of the ‘occasional’ nature of the poems in particular, where they exist in more than one version we have chosen to reproduce the earliest complete text, while noting variants between this and any other versions in Austen’s handwriting.

   With the exception of the reading texts of ‘The Watsons’ and ‘Sanditon’ (see below) we have not changed Jane Austen’s spelling, capitalization, paragraphing or punctuation; her idiosyncrasies and inconsistencies, which form part of the texture of her work, have been carefully preserved. We have however made no attempt to represent graphic features of the manuscripts, such as lines drawn above or below titles and chapter numbers. Jane Austen occasionally uses the long ‘s’; throughout we have regularized this to the modern ‘s’. Her use of quotation marks differs from modern usage; we have followed her various systems but, when opening or closing quotation marks have been accidentally omitted, they have been inserted.

   Jane Austen’s handwriting is generally clear and legible, but some ambiguities in the manuscripts cause difficulties in transcription. Since her indentations are often extremely slight, it is not always clear where a new paragraph begins. Many initial letters of words fall somewhere between upper and lower case, while commas cannot always be distinguished from periods. In such cases we have used our best editorial judgement, taking into account Jane Austen’s practice in other manuscripts. The insetting of ‘Lady Susan’ into larger pages has sometimes resulted in the extreme right hand margin of Austen’s original manuscript being no longer visible; here, and on other occasions of obvious accidental omission, we have inserted missing letters within square brackets.

   ‘The Watsons’ and ‘Sanditon’, her two incomplete novels, both exist in what seems to be a first-draft state. As working documents, they are very revealing of Austen’s creative process. We have therefore decided that, rather than drawing an ‘authoritative’ text from the manuscript, with textual notes describing the revisions, additions and deletions, we would offer a line-by-line transcription of the two manuscripts: these appear as Appendices A and B. With this method, while we cannot indicate whether revisions were made at the time of first writing or later (on which one can speculate only when examining the manuscript in its material state), we can show where Austen was having difficulty working and reworking a phrase or sentence, and where she was writing smoothly in response to her first thoughts.

   Because of the presence of these line-by-line transcriptions we have chosen to present, in the main body of the volume, ‘reading’ versions of both texts, which have been discreetly edited to reflect basic publishing conventions of the early nineteenth century, as evidenced by Austen’s own published works. Accordingly, we have made the following changes:

   -inserted quotation marks around speeches, except where the older convention of using brackets to indicate the speaker is used;

   -inserted a line-break before and after speech, except where the speeches seem designed to run on;

   -added some paragraphing when a single paragraph seems much longer than is common in the published works, and the narrative moves to a new subject; for ‘Sanditon’ we have usually followed the paragraph divisions suggested by Cassandra Austen in her fair copy of the manuscript made after Jane Austen’s death;

   -reduced Austen’s heavy use of initial capital letters for nouns of all kinds;

   -converted underlining into the usual printed equivalent of italics;

   -normalized superscripts, so that ‘M^rs . becomes ‘Mrs.’, etc.;

-expanded grammatical contractions, so that ‘tho’ becomes ‘though’, etc.;

   -expanded contractions for dates, titles and names, so that ‘Oct.’ becomes ‘October’, ‘Col.’ becomes ‘Colonel’ (as it does in most, though not all, references in the published works), ‘H.’ becomes ‘Heywood’, etc.;

   -corrected idiosyncratic or old-fashioned spellings which would have been caught in any publishing process, such as ‘veiw’, ‘freind’, ‘neice’, ‘independant’, ‘chearful’, ‘agreable’, ‘bason’; where the spelling was acceptable in the nineteenth century, though obsolete now, for example with ‘staid’ for ‘stayed’, ‘shew’ for ‘show’, ‘stile’ for ‘style’, ‘ancle’ (which appears in Pride and Prejudice) and Surry (in Emma), we have not adjusted it;

   -adjusted punctuation where the text seems to require it for the sake of sense or common usage;

   -harmonized Austen’s inconsistent use of the apostrophe.

   With one exception, we have not made consistent Austen’s spelling of names, so that, just as in Pride and Prejudice the Bennets’ aunt is either Phillips or Philips, here the keeper of the library in Sanditon remains variously Mrs. or Miss Whilby or Whitby. The exception is the spelling of Edwards/Edwardes in ‘The Watsons’, which we have represented throughout as Edwards, partly because of the need to expand the frequently used contraction ‘E.’.

   Despite clear evidence that early nineteenth-century printing practice would have insisted on extensive adjustment, we have chosen to make very few changes in Austen’s use of the dash. It is clear to us that the dash is so characteristic of her style, and so closely bound up with the rhythm of her prose, that removal, or substantial reduction, would risk changing the nature of the text in a way that could not be justified in a scholarly edition.

   As far as all the changes are concerned, we have made them with caution. We strongly recommend that readers compare the resulting reading text with the line-by-line transcriptions, to reach a rounder sense both of Austen’s creative process as shown in these two unfinished works, and of the relationship, more generally, between her manuscripts and her published novels.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Given the very varied nature of the contents of this volume, we
have been grateful for the assistance of a large number of people.

   Like all editors of scholarly editions, we are indebted to those who came before us – in this instance in working on, and presenting editions of, Jane Austen’s manuscripts and related works. They include Christine Alexander, R. W. Chapman, Margaret Anne Doody, Margaret Drabble, Claudia L. Johnson, Vivien Jones, David Selwyn, Brian Southam and Kathryn Sutherland.

   Thanks are due to the owners of the manuscripts we have consulted and reproduced, and the libraries within which they are held: Belinda Austen, the Bath and N. E. Somerset Council, the Henry W. and Albert A. Berg Collection in the New York Public Library, the British Library, Damaris Jane Brix, Chawton House Library and Study Centre, the City Museum, Winchester, the Dean and Chapter of Winchester Cathedral, the Fondation Martin Bodmer, David Gilson, Park Honan, King’s College Cambridge (in particular Patricia McGuire the Archivist), the Morgan Library in New York (in particular Christine Nelson, the Drue Heinz Curator of Literary and Historical Manuscripts), Sandy Lerner, the William H. Olin Library, Oakland, California, Queen Mary, University of London (particularly Lorraine Screene the Archivist), and Freydis Jane Welland.

   We are very grateful for information, ideas and advice we have received from Kathy Atherton, Antje Blank, Marilyn Butler, Emma Clery, Edward Copeland, Jan Davies, Geoffrey Day, Alistair Duckworth, Roz Field, Heather Glen, David Hewitt, Derek Hughes, Peter Knox-Shaw, David McKitterick, James McLaverty, Claude Rawson, Ruth Roston, David Selwyn, Tony Singleton, Margaret Smyth, Elizabeth Spearing, Fiona Sunley, Kathryn Sutherland, Mary Turner, Chris Viveash, Michael Wheeler, John Wiltshire, John Worthen and Cheryl Wilson.

   The editorial and production team at Cambridge University Press – Maartje Scheltens, Audrey Cotterell, Alison Powell and Caroline Murray – have supported the volume with expertise and enthusiasm well beyond what their professional work required.

   A large number of people have been particularly generous with their time, knowledge and skill. We would like to express special thanks to Tom Carpenter, David Gilson and Peter Sabor. But our greatest debt of gratitude is to Deirdre Le Faye, whose knowledge of Austen’s life and family circumstances is unparalleled, and from whose intellectual generosity we have benefited hugely. This volume could not have been published in anything like its present form without her help and encouragement to us – and her stringent questioning of our conclusions – as we pursued and presented our research.

CHRONOLOGY

DEIRDRE LE FAYE

The Austen Family

INTRODUCTION

Virginia Woolf famously claimed that Jane Austen was the most difficult author to catch ‘in the act of greatness’.¹ If there are to be glimpses, some must come from the handwritten changes, elisions and revisions in the few prose manuscripts that survive: the small, closely written pages that form the unfinished works now entitled ‘The Watsons’ and ‘Sanditon’ and the cancelled chapters of Persuasion.

   This volume of The Cambridge Edition of the Works of Jane Austen contains ‘The Watsons’, ‘Sanditon’, the novella ‘Lady Susan’, comments on fiction in a series of letters Austen wrote to her niece Anna Lefroy,² the burlesque ‘Plan of a Novel’ and the comic letter to ‘Mrs. Hunter of Norwich’, as well as the opinions she collected on her own novels, Mansfield Park and Emma. It also prints poems, both serious, such as ‘To the Memory of Mrs. Lefroy’, written in 1808, and lightly frivolous, such as ‘On the Marriage of Mr. Gell of East Bourn to Miss Gill’, provoked simply by the oddity of names. An appendix includes works that have been ascribed to Jane Austen but for which there is insufficient certainty to warrant placing with the texts which are securely hers. The cancelled chapters of Persuasion, which would otherwise have found a place in the volume, have been included with Persuasion in this edition.³

   The novels published in Jane Austen’s lifetime have for us now no private rehearsals – although two of them, Sense and Sensibility and Mansfield Park, received small revisions between published versions⁴ – and so the unfinished, fragmentary ‘The Watsons’ and ‘Sanditon’, frustrated attempts at finished works and meant in this state only for her own or her family’s eyes, indicate habits of writing about which the published texts are secret. Their revisions, including the ‘scratching out’, may be placed beside the advice Jane Austen gave to Anna concerning descriptive minuteness, characterization, social verisimilitude and the paring down of detail when composing fiction.⁵

   The two fragments of ‘The Watsons’ and ‘Sanditon’ can of course only hint at the process behind the published works. They are equally secretive about how they themselves might have looked in their final state, though the comparison between them and the printed works clearly indicates the kind of changes that Austen’s publishers made to her writing. They have significance in their own right, as manuscript texts unmediated by print and compositor. They expand Jane Austen’s oeuvre and indicate other directions from those taken in the six works published in or just after her lifetime. Together they suggest a greater range than the finished novels alone display.

   The third substantial prose work in this volume, the novella ‘Lady Susan’, exists only in a fair, untitled copy probably made much later than its composition and intended, as far as we know, for readers within the circle of friends and family rather than as a prepared text for a printer to publish – we have no idea of the state of manuscripts Jane Austen or her siblings Henry and Cassandra actually sent to the printer. But, because, outside the juvenilia, ‘Lady Susan’ is the only example of her work in letters and because Jane Austen first composed Sense and Sensibility and possibly Pride and Prejudice in epistolary form, this also may tell us something distinctive about her creative habits in the major novels. And it too interests in its own right. The story of a designing society woman has many antecedents, English and French, but there is nothing quite like ‘Lady Susan’ in earlier fiction and nothing in Jane Austen’s published novels prepares us for its ebulliently amoral effect.

   Families often control literary remains of a famous author, feeling themselves appropriate stewards of genius. Rivalry plays a part in the withholding and delivery of items, along with discretion and sense of family honour. The Shelley family struggled hard to create a saintly image of the poet by selecting, excising, rewriting and destroying part of the surviving archive. The Austen family members were less extreme but presumably had less to hide. They did however seek to control the image of their only famous relative. It was an image that could be much affected by the manuscripts they owned.

   Cassandra Austen was her sister’s legatee and executrix; and to her came all Jane Austen’s finished and unfinished fictional manuscripts. She was prepared to destroy letters which she did not want to leave for the eyes of her younger relatives, as being perhaps too intimate or too trivial, but she appears not to have interfered with the creative work left unpublished or unfinished at Jane Austen’s death, except for small points of editing when making copies. In Cassandra’s lifetime, none of the manuscripts and fragments was printed; instead they were, when she died in 1845, carefully apportioned out among those family members who, it was thought, would most appreciate them.

   In a ‘Biographical Notice of the Author’, prefixed to the posthumous volume Persuasion and Northanger Abbey (published December 1817, dated 1818), Henry Austen alluded to some stanzas ‘replete with fancy and vigour’ which his sister had written a few days before she died; these were ‘When Winchester races first took their beginning’. He later thought better – or was persuaded to think better – of the allusion and he suppressed it when he revised his 1817 ‘Biographical Notice’ into the ‘Memoir of Miss Austen’, supplied to accompany Richard Bentley’s ‘Standard Novels’ edition of Sense and Sensibility in 1833. No other relative of Jane Austen’s generation found it appropriate to mention the completed manuscript works, including this poem, or the drafts of what she herself may have had no intention of publishing, but which, in the case of ‘Lady Susan’, she had kept by her through several moves over more than two decades.

   In 1869, nearly twenty-five years after Cassandra’s death, fifty-two years after Jane’s and four years after that of the last remaining brother, Frank, James Edward Austen Leigh, son of the eldest brother, James, wrote his influential Memoir of Jane Austen (published 1870), in which he presented his subject as a decorous Victorian lady author.⁶ In accordance with this image, Austen Leigh rejected the comic poem on the Winchester races about which Henry had been so enthusiastic. His sister Caroline Austen had been sorry her uncle had noted it in the first place; she thought it unseemly for a deathbed. To her brother she wrote, ‘Tho’ there are no reasons ethical or orthodox against the publication of these stanzas, there are reasons of taste—I never thought there was much of point in them—they were good enough for a passing thought, but if she had lived she would probably soon have torn them up.’ Caroline was appalled at any notion that the stanzas should be published in the Memoir:

   there is a much stronger objection to their being inserted in any memoir, than a want of literary merit—If put in at all they must have been introduced as the latest working of her mind—They are dated July 15^th—her death followed on the 18^th—Till a few hours before she died, she had been feeling much better, & there was hope of amendment at least, if not of recovery—she amused herself by following a harmless fancy suggested by what was passing near her—but the joke about the dead Saint, & the Winchester races, all jumbled up together, would read badly as amongst the few details given, of the closing scene—⁷

   Instead of ‘When Winchester races first took their beginning’, Austen Leigh chose to publish in his Memoir five sets of verses he thought more appropriate: part of the elegy ‘To the Memory of Mrs. Lefroy,’ already published in a fuller version by Sir Henry Lefroy in 1868;⁸ the comic poem ‘On the Marriage of Mr. Gell of East Bourn to Miss Gill’; a version of a poem about Camilla Wallop’s marriage to Henry Wake in 1812; burlesque stanzas probably addressed to Anna, half-sister of James Edward and Caroline; and the verses written to accompany the gift of ‘a little bag’ to her friend Mary Lloyd. However, an Austen admirer, the politician and man of letters, Lord Stanhope, accepting that the materials available to Austen Leigh were ‘meagre’ and having noted the existence of the Winchester races poem from reading Henry Austen’s ‘Biographical Notice’, queried the omission with the publisher Richard Bentley – he hoped it ‘might be set right in another edition’.⁹ It was not, and ‘When Winchester races first took their beginning’ had to wait more than thirty years for publication in another family memoir: J. H. and E. C. Hubback’s Jane Austen’s Sailor Brothers (1906).

   In the first edition of his Memoir Austen Leigh also included an altered and reduced version of Jane Austen’s spoof ‘Plan of a Novel’, which mocked contemporary fiction with the ebullience of her juvenilia and was inspired in part by the incongruous advice given by the Prince Regent’s librarian James Stanier Clarke in the autumn and winter of 1815 concerning a subject for her next novel. As the basis for his text Austen Leigh used his aunt’s original version, by then owned by Charles Austen’s daughter Cassandra (Cassy) Esten Austen, Cassandra Austen’s goddaughter; possibly Cassy Esten lent her copy to Austen Leigh, who modified it for publication, or she herself might have provided him with a censored version. Or possibly James Edward’s sister Caroline had at some point made a copy which he used. Caroline remembered her aunt visiting Carlton House, the Prince Regent’s London residence, and meeting Clarke, whose suggestions form much of the humour of the work: ‘the little adventure . . . afforded some amusement’.¹⁰

Austen Leigh mentioned but did not include the ‘condemned chapter’ of Persuasion; ‘an old copy-book containing several tales, some of which seem to have been composed while she was quite a girl’; and a few works beyond the juvenilia which were ‘not without merit, but which [Jane Austen] considered unworthy of publication’.¹¹

The omission of ‘Lady Susan’, ‘The Watsons’ and ‘Sanditon’ from the first edition of the Memoir followed the combined decision of Austen Leigh and his sisters, Caroline Austen and Anna Lefroy, all of whom considered ‘it would be as unfair to expose preliminary processes to the world, as it would be to display all that goes on behind the curtain of the theatre before it is drawn up’: ‘the family have rightly, I think declined to let these early works be published,’ Austen Leigh concluded.¹² The Kent branch of the Austen family, descendants of Jane’s wealthy brother Edward Knight, felt less reticent, however: according to Caroline Austen, the Knights, including Edward’s daughter Fanny, now Lady Knatchbull and formerly a favourite niece of the author, ‘were wishing years ago to make public’ ‘Lady Susan’ but were ‘discouraged by others’.¹³

Austen Leigh and his sisters were mostly pleased with the response to the Memoir. Caroline recorded favourable notices, remarking, ‘on the whole I think [James Edward] may be quite satisfied with the public voice, as it has spoken upon this occasion’; she believed the volume was ‘fairly launched’.¹⁴ She was gratified to find that many readers appreciated her brother’s reticence. The Times for 17 January 1870 noted that Jane Austen’s family ‘have in their possession the manuscript of several stories written in the interval between childhood and womanhood, but have, very properly, declined to allow their publication . . . We have always thought it most culpable in the guardians of literary remains to allow a line to pass into print upon which the writer has not clearly signified his wish. The greatness of more than one name has been slurred by such remissness.’ The Quarterly Review agreed with this stern view:

However tantalising be the knowledge that such treasure exists, we hold the decision to be wise. In the face of the indecorous practice too largely prevalent in the present day, of exposing to common view every scrap, and relic, and incomplete essay left by those who have become famous in literature or art, it may be recommended as a wholesome truth, that a man’s thoughts are as indefeasibly his own property as his acres, and that the work which he has judged discreet to withhold from public view from a sense of its incompleteness, ought to be sacred from being pored over and printed by posthumous busybodies.¹⁵

In reality it was too late to hide from ‘busybodies’. Ever since the 1833 Bentley ‘Standard Novels’, with the revised notice by Henry, Jane Austen’s fame had been slowly growing and by the late nineteenth century many admirers were eager to go ‘behind the curtain’, curious to know what the author might have left unfinished. As the reviewer in Macmillan’s Magazine later remarked:

The virtue of literary reticence is fast becoming extinct; we have almost indeed forgotten that it is a virtue at all. To be able to persuade oneself that the world could possibly do without information which it is in one’s power to give, implies now a strength of mind so abnormal and so rare, that a modern instance of it is scarcely to be found.¹⁶/p>

Caroline Austen responded to ‘the vexed question between the Austens and the Public’ by lamenting: ‘see what it is to have a growing posthumous reputation! we cannot keep any thing to ourselves now, it seems’.¹⁷

   In ‘The Lesson of Balzac’, Henry James wrote that ‘Jane Austen, with all her light felicity, leaves us hardly more curious of her process, or of the experience in her that fed it, than the brown thrush who tells his story from the garden bough.’ In his view her popularity had been driven up by ‘the stiff breeze of the commercial bookselling spirit’; she was ‘so amenable to pretty reproduction in every variety of what is called tasteful, and in what seemingly proves to be saleable’. Jane Austen was in part popular because she was unconscious of ‘the extraordinary grace of her facility’.¹⁸ Many readers disagreed and had long been curious about the author’s writing methods and her consciousness of her own skill. The reviewer in The Athenӕum noted her remark about writing on little pieces of ivory with much labour, then complained regarding the Memoir, ‘But of this labour we hear scarcely anything.’¹⁹ Surely some notion of her ways of composing might be obtained from the unpublished papers in the Austens’ possession. Writing in The Academy, the feminist activist and journalist Edith Simcox also keenly felt the lack of the ‘unpublished writing’. Later she remarked, ‘The editor is perhaps right to avoid everything that might bear the appearance of book-making, but our faith in his judgement is rather shaken by his having waited for encouragement from without before introducing us to Lady Susan and The Watsons.’²⁰

   As can be deduced from Simcox’s remark, Austen Leigh soon bowed to pressure, and the second edition of his Memoir in July 1871, which formed the sixth volume of Bentley’s reissue of Austen’s published work as part of the ‘Favourite Novels’ series, made more, although not complete, use of the unpublished writings ‘with the consent and approbation of Lady Knatchbull, & my two Sisters, to whom the copies of these works respectively belong’. Austen Leigh continued, ‘I felt some anxiety how these minor works might be received by the public, & a fear lest I might have lowered, rather than extended our Aunt’s fame by the publication of them,’ but he was pleased to report that he had ‘obtained a unanimous verdict of acquittal’.²¹ The title of the volume now continued: ‘to which is added Lady Susan and fragments of two other unfinished tales by Miss Austen’. Within his Memoir Austen Leigh emended his earlier phrase, ‘old copy-book containing several tales’, to ‘copy books’, noting that these works amounted to a considerable number by the time Jane Austen was sixteen. The ‘childish effusions’ were still of a ‘slight and flimsy texture’ but he now printed an example: ‘The Mystery. An Unfinished Comedy’.²²

   He understood that the reading public had not been satisfied with what he had provided from the later writings, a few poems created in a family context; they wanted signs of the great novelist. So, in this second edition, chapter 12 of the Memoir became the ‘cancelled Chapter of “Persuasion” ’, and chapter 13 ‘The last Work’ (as he referred to ‘Sanditon’); ‘The Watsons’ and ‘Lady Susan’ were appended. The manuscript of ‘The Watsons’ had come to Caroline from her aunt Cassandra; ‘Lady Susan’ was taken from an inaccurate copy made by Fanny Knight or Anna Lefroy and now missing,²³ while Anna provided the autograph manuscript of ‘Sanditon’.²⁴

   Austen Leigh felt that ‘Lady Susan’ fitted ill with the gentle, refined image of his aunt which he was eager to promote. To his disapproval, Bentley had placed its title on the spine in order to make the volume more marketable, and Jane Austen more popular, since he owned the copyright of five of the novels; Austen Leigh called the act ‘perverseness’ and declared it quite ‘contrary to my wishes & instructions’.²⁵ As for those texts which existed only in foul copies, Austen Leigh did what he could to tidy them up. In ‘The Watsons’ he regularized punctuation and spelling and rectified ‘some obscurities and inaccuracies of expression . . . which the author would probably have corrected’. For ‘Sanditon’ more radical intervention was required.

   He conceded that some of Jane Austen’s admirers desired to know something of this final work, but his sister Anna Lefroy feared that publishing it in full would be ‘at the expense of the Authoresse’s fame’.²⁶ It was one thing to write indelicately in youth as Jane Austen might have done with ‘Lady Susan’, another to be composing rollicking satire during a final illness. However, there was family rivalry to contend with, and Anna and her brother worried that, if they ignored the work, it would be at the mercy of their cousin Catherine Hubback, Frank Austen’s daughter; she had acquired her aunt Cassandra’s fair copy, newly punctuated and paragraphed – Anna declared the manuscript had been ‘taken, not given’.²⁷ Austen Leigh’s solution was to fillet the work and print the result. No heroine had yet attracted ‘the sympathies of the reader’, he observed, but ‘some of the principal characters were already sketched in with a vigorous hand’. He – or perhaps Anna – would deliver ‘Sanditon’ as a series of short studies of the three ‘original’ characters whom he considered ‘ready dressed and prepared for their parts’: Mr Parker (the description taken from about a third of the way into chapter 2), Lady Denham (from chapters 3 and 6) and Diana Parker (from chapter 5). The sketches primarily used Jane Austen’s words, tidied up and re-punctuated. For example, where the manuscript reads ‘[Mr Parker] wanted to secure the promise of a visit—to get as many of the Family as his own house would contain, to follow him to Sanditon as soon as possible—and healthy as they all undeniably were—foresaw that every one of them would be benefited by the sea.—’ (ch. 2), Austen Leigh’s version states, ‘He wanted to secure the promise of a visit, and to get as many of the family as his own house would hold to follow him to Sanditon as soon as possible; and, healthy as all the Heywoods undeniably were, he foresaw that every one of them would be benefitted by the sea’.²⁸

   As this passage suggests, the extracts included words and phrases by Austen Leigh with no indication as to where he began and his aunt ended; elsewhere, excerpted sentences and paragraphs from Austen were run on with no gaps noted. All in all, ‘Sanditon’ was reduced to thirteen printed pages, a very small proportion of the original manuscript. The absence of any character sketch of the heroine Charlotte suggests the difficulty Austen Leigh felt with this character who had perversely refused to develop the author’s increasingly sophisticated experiments with inner consciousness and narrative voice. The editor was responding to what the manuscript revisions indicate: that Jane Austen was more fluent with the idiosyncratic characters than with the more sensible ones.

   Austen Leigh’s additions to the Memoir were well received. In her Academy piece Edith Simcox noted the coercion he had suffered: ‘In obedience to the unanimous demands of his critics . . . Mr. Austen Leigh has now produced from the family storehouse nearly all the fragments of his aunt’s compositions which might reasonably be supposed to be of general interest.’²⁹ Against Henry James’s later view she concluded, from the cancelled chapters of Persuasion, that ‘judgment had a share in [Jane Austen’s] successes as well as inspiration’.³⁰ Anne Thackeray in The Cornhill Magazine welcomed ‘one more glimpse of an old friend come back with a last greeting’. All lovers of Jane Austen would, she thought, ‘prize this addition, small as it is, to their acquaintance with her’. Ignoring the bowdlerized ‘Sanditon’, she noted that ‘Lady Susan’ was very unlike Austen’s later works ‘and scarcely equal to them’. But she found ‘The Watsons’ ‘a delightful fragment, which might belong to any of her other histories’.³¹ The editor of The Spectator disagreed with this assessment but admitted he had anticipated being disappointed: appreciating humour and finish as the most distinguishing characteristics of Jane Austen’s writing, he pointed out that the former was unlikely to be discovered in an early effort of a modest author while the latter ‘could not be found in unfinished and fragmentary pieces deliberately thrown aside by her own better judgment’.³²

   Unexpectedly, The Times changed its earlier position, basing its new opinion on the work Austen Leigh and others considered most objectionable: ‘Lady Susan is vain of her eloquence . . . and as she prevails over every one on whom she can use her gift, so she gains from the reader interest and almost sympathy,’ the reviewer wrote. ‘Generally it is a pity that posthumous works should be published if they have been deliberately consigned to oblivion by the author; but “Lady Susan” is a clear addition to the fame of the writer and the pleasure of the reader.’³³ Lord Stanhope, whose opinion Austen Leigh greatly valued, was also enthusiastic: he liked the work ‘very much’ and thought it ‘worthy of her genius though differing very materially from her other tales’. The difference was not only generic but also substantial: ‘Elsewhere she has dealt only with faults and foibles, & ridicules, whilst here the errors are of a far graver kind, involving an entire depravation of mind, and deriliction [sic] of moral principle’. But, he added with relief, ‘Nowhere . . . has Miss Austen departed in the least degree from that delicacy & reserve of touch which is among her many titles to praise.’³⁴

   For Virginia Woolf it was ‘The Watsons’ that was most revelatory. After scrutinizing it, she remarked that Jane Austen, for all her ‘greatness’, was ‘no conjuror’: without the unfinished works we should never have guessed what ‘pages of preliminary drudgery’ she ‘forced her pen to go through . . . Like other writers, she had to create the atmosphere in which her own peculiar genius could bear fruit.’ Observing ‘the stiffness and bareness’ of ‘The Watsons’, Woolf judged the author to be different from what she had imagined, the kind of writer who put down the facts of her story, then returned to elaborate and flesh out: ‘Those first angular chapters of The Watsons prove that hers was not a prolific genius.’³⁵

   In 1925 R. W. Chapman, Jane Austen’s first scholarly editor, at last printed a full version of ‘Sanditon’, calling it Fragment of a Novel. He also provided a more carefully edited text of ‘Lady Susan’. The following year he added ‘Plan of a Novel’ and the ‘Two Chapters of Persuasion’, along with ‘Opinions’ of Mansfield Park and Emma; in 1927 he finished with ‘The Watsons’. In 1954 he collected all the pieces into a single volume entitled Minor Works, and appended it as volume six to his Novels of Jane Austen, which had originally appeared in 1923.

   With all this labour on the part of Austen Leigh and Chapman, still some autograph and allograph manuscripts remained unpublished in family hands; gradually over the past fifty years new poems, in particular, have been identified. In this volume we are collecting as much of Jane Austen’s manuscript work as is known to date. Inevitably it represents only selective evidence of her creative activity as an adult: with the exception of the cancelled chapters of Persuasion, the drafts and copytexts of the published novels have been lost, and there are intriguing works which were almost certainly never written down, including the stories which Aunt Jane is said to have spun to Anna ‘of endless adventure and fun . . carried on from day to day or from visit to visit’.³⁶

∗

   The manuscripts exist within a family context. The Austens and their relatives were dispersed across ranks and throughout southern England. They included the rich landowners, the Leighs of Stoneleigh Abbey and the Knights of Godmersham, as well as men and women lower in the social scale such as poorer clergy and even a milliner’s apprentice. George Austen, Jane’s father, was the rector of the two small Hampshire country parishes of Steventon and Deane, and her mother, Cassandra (née Leigh), came from the academic clergy of Oxford. Jane’s six brothers included James, a clergyman (successor of her father as rector of Steventon), Henry, army agent, banker and later clergyman, Frank and Charles, two sailors (admirals through longevity), and Edward (heir through adoption to the wealthy Knights and later owner of their estates in Kent and Hampshire).

   Jane Austen interacted with three generations of this family: her parents’, her own, and her nieces’ and nephews’. Many of her manuscripts were copied out for them and her close friends to read and sometimes keep; to these, also, Jane Austen usually addressed her poems and burlesques. There is little evidence that she confided widely even within her family while writing the major novels. Her main confidante and critic was always her elder sister Cassandra, who remembered lively debates over the drafts of the published works, for with her alone Jane could talk ‘freely of any work that she might have in hand’.³⁷ She also discussed her writings with the nieces with whom, as they grew up, she became intimate, Anna Lefroy and Fanny Knight, though even here she may not have been wholly open. Towards the end of her life, responding to a presumed query from Fanny concerning her present literary activities at a time when she had largely finished Persuasion and was close to abandoning ‘Sanditon’, she referred briefly to the former without naming it, and did not mention the latter at all. However, Anna later recalled ‘conversations which passed between Aunt Jane & me’ during the time she was writing ‘Sanditon’, in which they discussed the characters and situations being created.³⁸

   The early nineteenth century had not learned to fetishize the autograph manuscript. When in 1831 the manuscripts of the Waverley novels by Walter Scott, the most famous writer of the time, were offered for sale by auction there was little interest. Thomas Frognall Dibdin was amazed at the ‘catastrophically low’ prices, which included the sale of the manuscript of The Monastery for £18.18s.³⁹ In 1833 prices around £30 for Scott’s manuscripts were the norm–and most were bought by Robert Cadell, who had succeeded as Scott’s publisher and sole owner of Scott’s copyrights.

   Prose manuscripts began to fetch higher prices in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries when the wealthy American banker and founder of the library that bears his name, John Pierpont Morgan, began to collect. His son John Pierpont Morgan Jr., an ‘ardent Austenian’ according to Chapman, desired a manuscript of a published Jane Austen novel such as Pride and Prejudice for the library he had inherited; disappointed to learn that none existed, he set about buying letters.⁴⁰ Later, he turned to the manuscript works: in 1925 – the year in which he surrendered ownership of the library, which became an educational institution – facilitated by Chapman, he bought ‘Plan of a Novel’ from Charles Austen’s female descendants. In the same year he purchased the first six leaves of ‘The Watsons’ for £317.5s.6d., much less than was asked for it. These pages had been on the market since 1915 when William Austen-Leigh, Caroline Austen’s nephew, donated them to a Red Cross benefit sale in London, where they raised either £55 or £65—accounts differ.⁴¹ In 1978 the rest of ‘The Watsons’, passed down through James Edward Austen Leigh’s descendants, was sold for £38,000 to the British Rail Pension Fund and ten years later it went for £90,000 to Sir Peter Michael, who deposited it in Queen Mary, University of London. The first eight-page section of this material has since been lost.

   ‘Lady Susan’ remained an unbroken manuscript, inherited by Lord Brabourne from his mother Fanny Knight, Lady Knatchbull. In 1891 he wrote that he might include ‘the book’ of ‘Lady Susan’ among Austen items for sale,⁴² suggesting that it was perhaps he who had the manuscript formally bound (by Robert Rivière & Son, a firm who specialized in showy bindings often for commercial sale purposes). He sold the manuscript in 1893 and it was sold again in 1898. At the turn of the century Lord Rosebery bought it for £90; his collection was auctioned in 1933 and it went for £2,100. Then the Morgan Library purchased it for $6,750 in 1947, a lesser price considering the rate of exchange at the time.

   ‘Sanditon’ remained in the hands of the Lefroys until Anna Lefroy’s granddaughter Mary Isabella Lefroy presented it to King’s College, Cambridge, in 1930.

‘LADY SUSAN’

‘Lady Susan’ survives in a fair copy in Jane Austen’s handwriting, with her original sheets mounted in a larger leather-bound book. The story is never mentioned by Jane Austen in documents that survive, and the manuscript itself has no title, though it is possible that a title page was lost during the rebinding process. The story is referred to as ‘Lady Susan’ in a letter Anna Lefroy wrote to James Edward Austen Leigh in 1869, during the discussions about the forthcoming memoir,⁴³ and it was published as Lady Susan in the second edition of the Memoir itself (1871).

   The manuscript consists of 79 sheets – 158 written folios – of paper of about 200 mm × 165 mm.⁴⁴ Two of the sheets (fos. 85–6 and 107–8) are watermarked 1805. In the early nineteenth century paper was expensive, and was often kept for long periods of time before use. Very rarely did Jane Austen use paper watermarked the same year as that in which she was writing (one exception was when she addressed the publisher John Murray in November 1815 on paper watermarked 1815), and she routinely wrote on paper with watermarks between two and five years old. The 1805 watermark for ‘Lady Susan’ might therefore suggest a copying date of any time between 1805 and 1809, including the years in which Jane Austen was living in Southampton with her mother, sister and Martha Lloyd; but it gives no clue to when, before that, the narrative was first written. Austen Leigh declared the work ‘an early production’ between the ‘childish effusions and the composition of her living works’, written in the same period as the epistolary ‘Elinor and Marianne’, about 1795.⁴⁵ Caroline Austen labelled the work one of the ‘betweenities’ ‘when the nonsense was passing away, and before her wonderful talent had found it’s proper channel’.⁴⁶ Like her brother, she offered no historical evidence for the dating, although the family view seems to have been a firm one.

   In his preface to Jane Austen’s Lady Susan, the critic A. Walton Litz supported Austen Leigh’s dating on stylistic grounds; he too believed the work could be associated with the presumed composition of ‘Elinor and Marianne’.⁴⁷ Chapman disagreed. In Facts and Problems (1948), he suggested that the fair copy was probably made ‘at some time in, or not long after, 1805’, when Jane Austen was ‘still sufficiently interested in the piece to be at the trouble of making a copy of it’. In the chronology he provided for Facts and Problems he gave the composition date as ‘c. 1805’⁴⁸ and in his note before the text in Minor Works he wrote that it was written ‘not much earlier than 1805’.⁴⁹

   Using the copying date of after 1805, Jan Fergus associated the novel with Maria Edgeworth’s epistolary novel in two volumes, Leonora (1806). By the early years of the nineteenth century, novels in letters were less popular than in the early 1790s, but Edgeworth’s successful publication in that form may have inspired Austen to think of publishing herself; hence her creation of a fair copy.⁵⁰ It is also possible, however, that Austen was prompted to make the fair copy simply for family circulation rather than for publication. After all, Edgeworth was an exception: as an established novelist she could go against the trend for the three-volume narrated novel in the way a novice could not.

   The connection with Edgeworth was more startlingly made by Marilyn Butler in her article on Jane Austen published in the new Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (2004).⁵¹ Calling it one of the ‘Chawton novels’, she suggested that the date of composition was 1810–12, when Austen was preparing Sense and Sensibility and Pride and Prejudice for publication and beginning the composition of Mansfield Park. This date presupposed that Jane Austen, having embarked on her publishing career, had momentarily reverted to the epistolary form and short format of her juvenile work. Butler’s primary argument rested on her assumption that Jane Austen borrowed from Maria Edgeworth for all of the six novels except Pride and Prejudice, and that she also borrowed for ‘Lady Susan’, this time from two of the satirical tales of fashionable life, ‘Manoeuvring’ (1809) and the earlier Leonora. In Butler’s view Austen’s work is ‘a full-scale pastiche and merger’ of these two tales: for example, in Leonora the anti-heroine Lady Olivia resembled Lady Susan in glamour, charm and playfulness, and the work furnished Austen with her opening: ‘where in Edgeworth a woman of blighted reputation invites herself to become a long-resident house guest, so in Austen Lady Susan, in two similar letters, achieves the same manoeuvre’.⁵² The similarities between ‘Lady Susan’ and ‘Manoeuvring’ are more marked, since both tales feature the manipulative attempts of a youngish widow to marry off her modest daughter to a foolish but wealthy man, and her eventual decision to marry the man herself. But Jane Austen avoided the heavily didactic side of Edgeworth’s narratives, and in her treatment the theme of adultery and passion became romantic black comedy.

   Butler’s late dating has something to recommend it, perhaps less for the supposed indebtedness to Edgeworth than for the obvious sophistication of the novella’s content and technique. Yet Lady Susan, the handsome selfish widow who enjoys her own energetic duplicity and has much in common with the spirited heroines of the burlesque juvenile pieces, requires no subtle inner life of the sort Jane Austen was portraying in Elinor Dashwood and Elizabeth Bennet; she has only the persona of her vivacious letters and the description of her operations in the correspondence of those surrounding her.

   In contrast to Butler, B. C. Southam associated ‘Lady Susan’ with the failure of the early narrated story ‘Catharine’ (dedication dated 1792), ‘to which it stands in the same relationship as “Catharine” holds to the earlier juvenilia, as an exercise in correcting technical and stylistic faults’. After ‘Catharine’, Southam argued, Jane Austen returned to the less demanding form of epistolary fiction, although she might have made some revision of ‘Lady Susan’ after 1805 at the time when she copied it out. The revision probably included the addition of the hasty conclusion to tie up loose ends.⁵³ Southam is not alone among critics in seeing the conclusion either as a later addition or as an admission of the failure of the epistolary method to satisfy Jane Austen’s narrative requirements. However, many epistolary novels of the time ended with or included just such summary gathering by the editor/author, and Jane Austen could have been responding creatively to this established literary convention.

   Disinclined to credit Jane Austen with the conception of such brisk immorality as Lady Susan reveals, her great-niece Mary Augusta Austen-Leigh could only conceive personal indignation behind the creation of the character, and she speculated on the resentment her great-aunt must have felt when learning about the cruel Mrs Craven, grandmother of her beloved friend Martha Lloyd, ‘an unnatural and brutal mother’, whose wicked treatment of her daughters overpowered Jane Austen’s fancy ‘to so great a degree that she was at last impelled to seek relief in gibbeting this repulsive creature by setting down her character in writing’. In fact, as Elizabeth Jenkins points out in her 1938 biography of Jane Austen, Mrs Craven’s cruelty speaks against her as a model since, unscrupulous as Lady Susan may be, ‘what she does is done from a quite understandable, though entirely selfish standpoint’.⁵⁴

   A real-life source less easy to dismiss is Jane Austen’s charming and cosmopolitan cousin Eliza de Feuillide. To Q. D. Leavis she appeared quite clearly the sitter for the merry widow: ‘I think we can decide on internal evidence that [‘Lady Susan’] was founded on events of the years 1795 to 1797, and was certainly written before the end of 1797.’⁵⁵ The events of these years included the flirtatious dealings of Eliza with Jane Austen’s two brothers, James and Henry.

   Eliza de Feuillide comes most alive for us now in her flighty, sophisticated letters to her more staid cousin Philadelphia (Phylly) Walter; occasionally catching the tone of Lady Susan, these depict a woman delighting in her power over men and enjoying bantering with many admirers. Jane Austen could not have seen these letters but it is unlikely that Eliza de Feuillide would entirely have repressed this side of herself when visiting the Austens in Steventon. She was there for Christmas in 1786 and fascinated young Jane, as well as her brothers, with her rakish glamour; in 1790 Jane dedicated ‘Love & Freindship’ to her cousin. In February 1794 Eliza’s French husband was guillotined and in May 1795 James’s wife died. The pair were free for more serious flirtation although Eliza was not keen to settle down to matrimony too quickly. Meanwhile, Henry, ten years Eliza’s junior, was so smitten by his cousin’s charms that he seems to have proposed marriage; he had to be gently rejected.⁵⁶ For a short while in 1796 Henry then attached himself to a Mary Pearson, described by Eliza as a ‘pretty wicked looking Girl with bright Black Eyes’,⁵⁷ and in January 1797 James removed himself from the fray by marrying Mary Lloyd, who may have been aware of her husband’s tenderness for his cousin. One of his granddaughters recounted an occasion in 1811 when James’s daughter Anna was not allowed to visit Eliza because his wife was not on good terms with her:

   I believe the ci-devant Countess, who was an extremely pretty woman, was a great flirt, and during her brief widowhood flirted with all her Steventon cousins, our Grandfather inclusive, which was more than his after wife could stand or could ever forgive—and I think it is very probable that he hesitated between the fair Eliza and Miss Mary Lloyd. I can testify that to the last days of her life my Grandmother continued to dislike and speak ill of her.⁵⁸

   Henry, who had seemed too young a few years earlier and appeared to be heading unfashionably for the Church, was by May 1797 Captain Austen in the militia and a more attractive proposition: Eliza remarked, he ‘bids fair to possess a considerable Share of Riches & Honours’.⁵⁹ In December 1797 Henry and Eliza de Feuillide were married.

   Focusing on Eliza as a likely source of Lady Susan, William Jarvis argued that the only plausible date for the composition of the narrative would have been before Eliza had been widowed, since after that ‘It would have been too cruel.’⁶⁰ However, ‘Lady Susan’ captures much of the tone and timbre of Eliza de Feuillide in the circumstances of 1794–5, and it could well have been written during the height of her flirtatious behaviour with both of Jane Austen’s brothers and before any flirtation became serious. It would be much less appropriate once Henry and Eliza were going to marry or had married. This fact would lend support to the family’s dating of about 1794–5, with which we are inclined to agree. After Henry and Eliza were married, ‘Lady Susan’ would not be the sort of work to circulate among the family, who might recognize the original, but it could well have been prized by Jane herself and copied out some time after 1805, when the situation had become much less sensitive. Jon Spence went rather further in this line of speculation when he argued that Lady Susan was in fact ‘a wish-fulfilment fantasy’ of a girl who feared the sway her sexy cousin held over her brothers. Quite unlike the real Henry Austen, who eventually succumbed, the novella ‘shows the young man undeceived by the wicked Lady Susan’, while the tale itself reveals that the author ‘was never taken in by Eliza’.⁶¹

   Eliza de Feuillide may also be concerned in a literary connection. At the end of 1786 she had come from France to Steventon, where Jane and Cassandra had recently returned from school in Reading. There is no mention of her bringing over a copy of the scandalous novel Les Liaisons dangereuses, as Warren Roberts speculated,⁶² and in any case perhaps such a work would not have found favour in a rector’s household, but it was certainly popular in England. It had been published in France in April 1782 to great acclaim; its translation into English in 1784 as Dangerous Connections led the Monthly Review to exclaim against the corrupting potential of the ‘scenes of seduction and intrigue’ while admiring the ‘great art and address’ of the execution.⁶³ Among other critics, Frank Bradbrook noticed resemblances between Les Liaisons dangereuses and ‘Lady Susan’ in the epistolary form, use of letters and final reversion to narrative prose.⁶⁴ Roger Gard, however, rejected the comparison, diagnosing a ‘lack of radical disquiet’ and an ‘absence of a concomitant voluptuousness in realisation’ in Jane Austen’s much slighter piece. ‘Lady Susan’ is, after all, ‘hardly an equivalent in drastic refined debauchery’–there are plenty of intrigues in Les Liaisons dangereuses at which even Lady Susan would baulk–and it evinces none of the ‘deeper concern about the constitution of society’ which made the French ancien régime novel such a subversive publication.⁶⁵

   The character of the unscrupulous widow exists fully formed in English literature, especially in Restoration drama of the sort the Austens acted in the Steventon barn. Although this character is not usually central in William Wycherley, George Etherege and William Congreve, she becomes so for women writers of that period, especially in the novels of Eliza Haywood, Delarivier Manley and Aphra Behn: for example, in The New Atalantis a naïve young girl is pitted against an older skilful and scheming woman, in this case her mother. The female villain is usually unmasked and the young man gets the innocent girl, but the witty widow may or may not be thoroughly punished. The pitting of town and country, which united Les Liaisons dangereuses and ‘Lady Susan’, is also a staple of Restoration English drama; with a twist towards the country bumpkins, it becomes a strong motif in sentimental fiction on which, as her juvenilia amply testify, Jane Austen was raised.

   Jane Austen was said by her brother to have recoiled from Fielding’s work because of its low moral standards,⁶⁶ but the predatory Lady Bellaston from Tom Jones may be a model for Lady Susan; Fielding also provided, in Jonathan Wild, a rare eighteenth-century example of a narrative of sustained irony following the fortunes of an amoral protagonist. However, the most obvious literary context for ‘Lady Susan’ is undoubtedly eighteenth-century English epistolary and first-person fiction. The character is replicated in Mrs Gerrarde in Frances Sheridan’s Memoirs of Miss Sidney Bidulph (1761) for example, and in the works of the prolific Susannah Gunning, in her youth half of the Miss Minifies writing team. The Histories of Lady Frances S—, and Lady Caroline S— (1763) includes comparison of an innocent, tearful girl and her heartless, beautiful mother, who first packs her off to school, then laments that the ‘ungrateful, designing’ girl will expose her in public with her gaucheness; Coombe Wood: a Novel in a Series of Letters (1783) displays Lady Lucy Blank, sprightly letter-writer, who loathes the country and debates marriage to an ugly fool for the ability to spend his £200,000, the ‘price of pleasure’; while Memoirs of Mary: A Novel (1794) again pits a sophisticated older woman against her simple, artless charge. One final forerunner is worth mentioning, Emily Herbert: or Perfidy Punished (1786), possibly an early novel by Elizabeth Inchbald, adapter of Kotzebue’s Lovers’ Vows, which plays so important a role in Mansfield Park. It portrays a beautiful, hypocritical and sexually predatory widow who reveals herself only to a female confidante while disguising her ‘true colours’; she roundly declares, ‘ ’tis the custom to wear a mask.’⁶⁷

   As Austen Leigh had anticipated, most early responses to ‘Lady Susan’ were unflattering. The novella was considered indecorous, more Fielding than Richardson: The Athenæum noted that the letter form made it difficult to vary the style, so that the narrative proceeded in a series of jerks; the reviewer called the heroine ‘simply odious’ and found the semi-rivalry of mother and daughter disagreeable. Eliza Quincy, a friend and admirer of Austen Leigh, writing in the New York periodical The Nation, found the piece ‘thoroughly unpleasant in its characters and its details, and worked out with none of the skill that conceals itself which was Miss Austen’s eminent gift’.⁶⁸ Anne Thackeray judged it ‘very unlike’ Austen’s later works and ‘scarcely equal to them’.⁶⁹ R. Brimley Johnson declared confidently that it was ‘most probable’ that ‘Miss Austen would have refused to publish, even if desired, so cold a picture, above all of a woman and a mother’.⁷⁰

   But there were other favourable or quasi-favourable notices – The Times, for example, in its review of the fifth issue of the Memoir, observed that the novella was a ‘clear addition’ not just to Austen’s fame but to the ‘pleasure of the reader’.⁷¹ Edith Simcox, calling ‘Lady Susan’ a study rather than a novel, considered it more original fifty years ago than in the 1870s ‘when dangerous heroines are so much in vogue’, presumably a reference to such works as Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s Lady Audley’s Secret (1862). There was, Simcox asserted, ‘no sensationalism in Miss Austen’s sketch of such a character . . . she keeps strictly within the limits not merely of the possible, but of the real’. Her heroine ‘is a clever and attractive woman far too sensible to murder anybody, and not likely even to figure in the Divorce Court, at the same time thoroughly unprincipled’.⁷²

   R. H. Hutton, editor of The Spectator and one of the nineteenth-century’s ablest literary critics, devoted a detailed review to ‘Lady Susan’, which described the novella as a failure but for reasons very different from those of most of his contemporaries: evincing some fascination for a heroine so ‘feline, velvet-pawed, cruel, false [and] licentious’, he faulted Austen’s narrative execution as too tame and cramped. Though she thoroughly recognized the depth of her protagonist’s malice, Austen lacked ‘the nerve or inclination to make her fully known’. Her choice of the epistolary genre proved detrimental, Hutton argued, since through it she not only ‘voluntarily surrender[ed] the light dramatic power’ of dialogue that was ‘the very life of her genius’ but also failed to supply descriptions of Lady Susan’s relations with her daughter and her admirers in language other than her own. A young and inexperienced author, in Hutton’s view, had committed ‘the double error of choosing a subject which required a bolder style than hers, and of fettering herself in its treatment by a method which robbed her style of its greatest grace as well as power’.⁷³

   Writing in 1917 a centennial obituary for The Quarterly Review, Reginald Farrer detected more merit in the immaturity: the ‘cold unpleasantness’ of the protagonist, he observed, was but ‘the youthful exaggeration of that irreconcileable judgement which is the very backbone of Jane Austen’s power, and which, harshly evident in the first book, is the essential strength of all the later ones, finally protruding its bony structure nakedly again in “Persuasion”.’⁷⁴ A reviewer of Chapman’s 1925 edition thought the telling in letters a ‘clumsy contrivance’ and believed that the author ‘scored only a partial, though an interesting success’ with the form; although the work could not be ‘classed with the masterpieces of Jane Austen’, the reviewer observed, ‘it will always engage the interest of those engaged in authorship, as showing a universality in her genius that supplements and completes what is to be found in its predecessors’.⁷⁵ Chapman demurred. He continued to regard ‘Lady Susan’ as unconvincing and its characters insufficiently individualized.⁷⁶

   Later twentieth- and early twenty-first-century criticism of ‘Lady Susan’ frequently centred on the heroine’s obsession with social power, although there is considerable debate over whether she gains control by assuming male values, by exploiting feminine propriety, or through skilful manipulation of language alone. Building on Farrer’s earlier arguments, Marvin Mudrick proved himself the greatest champion of ‘Lady Susan’ when he declared that the novella is the ‘quintessence of Jane Austen’s most characteristic qualities and interests’, her ‘first completed masterpiece’. He fervently defended the heroine as well as the work, arguing that Lady Susan’s

objective is double: complete self-indulgence and complete social approval . . . The ultimate, tragic victim is Lady Susan, the beautiful woman who must waste her art in pretense, her passion in passing seductions, her will on invertebrates like her daughter and Reginald . . . Energy, in her immobile bounded conventional world, turns upon and devours itself. The world defeats Lady Susan, not because it recognizes her vices, but because her virtues have no room in it.⁷⁷

   LeRoy W. Smith in Jane Austen and the Drama of Woman (1983) accepted Mudrick’s analysis but questioned the conclusion. Again, in his criticism Lady Susan appears as victim as well as predator. ‘Propriety & so forth’ are stacked against women, who have neither property nor status. Smith argued that the heroine is discriminated against and controlled by patriarchal culture; refusing dependence, she sustains ‘self-esteem by a compensatory striving for power that takes the form of the imitation of the dominant male’. Her apparent defeat ‘is not viewed so by her or her narrator. She sees herself as having preserved her freedom and, in her prompt marriage to the adoring Sir James, as having assured its continuance.’⁷⁸ In The Historical Austen (2003), William H. Galperin agreed with this feminist reading when he observed that, while it was ‘virtually impossible to regard the recently widowed Lady Susan Vernon as a role model for a presumably female readership, it is just as impossible to perceive the cultural order, which seeks to contain and to thwart her, in a more positive light’. Marriage is a conspiracy, he continued, whose ‘purpose is to remove women to a place where they are inaudible, invisible, and where their only agency is in serving the landed and patriarchal interests in which they are presumably subordinate and continually vulnerable’.⁷⁹ Yet, as Mary Favret pointed out, unlike the middle-class heroines of Austen’s early juvenilia, ‘Lady Susan’ begins and ends with an aristocrat, firmly established within the social order of wealth and nobility: ‘She is a widow and a mother; as such, she has social authority.’⁸⁰

   Laura Fairchild Brodie disagreed with Mary Favret and observed that it is not her status that confers power on Lady Susan – in fact, as a widow with neither home nor fortune, her aggressive self-promotion emerges as an essential survival strategy that allows her to ‘captivate a society that would otherwise regard her as superfluous’.⁸¹ A psychological variation on this argument was provided by Tara Ghoshal Wallace in Jane Austen and Narrative Authority (1995), who claimed that ‘Lady Susan’ demonstrates how a woman’s dominion is connected not only with evoking desire in men, but with successfully repressing her own, as is apparent from the heroine’s anxious passion for Manwaring. Much as she prides herself on her manipulative articulateness, Lady Susan ‘in fact desires a power based not on language but on emotional commitment’. Drawing attention to Lady Susan’s anger at Reginald’s misgivings over her habitually untruthful version of events, Wallace observed how Jane Austen’s heroine ‘allows herself to expose her longing for what neither she nor any narrator can ever have: absolute love and trust, absolute credibility based not on how well she makes her case but on faith beyond reason’.⁸²

   Seeing a likeness between Lady Susan’s eloquence and her creator’s narrative flair – perhaps ‘because we admire Jane Austen’s artistry with language we cannot hate Lady Susan’ – Barbara Horwitz understood the novella as a sly parody on eighteenth-century educational manuals made popular by moralists such as John Gregory, Jane West and Hannah More: yet, far from representing a crude anti-conduct book stance, Horwitz argued, Austen’s villainess ‘attempts appearing to behave exactly as they recommend by using their very words to justify her behavior’.⁸³ Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar in The Madwoman in the Attic (1979) identified an even greater act of rebellion: Lady Susan is one among a series of energetic and powerful mothers in Austen’s canon ‘who seek to destroy their docile children’. She comes to enact the anger and revolt that the more compliant heroines in the novels – and their duplicitous author – repress so successfully: if Lady Susan’s ‘energy appears destructive and disagreeable’, they argued, it is ‘because this is the mechanism by which Austen disguises the most assertive aspect of herself as the Other’.⁸⁴

   Several critics were exercised over the place of ‘Lady Susan’ in literary and political culture. Bharat Tandon’s reading in Jane Austen and the Morality of Conversation (2003) suggested that Jane Austen’s novella transcended the Richardsonian sentimental ideal of transparent language: the author, Tandon argued, was ‘one of the first major imaginative voices to inhabit the space left by sentiment- alism–a chronicler of how one might get by in the knowledge that no language is intrinsically any more sincere than the other’.⁸⁵ Susan Allen Ford found the language of 1790s ideological debate – particularly as it invokes the family – infiltrating the work. Sir Reginald speaks of his son as ‘the representative of an ancient Family’, a phrase that echoes a terminology established by the conservative apologist Edmund Burke in Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790). This approach associated Lady Susan subversively with a perverse sentimentalism: exploiting powerful cultural ideals of affective motherhood, her ‘presentation of herself as sentimental heroine attempts to clear a space for unfettered action’.⁸⁶

   Another cultural reading set ‘Lady Susan’ against the background of political events, the revolutionary upheavals of the 1790s in France and their repercussions on British society. Marilyn Butler’s Jane Austen and the War of Ideas (1975) made the heroine into ‘a cruising shark in her social goldfish pond’, the ‘female counterpart of the male seducers of the later anti-jacobin period’.⁸⁷ Mary Favret linked the work historically with the period of Pitt’s policy of national surveillance, which frequently functioned through the Post Office. ‘Between the years of Lady Susan’s composition and final revision, Pitt’s ministry in Great Britain had elevated the Post Office into a highly political – and corrupt – bureaucracy . . . These years also marked the time of the greatest intrusion into private correspondence.’ In her reading, the letter as used in ‘Lady Susan’ emerges not so much as a dying form as an overpowering paradigm of law, ‘an expression of the power of form itself, of institutions and established law’.⁸⁸

   Developing from these investigations into authorial political and moral intent is the recurring critical concern with Austen’s sudden final move into third-person narration. This is often interpreted as an ideological tug-of-war between the author and her protagonist. Frequently the spirited heroine comes out on top – ‘all the brains allotted to the bad side and diffused scorn directed at the good people’, as Q. D. Leavis sighed.⁸⁹ Unlike most of her mature novels, where Austen controls the reader’s moral point of view with irony, here she lets the energy of the character in a way defeat the morality – as she very nearly allows again in Mansfield Park. Leroy W. Smith considered the conclusion of ‘Lady Susan’ notably ‘free of moralising and support for conventional social values’.⁹⁰ Tara Ghoshal Wallace went further by pointing out that the narrator, though shutting off unreliable voices, none the less eventually comes to sound remarkably like her own heroine, suggesting that she, too, had become corrupted: her closing remarks expressing pity for Miss Manwaring are not in the voice of one who ‘objectively surveys, directs, and judges, but of one who fully participates in the worldly and cynical discourse of the self-consciously sophisticated’. And this after all, Wallace concluded, is ‘the voice that Austen chooses when she writes each subsequent novel’.⁹¹

   For Susan Pepper Robbins, the conclusion embodied a ‘lost parental authority’. She believed that behind the ‘astringence of irony’ lay ‘the clear moral judgments. The narrative voice has indeed become a source of order and value.’⁹² Mary Poovey saw ambivalence in Jane Austen’s final narrative fiat. Since epistolarity facilitates a ‘laissez-faire competition’ in which those characters that know best how to entertain win the reader’s sympathies, Austen needs to censure her unscrupulous widow and can effectively restore social order only by ‘disrupting the epistolary narrative and ridiculing not just the correspondents but the morally anarchic epistolary form itself ’. The fact that she has allowed our imaginative involvement with Lady Susan’s disruptive energies until the very last is, in Poovey’s reading, proof of Austen’s reluctance to curb the attraction of female energy; echoing Gilbert and Gubar, she speculated that it was ‘perhaps because [this energy] is too close to the creative impulse of her own wit’.⁹³

   Discussions of the conclusion inevitably take into account Austen’s attitude to the epistolary form itself – whether or not the switch to third-person narration expressed her impatience with the letter. The early twentieth-century critic Mary Lascelles believed the hasty conclusion was written later than the original composition and showed a writer tired of the epistolary mode.⁹⁴ A. Walton Litz agreed that the conclusion represented Jane Austen’s frustration with the form: ‘Lady Susan’ is a ‘cautious retreat’ from the more mature juvenilia, especially ‘Catharine’, which prefigures the method of the major novels. It represents ‘a move back into the more familiar world of eighteenth-century satire and comedy’, growing from Jane Austen’s literary rather than personal experience.⁹⁵ Deborah Kaplan challenged this view and wondered whether Austen was less disillusioned with a dying form than ambiguous about representing challenges to a patriarchal system. She understood the representation of women’s correspondence in ‘Lady Susan’ as a fantasy of power reversal in which female networks generate authoritative versions of their selves (as Kaplan observed, this is a distinct feature of Austen’s private letters to her sister Cassandra, which ‘had a tendency to imagine in the shape of [legalistic and sexual] reversal’). She pointed out that, far from abandoning the letter, Jane Austen continued to experiment with the mode in early epistolary versions of ‘First Impressions’ and ‘Elinor and Marianne’.

   Possibly, however, she did begin to feel ambiguous about the appeal of this kind of unmediated access to female discourse and its concomitant challenge to patriarchal literary and social conventions; ‘it may be’, Kaplan mused, that Austen ‘did – and did not – want to represent such challenges’.⁹⁶ Roger Gard revisited R. H. Hutton’s argument of over a century earlier to present a persuasive aesthetic motive for Jane Austen’s move away from the genre when he compared her economical use of letters to the unwieldy epistolary novels that preceded ‘Lady Susan’: classifying the non-contrapuntal nature of the correspondence in Austen’s novella as bare ‘reports of happenings’, he admired her realistic use of the form while pointing to its drawback, a limited access to dramatic representations of public scenes, so deftly handled in her mature novels by a ‘subtly directive narrative voice’.⁹⁷ Jane Austen clearly needed to move on.

‘THE WATSONS’

‘The Watsons’ and ‘Sanditon’ come from the beginning and end of Jane Austen’s adult life as a novelist but they share many material and scriptural characteristics. The manuscripts show Austen employing both sides of her paper, leaving no space for large-scale revision, as some of her contemporaries such as Walter Scott and William Godwin did. When she wanted to revise substantially, as in the cancelled chapters of Persuasion, she wrote on extra pieces of paper cut to the shape of the new material – women’s work indeed: Jane Austen was said to have been a fine needlewoman.

   The unfinished manuscripts of ‘The Watsons’ and ‘Sanditon’ share habits of punctuation, using multiple dashes instead of commas, semi-colons, colons and full stops, typical especially of women authors in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Printers presumably changed most of these before printing the finished novels, although they did not always do so for sentimental fiction of the late eighteenth century; they may also have provided paragraphing which, in the manuscripts, is economical, sometimes non-existent, with speeches and commentary run together.

   In other respects the two manuscripts are rather distinct in what they suggest about Austen’s method of writing. The first pages of ‘Sanditon’ are heavily revised but thereafter the writing is fairly fluid and untouched. ‘The Watsons’, however, has been subjected to considerable emendation throughout. Much of ‘Sanditon’ is written in a clear neat hand while ‘The Watsons’ contains some scrawled, hasty writing. Like the published novels and the cancellations in Persuasion, ‘Sanditon’ is divided into chapters; ‘The Watsons’ is not. Unlike ‘Sanditon’ the earlier manuscript has no date indicators.

   The ‘Watsons’ manuscript is untitled, and the first reference to the name is given in the correspondence between James Edward Austen Leigh and his sisters during the period of preparation for the second edition of the Memoir, where it was reproduced with the title ‘The Watsons’. The manuscript was begun on two sheets of paper of 190 mm × approximately 134 mm, written on both sides horizontally and glued to keep the four written pages together; these were followed by eleven eight-folio booklets, all cut to the same size of about 190 mm × 120 mm, marked 1–11 in the top right-hand corner of the first page, covered vertically, and originally fixed with a central pin. Individual sheets of paper containing additional text are tucked into booklets 7, 9 and 10, and were probably also originally attached with a pin. The writing of the fragment seems to be continuous: the horizontal sheets carry on to booklet 1 mid-sentence, and there is no evidence of any break in the narrative between the later booklets. Several of the pages carry a watermark of 1803.⁹⁸

   It seems very likely that these manuscript folios represent the first draft of the novel, although it is just possible that booklet 1 – which contains fewer corrections than the rest of the text and only two revisions clearly resulting from a change of mind as Austen was writing rather than revisiting the draft later – is a second version. In the rest of the manuscript, every page includes some revisions, and there are sections where Austen is clearly working very hard to find the exact words and phrases for what she wishes to say. A significant proportion of the revisions represent changes of mind in the course of writing – for example the description of the Edwards’s house (f. 8r), where its elevation, the stone steps, the posts and the chain appear in several combinations, or Emma’s initial reaction to Mr Howard, recording the ‘quietly-chearful, gentlemanlike air’ which first ‘she liked’, then she ‘greatly approved’ and which finally ‘suited her’ (f. 18r). Other changes could have been made only on re-reading, and for some of these a thicker pen seems to have been used.

   A few generalizations may be made concerning the revisions. Jane Austen frequently refines factual detail: Penelope’s Dr Harding was originally to have been afflicted with gout, but this is changed to asthma (f. 3v), perhaps because Mr Watson was later to have a gouty attack; Mr Watson recalls that he has lived in Stanton Parsonage fourteen not twelve years (f. 31v), making it the same length of time as Emma is said to have been away from home, and thus explaining her complete unfamiliarity with Stanton and its neighbourhood; Mr Edwards wins four, not all five, rubbers of whist at the assembly (f. 21v); Mrs Robert Watson boasts of seven, not nine, tables in her drawing room (f. 34r). Mrs Robert’s child left at home in Croydon becomes a girl rather than a boy, entailing nine minor adjustments in a short discussion and a change of name from ‘John’ to ‘Augusta’ (f. 33v).

   Some alterations may add precision, making ‘tuning’ into the ‘Scrape’ of violins (f. 12v), or they may move from it, for example causing visualization to be more rather than less difficult for the reader – as with the changes to the Edwards’s townhouse, which loses colour and elevation. Some intensify, such as Mrs Edwards’s offer of a carriage to take Emma home becoming what Emma ‘longed’ rather than ‘wished’ for (f. 24r); some retreat and modify like the change from Emma’s ‘wretchedness’ to ‘gloom’ to ‘Despondence’ (f. 42v). Larger changes of mind are recorded about names: only once Jane Austen began did she decide that she would write about the town of ‘D.’ in ‘Surry’ rather than the town of ‘L.’ in Sussex, that Penelope was husband-hunting in Chichester rather than Southampton, that the name Charles should not be used for young Musgrave, but be kept for the little boy Charles Blake, that Captain Hunter and not Captain Carr would be the soldier who attracted Miss Edwards.

   Most of the revisions are very local, and serve to adjust rather than lengthen or shorten the manuscript in any significant way. Three sections were, however, added later by means of inserted papers, all providing sections of dialogue, and one containing some of the most striking writing in the fragment. In the first, Jane Austen clearly had second thoughts about an exchange between Lord Osborne and Emma in which Lord Osborne tries to get Emma to provide a lesson on the art of giving compliments. Austen replaced this whole exchange with a section focusing rather on Emma, her circumstances and her wit: instead of ‘a cold monosyllable & grave look’, she now gives her heroine one of the most memorable responses in all her fiction: ‘Female economy may do a great deal my Lord, but it cannot turn a small income into a large one’ (f. 30ar).

   The second inserted section does not require compensating deletions in the text, but amplifies the discussion between Emma and her brother Robert about Mrs Turner, and offers a greater opportunity for Robert to point out the vulnerable position in which Emma has been left and for Emma to acknowledge the change in her situation while also displaying continued affection for her aunt. The third expands the conversation with Tom Musgrave over the game of vingt-un, enabling Emma to ask Tom about Mr Howard, and Tom to reply with an account of his and Lord Osborne’s view of Emma, which is interrupted by the demands of the game.

   Surely it is no coincidence that the insertions in ‘The Watsons’ all come in the later stages of the manuscript. Although the mater- ial shows signs of extensive local revision throughout, the writing becomes significantly less confident towards the end, where Jane Austen struggles to describe to her own satisfaction Emma’s feelings about her family and about her situation. The manuscript stops part-way through booklet 11, in the natural pause at the end of the visit by Robert and his wife. It is difficult to see how the narrative as a whole could have been concluded. Presumably, since we are still in comic mode, marriages would have to close the book: it was all very well to leave Nancy Steele unaccounted for in Sense and Sensibility but no happy ending could abandon three daughters outside matrimony, including the interesting character of the kindly eldest, Elizabeth, now a fading beauty and given rather vulgar but understandable comments. Yet how such an ending was to be brought about we cannot know. The increasing number of revisions towards the end of the fragment suggests an anxious author who may have wondered herself.

   The year, or years, of composition of ‘The Watsons’ is not securely known, and the manuscript was not dated by Austen Leigh when he published it with the Memoir in 1871. However, he drew attention to paper watermarks of 1803 and 1804 – only 1803 is now visible on the extant sheets, and since Chapman also notes only 1803 it is possible Austen Leigh was in error.⁹⁹ Support for a dating of c. 1804 comes from a reference to ‘a doubtful halfcrown’ in connection with the heroine’s tight-fisted brother Robert. In the late 1790s Spanish dollars taken from prize ships were overstamped with a small head of George Ⅲ to compensate for the shortage of British silver for coins; counterfeiting was easy and widespread. In 1804 a new counterstamp was created and new coins were issued to replace old ones; it was noted that most old coins presented to the bank were rejected as having counterfeit stamps. So at the time Jane Austen was probably writing ‘The Watsons’ counterstamping and counterfeiting would have been very much in the news.¹⁰⁰ In more general terms it could well be that Jane Austen’s decision first to accept, and then to retract her acceptance of, an offer of marriage from the wealthy Harris Bigg-Wither in December 1802 might have prompted particular thoughts about a heroine whose promise of wealth is withdrawn, and who might later be tempted by marriage to a wealthy peer whom she did not love.

   Anna Lefroy’s daughter, Fanny Caroline, claimed that Jane Austen began ‘The Watsons’ ‘[s]omewhere in 1804’.¹⁰¹ Probably she took the date from Cassandra Austen, the owner of the manuscript after her sister’s death. According to James Edward Austen Leigh, Cassandra had also known Jane’s future intentions for the novel and had passed them on to her nieces: ‘Mr. Watson was soon to die; and Emma to become dependent for a home on her narrow-minded sister-in-law and brother. She was to decline an offer of marriage from Lord Osborne, and much of the interest of the tale was to arise from Lady Osborne’s love for Mr. Howard, and his counter affection for Emma, whom he was finally to marry.’¹⁰² As usual, but with perhaps more difficulty, the ‘pseudo-gentry’ were to triumph over both aristocracy and middle class, each vulgar in its own way.¹⁰³

   Edith Brown, great-granddaughter of Frank Austen and granddaughter of Catherine Hubback, eager to appropriate the work for her branch of the family, dated ‘The Watsons’ much later, to 1807. In this view Austen had meant to finish the work but stopped out of delicacy, since the heroine Emma’s having to live with her brother resembled too closely Jane Austen’s living with her own brother Frank and his family in Southampton.¹⁰⁴ The date of 1807 was underpinned by the fact that Jane Austen’s Tuesday 13 October, mentioned at the beginning of the fragment, occurred in that year. In fact it occurred also in 1801. Jane Austen may well have had a perpetual calendar and consulted it; or of course her chosen date, though unusually specific, may have been arbitrary.

   Taking all these arguments into account, we have accepted the majority opinion of a composition date of approximately 1804; but, given any of these possible dates, ‘The Watsons’ follows first drafts of Pride and Prejudice, Sense and Sensibility and Northanger Abbey, and prepares for the Chawton novels, Mansfield Park, Emma and Persuasion. The fragment thus has huge significance as the only original prose work extant from the long period between the completion of a forerunner of Northanger Abbey in 1799 and the beginning of Mansfield Park in 1811.

   Apart from Fanny Caroline Lefroy’s, there have been many suggestions as to why the work remained unfinished. The rank-conscious Austen Leigh maintained that his aunt dropped the project once she realized she had manoeuvred herself into a corner: she saw ‘the evil of having placed her heroine too low, in such a position of poverty and obscurity as, though not necessarily connected with vulgarity, has a sad tendency to degenerate into it’. Jane Austen was like a singer who begins on too low a note, then stops because of this false start; the subject matter was ‘unfavourable to the refinement of a lady’.¹⁰⁵ Since Austen’s fiction went on to describe both the refined Fanny Price during her visit to Portsmouth and Anne Elliot during hers to Mrs Smith in situations also perilously close to vulgarity, this explanation is probably less revelatory of Jane Austen than of James Edward’s mid-Victorian sensibilities.

   If she was writing ‘The Watsons’ in 1804, external factors may also have prevented her from proceeding. In 1800, at the age of seventy, George Austen had decided to retire, handing on the Steventon rectory to his son James, who then acted as curate in the parish. He went with his wife and two unmarried daughters to reside in Bath, a still fashionable watering place. There they could live comfortably in lodgings on the tithe income from Steventon, which had appreciated during the last war-torn decade. This period in Bath is the most obscure of Jane Austen’s life. Perhaps she was unhappy, perhaps not; perhaps busy with family life, perhaps falling in and out of love. Although no finished novels emerged from the time, it was not without literary activity. In spring 1803 Henry Austen and his agent William Seymour sold her novel ‘Susan’ for £10 to Benjamin Crosby & Co. The date suggests that she used the early part of her stay in Bath to revise the third of the novels she had drafted in Steventon. The book was not printed, however. Following the refusal of a manuscript usually assumed to be that of ‘First Impressions’ (later Pride and Prejudice), which her father had offered to a publisher and promptly had rejected sight unseen in 1797, this delay must have been disheartening. Perhaps it contributed to her putting aside ‘The Watsons’.

   Austen Leigh connected the interruption of the work with a thoroughly destabilizing event, George Austen’s sudden death in Bath on 21 January 1805. The depression and sadness Jane and her family must have felt were not conducive to writing a story which included the death of a father and clergyman. Nor perhaps were her new (relative) poverty and insecurity. With the small annual income of £210 between them, the Austen ladies, following George’s death, faced a life of dependence on Jane’s brothers: ‘prepare you[rself] for the sight of a Sister sunk in poverty, that it may not overcome your Spirits,’ Jane wrote wryly to Cassandra.¹⁰⁶ The brothers noted the low sum and between them increased it to £450.

   The first, relatively enthusiastic critics of ‘The Watsons’ ignored the probable family context of George Austen’s death when they commented on the work. The reviewer of The Athenӕum declared that ‘we care very much for “The Watsons” ’, described as having been ‘written in a moment of gay and happy inspiration’. Its unfinished state derived from its realism rather than its closeness to vulgarity: Tom Musgrave is too ‘real’ a character and Jane Austen shrank ‘from what she would call “an invasion of social proprieties” ’.¹⁰⁷ Edith Simcox, who thought the work ‘quite in Miss Austen’s best manner’, commented that it was ‘not easy to account for its having been laid aside’. She speculated that perhaps Jane Austen was unhappy with the plan of the story, or could not ‘get on comfortably without a leading idea of some sort or a moral to be enforced’.¹⁰⁸ Naming it ‘only a sketch’, Constance Hill felt it contained ‘characters such as Jane Austen alone could have created’ and with whom one parted ‘after so brief an acquaintance, with great regret’.¹⁰⁹ Anne Thackeray saw a ‘delightful fragment’ that was ‘bright with talk, and character, and animation’, and The Times described it as ‘full of the sparkles of Miss Austen’s characteristic playfulness and humour’.¹¹⁰

   In contrast to their predecessors, twentieth-century critics responded fully to the fragment’s supposed connection with its author’s life. They were forcibly struck by the fact that, when he died, the clergyman in ‘The Watsons’ would leave his family of daughters in reduced circumstances. ‘The Watsons, I am convinced, was given up for other than artistic reasons,’ wrote Alistair M. Duckworth; but he continued, ‘the fragment we have, though admittedly somewhat “bleak” in its depiction of society, has within it the necessary thematic impulses to allow for the correction of its world’.¹¹¹ Similarly, Jan Fergus argued that, with George Austen’s sudden death, Jane Austen would find her work ‘imitating life too closely’, a consequence of her having, probably unconsciously, used the plot of ‘The Watsons’ to assert her own superiority to the powerlessness and poverty that threatened her own life.¹¹² But Fergus went on to argue that, although the death of her father may have caused an interruption to the composition, it would not fully account for Austen’s decision never to revise it; Margaret Drabble disagreed, suggesting that, even in her secure, settled existence at Chawton, Jane Austen dreaded the ghosts of the past: ‘When she felt like writing again, the melancholy associations of the manuscript were too much for her, and she put it aside.’¹¹³ Marilyn Butler’s response was more extreme: dating the work to just after George Austen died, she characterized ‘The Watsons’ as ‘the most depressed and bitter of [Jane Austen’s] fragments’, conceived in resentment over ‘the arrogance and indifference of the comfortably rich and their meanness over sharing their resources when alive, or generously dispersing them after death’.¹¹⁴

   Jane Austen’s collateral descendants forcefully opposed the notion of her as a recycler of ideas. James Edward Austen Leigh declared that ‘The Watsons’ ‘could not have been broken up for the purpose of using the materials in another fabric’–Mrs Robert Watson might resemble Mrs Elton but otherwise there was little to remind a reader of later works, he thought; William and Richard Arthur Austen-Leigh, son and grandson of James Edward, declared that such salvaging procedures would have been ‘contrary to Jane Austen’s invariable practice’.¹¹⁵

   Successive critics have disagreed, detecting a principle of artistic economy at work in her oeuvre. They argued that, over the years, Jane Austen let many aspects of ‘The Watsons’ infiltrate her later novels, a reason why she never returned to it. Early on, Anne Thackeray pointed out that, in the incomplete ‘Watsons’, ‘vague shadows of future friends seem to be passing and repassing’: ‘anteghosts, if such things exist, of a Mrs Elton, of an Elizabeth Bennet, of a Darcy, meet us, only they are not ghosts at all, but very living people, with just so much resemblance to their successors as would be found no doubt between one generation and another’.¹¹⁶ Chapman believed that in the Austenian narrative world ‘The Watsons may with some plausibility be regarded as a sketch for Emma.’¹¹⁷ Noting that recycling was ‘a process by which Jane Austen habitually worked’, Q. D. Leavis described the transformation of ‘The Watsons’ in detail: the disenfranchised static and too faultless Emma turned into faulty and spoilt Emma Woodhouse, the Watson family became the Woodhouse circle, with the eldest spinster sister Elizabeth transforming into Miss Bates; Tom Musgrave begat Frank Churchill, and Emma Watson’s sister-in-law with her daughter Augusta the later Augusta Elton; Mr Watson, the real invalid, became the valetudinarian Mr Woodhouse.¹¹⁸

   Others detected different progeny. Following Anne Thackeray, Mary Waldron thought that much of the treatment in ‘The Watsons’ of economic pressures on a family of girls was incorporated into the revision of ‘First Impressions’ as Pride and Prejudice, while Kathryn Sutherland argued that Austen might not have reached Mansfield Park ‘without the experimental social study of The Watsons’.¹¹⁹ Joseph Wiesenfarth cast his net a little wider and argued for an even more economical use of material from the fragmentary story:

The Watsons is a pre-text–a text that comes before other texts. The Watsons comes before the final rewritings of Sense and Sensibility and Pride and Prejudice. Once written, these novels pre-empt characters and scenes [Mr and Mrs Robert Watson transform into the calculating Dashwoods, Lord Osborne’s aloofness at the ball is pre-empted by Darcy’s haughty refusal to dance with Lizzy] . . . What is left in The Watsons then becomes a pre-text for the creation of Jane Fairfax and for the transformation of the dance in Emma and for using the case of too-nice-a-mind and too-refined-a-sensibility in Persuasion. Almost everything that we have in The Watsons as a fragment, then, makes its appearance in Jane Austen’s canon in some finished fashion.¹²⁰

   Like no other of Austen’s works, ‘The Watsons’ uses as its centre the material of the lower-middle classes, much associated with Frances Burney – the Branghtons of Evelina for example – which Austen Leigh in his Memoir was at pains to declare his aunt rejected in her published novels. More than Burney, however, Austen captures the claustrophobia of a marginalized group; ‘The Watsons’ depicts the struggle for status of those shadowed by the upper ranks, as well as illustrating the urgency of women’s need for marriage and their narrow expectations outside it. With the latter Jane Austen echoes Mary Wollstonecraft in Thoughts on the Education of Daughters (1787), which described the distress experienced by girls raised genteelly, then, if unmarried, reduced to dependence on unwilling brothers or forced to work as governesses and teachers.

   Husband-hunting, the main career path open to the early nineteenth-century gentlewoman, was never presented as a proper pursuit by Jane Austen, but in ‘The Watsons’ it is downright unappealing, if not futile: here, as John Halperin observed, the men are a ‘sorry lot’, proving themselves for the most part ‘inconstant, unpredictable, capricious, vain, and materialistic’, more concerned with ‘making conquests rather than wives of women’.¹²¹ A. Walton Litz read the Watson sisters’ husband-chasing ventures as the representation of a wider existential crisis: reflecting on Jane Austen’s darkening vision of herself as ‘a spinster nearing thirty who has probably relinquished all hopes of an equal marriage’, he saw her major artistic theme as ‘the conflict between the free spirit and social-economic imperatives’. Litz argued that Emma Watson ‘is deliberately pictured as an isolated and sensitive person, cut off from all expectations and trapped in an alien world’; her situation develops into ‘an epitome of the dilemma faced by the free spirit in a limited world’.¹²²

   Anticipating this social view, Virginia Woolf responded strongly to the abrupt ending of Austen’s fragment, which shows Emma by her father’s sickbed assessing her new position in the world: ‘from being the life and spirit of a house, where all had been comfort and elegance, and the expected heiress of an easy independence, she was become of importance to no one, a burden on those, whose affection she could not expect, an addition in an house, already overstocked, surrounded by inferior minds with little chance of domestic comfort, and as little hope of future support’ (p. 135). This Emma is definitely without a room of her own or the independence that Jane Fairfax so craved. (Kathleen James-Cavan is one of the few critics who have interpreted this scene positively: she understood Emma’s retreat to her father’s sickroom as a refusal to emulate her sisters’ husband-hunting operations and a conscious decision to find an alternative to the dilemma of her situation by becoming his ‘companion in free and equal conversation’.¹²³ However, with Mr Watson on the verge of death, Emma’s chosen release from sexual discrimination would have proved a transitory one.)

   Edward Copeland also commented on Emma’s sorry domestic situation, reduced from affluence to comparative poverty; he described it as ‘a typical 1790s-style dislocation’, which underscored the most pressing economic issue for women of the time: fear of being without money. He noted that ‘The Watsons’ marks its borders by material signs of wealth – types of houses, status of servants, modes of transport, all calibrated according to prosperity: ‘The potential of such a rank-conscious world, with all its consequent confusions of money and place, is codified in material possessions.’ He also commented on the ‘distinctly hostile’ relations between the classes.¹²⁴

   ‘The Watsons’ is Austen’s earliest extant work in the realist mode of the mature novels: it is about poverty, pain and reduced gentility. Several critics have discussed how this content coloured the narrative style of the fragment. Mary Lascelles commented that Jane Austen ‘seems to be struggling with a peculiar oppression, a stiffness and heaviness that threaten her style’ and which is also found in her letters of the time.¹²⁵ David Nokes caught a ‘hard, cynical tone’ in the text¹²⁶ and Kathryn Sutherland noted the work’s ‘cold, peculiar angularity of vision’. Emma, the youngest of the four Watson sisters, has suffered the kind of reversal of fortune that recalls the career in freefall of Burney’s Cecilia, while Elizabeth, the eldest, has, unlike Emma, ‘found a way of coping with the world by making her ethical expectations . . . commensurate with its limited opportunities’. Emma and the reader are ‘unconfined by such pragmatism’ and are simply made uncomfortable. Sutherland argued that ‘The Watsons’ enacts ‘the moment when a new and tough realism took centre stage in Austen’s art’: place and setting became more than backdrop, and small objects assumed emotional freight. It began the psychological study of banality.¹²⁷

   Bharat Tandon agreed, observing how ‘The Watsons’ ‘narrates almost everything at the same pitch of descriptive intensity’, an intensity of detail which produces, like ‘Lady Susan’ had earlier, a ‘single effect’ – though, in this case, ‘of social, sexual and economic claustrophobia’.¹²⁸ Austen’s uncompromising narrative focus on financial hardship entailed an equally unsentimental account of family bonds, a ‘failing in generosity’, as B. C. Southam termed it.¹²⁹ Austen may not be, in Juliet McMaster’s words, the first author to specialize in the dramatic representation of an emotion so recognizable to a modern readership, family shame – after all, Burney’s heroines are similarly burdened with mortifyingly vulgar relatives – but the Watson family certainly presents ‘the hottest and most desperately disagreeable frying-pan’ that any heroine in the Austen canon needs to escape. In the process refined Emma Watson closely approximates the ‘regulated hatred’ that D. W. Harding identified as Austen’s psychological condition: she is ‘bravely successful in regulating her behaviour; but she has more cause than any other heroine to judge her neighbours, and particularly her family, adversely’.¹³⁰ The ‘hard, cynical tone’ in which ‘The Watsons’ described some ‘unenviable choices’ in the sisters’ marital prospects led David Nokes to speculate on hostile energies disrupting the sisterly bond between Jane and Cassandra, a relationship most biographers tend to perceive as blissfully harmonious. Connecting the narrative to Jane Austen’s refusal of the one marriage proposal of which we know for certain, Nokes observed that there was no reason to believe that Cassandra attempted ‘to supplant Jane in Harris Bigg-Wither’s affections’; yet, focusing on the story’s ‘underlying sense of uncertainty and distrust’ and drawing a link between Penelope Watson and Cassandra – both ‘powerful off-stage presence[s]’ – he conjectured: ‘Could there have been rivalry – even treachery – between the Austen sisters?’¹³¹

   The unfinished ‘Watsons’ provided a literary opportunity to one of Jane Austen’s younger nieces, as Anna Lefroy had feared it would. Catherine Austen, later Hubback, grew up knowing Cassandra and her father’s second wife Martha Lloyd, who had been close to Jane Austen at the time she was writing the work. Edith Brown claimed that ‘Cassandra used to read The Watsons aloud to her nieces, and my grandmother Mrs Hubback, was one of them.’ In 1850, needing to support herself and children after her husband suffered a mental breakdown, Catherine Hubback published a three-volume novel, The Younger Sister, dedicated to ‘the Memory of her Aunt, the Late Jane Austen’. The first five chapters are based closely on ‘The Watsons’: her son John insisted they were ‘a supreme effort of memory’ since his mother had not seen the manuscript for seven years, while her granddaughter Edith Brown claimed that the first volume was ‘Jane Austen through a haze of memory’.¹³² Alternatively, Catherine Hubback may have taken a copy from Cassandra before she died: although not much of the narrative is word for word, some of the earliest dialogue is similar.

   The Younger Sister was the first of many completed continuations of an Austen fragment, distinguished by the claim that its later plot was based securely on the original author’s outline. A rather tedious work – the most dramatic moment is when the hero Mr Howard is wrongly declared dead – it attempted to continue Austen’s bracing satire in the depiction of Robert Watson’s spoiled daughter and affected Mrs Elton-like wife and it added characters reminiscent of other Austen works – one has the silly literary talk of Sir Edward in ‘Sanditon’, for example. At the same time it tried to give a Victorian patina to the story: the heroine’s modest woes teach her that suffering is the condition of life. Taunted by her sister as ‘quite a Miss Charity or Miss Meek’, Hubback’s Emma is remarkably priggish: a woman of forty-five should have a ‘grave and gentle deportment, stately but serene’, she declares; accused of scorning Lord Osborne, she responds, ‘scorn cannot be a becoming quality in a young lady’. What most suggests the later period is the class inflection: while worthy rustics understand the ‘true poetry of nature’, the aristocratic Lord Osborne becomes ridiculous.¹³³ His tutor, the stuffy Mr Howard, moves from the ‘pseudo gentry’ of Austen’s usual clergymen heroes to become the representative of the Victorian middle class in his modesty and seriousness. Ruined by easy money, the unsavoury Tom Musgrave is given a rag-merchant for a grandfather: he is forced into marriage with the peevish sister Margaret by unguarded words seized on by her lawyer brother Robert. A wicked doctor contrasts with the amiably ignorant doctors and apothecaries of Jane Austen’s mature novels and in uncharacteristic style he is drowned at the end. Everyone who should gets married and the foolish aunt, whose marriage has forced Emma back on her family, obtains a separation.

   Through the generations ‘The Watsons’ went on inspiring the Frank Austen branch of the family, and in 1928, after Chapman’s published transcription appeared, Edith Brown and her husband produced another continuation using a tidied-up version of the Austen text in ten chapters and boldly entitling the whole ‘The Watsons by Jane Austen Continued & Completed by Edith (Her Great Grand-Niece) & Francis Brown’. Where her grandmother’s novel was ‘a long and not too faithful version’, hers was, she claimed, a short work written ‘in accordance with [the author’s] intentions’; the dust-jacket declared that it came ‘from a direct source and with the charm and flavour of Jane Austen’s style recaptured in a remarkable degree’. The Preface began: ‘I like my grand-aunt Jane, and she would have liked me. She would have said, “I am pleased with your notion, and expect much entertainment.” ’ Despite noting her grandmother’s deviation from the presumed Jane Austen plot, Edith and her husband availed themselves of some of her additional characters, but, instead of the villainous doctor, they added a benign apothecary. Elizabeth gets a younger brother of Purvis but by the end Margaret has not managed to secure Tom Musgrave.

‘SANDITON’

The manuscript of the fragment later published under the name of ‘Sanditon’ exists in three booklets of cut writing paper, now sewn together, though perhaps originally pinned. The first two are of 184 mm × 115 mm, with thirty-two and forty-eight pages respectively, and the third of 159 mm × 95 mm with eighty pages, of which forty-one contain text. Several pages of the first two booklets bear the watermark date of 1812 and of the third the watermark of 1815. The text of the manuscript includes three authorial dates: the first page of the first booklet is marked with the date 27 January 1817; the first page of the third booklet is marked ‘Mar. 1’; and the final line of the manuscript is followed by the date ‘March 18’. The precision in dating, also evident in the manuscript of the cancelled chapters of Persuasion but not present in the manuscript of ‘The Watsons’, suggests that Austen was more aware of the importance of dating her work after she had become a published novelist. Further corroborative evidence is provided by her sister Cassandra’s notes dating the novels: only for Emma and Persuasion are precise start and finish dates given.¹³⁴

   The manuscript is untitled. Mrs Janet Sanders, a granddaughter of Jane Austen’s brother Frank, who possessed the copy of the manuscript – also untitled – made by Cassandra long after Jane’s death, informed R. W. Chapman that her father Rev. Edward Austen ‘had been told, his Aunt Jane intended to name her last novel (unfinished) “The Brothers” ’.¹³⁵ In a letter to James Edward Austen Leigh while he was preparing material for the Memoir, Anna Lefroy referred to a copy of the manuscript as of ‘Sanditon’;¹³⁶ however, in the Memoir itself, the second edition of which offers the edited extracts from the manuscript, Austen Leigh refers to it only as ‘The last Work’.¹³⁷

   Like ‘The Watsons’, ‘Sanditon’ reveals much about the ways in which Jane Austen drafted and revised her work but, when compared with ‘The Watsons’, ‘Sanditon’ demonstrates a marked increase of creative confidence on Jane Austen’s part. In place of the eight-page booklets in which the earlier work was drafted, she prepared for ‘Sanditon’ much larger ones, and of increasing size; after a tentative few pages at the beginning, the narrative – unlike ‘The Watsons’, neatly divided into chapters – flows smoothly without extensive deletion or revision; there are no interpolated pages containing additional or replacement material as in the earlier work; and many of the pages contain no, or very few, corrections. There is no evidence of substantial rethinking of plot, character or circumstance while the writing was actually in progress. As in the other manuscripts (and indeed in at least one of the published novels), the names of some of the characters are spelt in various ways – the owner of the circulating library at Sanditon is Miss or Mrs Whilby or Whitby, depending on Austen’s mood when she was writing. Unlike in ‘The Watsons' there are few revisions of names of people or places, the only significant one being the alteration of Sanditon Hall to Sanditon House, making clear that Austen wanted her readers to imagine a rather more modest, perhaps less traditional, residence. One of the few factual changes is the decision to make the interfering Diana more ridiculous by letting her claim to have rubbed somebody’s ankle ‘without Intermission’ for six hours rather than four in order to cure a sprain (ch. 5). Cumulatively, the relatively modest level of alteration could suggest that Austen had either no time or no energy to go back for thorough revisions of her first draft; but it is equally likely that by 1817, although ill, she was a much more experienced professional writer than she had been in c. 1804–5, and much more certain of her aims and how to achieve them before she began to write.¹³⁸

   The corrections which she did make occur in specific significant areas. She was most concerned to pin down her descriptions of places and people. Early accounts of Diana Parker and Lady Denham show great care over the phrasing and nuance of their characters and behaviour; there is extensive deliberation about how to describe Sidney Parker, and much rethinking about the descriptions of old and new Sanditon, their constituent buildings and the way the characters feel about them (ch. 4). However, the famous description of Sanditon itself in chapter 1 stands exactly as Jane Austen first wrote it, except for one second thought towards the end: Mr Parker’s original ‘A measured mile nearer than East Bourne. Only conceive Sir, the advantage of that, in a long Journey’ becomes ‘One complete, measured mile nearer than East Bourne. Only conceive Sir, the advantage of saving a whole Mile, in a long Journey’. It is a small change, but the comedy is increased, the Sanditon venture sounds just a little more foolish and Mr Parker’s idiosyncratic enthusiasm of speech and thought is enhanced. Many of the other corrections throughout the manuscript embellish Mr Parker’s speech – ‘rather’ weak, ‘very’ fine, ‘by no means’ for ‘not’ – and some highlight his fondness for speculation in all areas of life, as when Mr Heywood is said to have been induced by Mr Parker (in a bravura example of reported free indirect speech) to undertake not to spend ‘even 5 shillings’ at Brinshore (ch. 2). Many later critics, including Anna Lefroy, felt that the idiosyncracies of Diana and Arthur Parker should be toned down, but the revisions show Austen heightening their eccentricities: for example, Diana’s declaration that ‘I know where to apply’ for a medical man to come to Sanditon, becomes ‘I could soon put the necessary Irons in the fire’ (ch. 5). Other revisions correct infelicities or possible bad jokes, such as the removal of ‘Hollies’ on the land of the deceased Mr Hollis (ch. 12), or they add precision in tiny matters of rhythm and phrasing, as when the account of the Parkers’ formidably large collection of medicines is altered from ‘many Phials already domesticated on the Mantlepeice’ to ‘the several Phials already at home on the Mantlepeice’ (ch. 10). Sometimes Austen just reverts to a natural preference in vocabulary, as when ‘mistakes’ is crossed out, to be replaced by ‘blunders’, her favoured word from Emma (ch. 11). It may be significant that, of the impressionistic phrases that critics have seen as a new departure for Austen and a sign of how her writing might have developed had she lived longer, ‘dancing & sparkling in Sunshine & Freshness’ (ch. 4) involved a second thought, and, while the suggestive phrase ‘something White & Womanish’ (ch. 12) exists in the first draft, the wording around it, including the mist which contributes to the overall effect of the sentence, was subject to revision.¹³⁹

   Throughout the manuscript, the writing, including the small section in pencil and overwritten in pen (f. 35r–f. 35v), is generally firm and legible, and, although some sections were clearly composed in more haste than others, there are no particular signs of physical or mental strain towards the end; the last pages of the manuscript are no more heavily corrected than the earlier ones, and the writing is rather neater than in some of the preceding sections. It seems nevertheless that on this occasion it was Austen’s strength, rather than her imagination, that failed her, and that she knew it. She had been over-ambitious in preparing a third booklet of eighty pages, and she was able to write on only half of them. The last written page contains a single line of manuscript. Directly below it and evidently written at the same time in the same hand is the date, ‘March 18’. It is, after two months and 23,500 words, a deliberate – and, to any reader of the manuscript, an affecting – signing-off.

   By 18 March Jane Austen was seriously ill; four months later, on 18 July, she died, according to Cassandra wanting ‘nothing but death’.¹⁴⁰ So ‘Sanditon’ became the last piece of prose fiction she wrote and, like ‘Lady Susan’ and to a lesser extent ‘The Watsons’, it hardly seems to fit the ladylike image which her nephew James Edward tried to promote for his aunt. To many it appeared a reversion to the style of the youthful parodies and caricatures, with the added poignancy that, with its jovial mockery of invalidism, it cruelly and comically recalled Jane Austen’s own state. Her energetic hypochondriac Diana Parker can hardly crawl from her ‘Bed to the Sofa’ and is ‘bilious’, a fashionable term for an ailment that made a sufferer yellowish; just as Jane Austen determined that this was her own complaint she added the term ‘anti-bilious’ to her manuscript above the line on the list of ‘antis’ for which the Sanditon air was beneficial (ch. 2). Five days after abandoning her novel in its twelfth chapter, she wrote that she was turning ‘every wrong colour’; several weeks later she was living ‘chiefly on the sofa’.¹⁴¹ No one could accuse her of the hypochondria so energetically displayed in the novel, but Mrs Edward Bridges, whose husband called at Godmersham on his way home from a summer in Ramsgate in 1813, might foreshadow the Parker sisters: ‘she is a poor Honey,’ wrote Austen, ‘the sort of woman who gives me the idea of being determined never to be well—& who likes her spasms & nervousness & the consequence they give her, better than anything else’.¹⁴² In a letter of 26 March 1817, mentioning her own increasing ill-health, Austen now declared, ‘I am a poor Honey at present.’¹⁴³

   E. M. Forster remarked that the revisions in `Sanditon' were ‘never in the direction of vitality’, so that the effect is of weakness and reminiscence, although David Gilson has suggested that Forster did not actually study the variants since the pages of notes in his review copy of Chapman’s edition were unopened.¹⁴⁴ It is easy to assume with Forster that Jane Austen knew she was incurably or terminally ill throughout the time she was writing the novel; but this need not be the case, as Austen Leigh himself indicated when, quoting Gil Blas’s Archbishop, he denied that the work ‘smells of apoplexy’.¹⁴⁵ Indeed, her letters and the external accounts clarify that Jane Austen did not realize her condition until well into the work. Just before she began her novel she composed an ebullient letter to her nephew James Edward in which she famously referred to her works as miniatures, written on little bits of ivory. She could not then walk the one and a half or so miles to his sister Anna Lefroy’s house at Wyards, but otherwise she was ‘very well’; a fortnight later she wrote a joke-letter in reversed spelling to her little niece Cassandra Esten.¹⁴⁶ A sick person might try to keep up pretences, especially for young correspondents, but there is a cheeriness in these letters that seems unforced.

   The tone continued cheerful when she addressed Caroline Austen on 23 January 1817: she commented approvingly on James Edward’s novel, which he had been reading to her, and declared herself stronger than half a year earlier. The walk to Alton and indeed back would soon be quite feasible and she hoped to attempt it in the coming summer. The next day she wrote more seriously to her friend Alethea Bigg: ‘We are all in good health’: she had ‘certainly gained strength through the Winter’ and now was ‘not far from being well’.¹⁴⁷ A month later she told Fanny Knight that she was almost cured of rheumatism and showed enthusiastic interest in her niece’s suitors and love life; then she sent a letter to Caroline, looking forward to receiving the four chapters of her novel.¹⁴⁸

   In mid March, she wrote again to Fanny, mainly on the subject of her suitors. When it mentioned her health, this letter was more sombre. She had clearly had a relapse. She meant to ride on the donkey when the weather became more springlike – a rather different project from her recent intention of walking to and from Alton in the summer.¹⁴⁹ On 23–25 March she wrote even less sanguinely to Fanny Knight, admitting, ‘I certainly have not been well for many weeks, & about a week ago I was very poorly . . . I must not depend upon being ever very blooming again’; she had signed off from ‘Sanditon’ exactly a week earlier, on 18 March.¹⁵⁰ On 6 April she told her brother Charles that she had been very ill for the previous fortnight, ‘too unwell . . . to write anything that was not absolutely necessary’ and on the 27th of the same month she made her will.¹⁵¹

   ‘Sanditon’ eschews the country-village setting which, while she was writing Emma, Jane Austen had declared ‘the very thing to work on’ (see p. 220) and took instead an English seaside resort in the making. She was thoroughly familiar with the kind of place, since, in the years following the removal to Bath, she had visited at least Lyme Regis, Sidmouth, Dawlish and Worthing. Within her work she often mocked fashionable seaside resorts. Brighton is one of Lady Lesley’s ‘favourite haunts of Dissipation’, while Lydia Bennet in Pride and Prejudice is given a vision of ‘the streets of that gay bathing place covered with officers’; in Mr Knightley’s formulation, Weymouth and places like it are the ‘idlest haunts in the kingdom’.¹⁵² So the attitude in ‘Sanditon’ comes as no surprise.

   By the end of the eighteenth century seaside resorts had provoked a good deal of satiric and sardonic comment. William Cowper, reputed to be Jane Austen’s favourite poet, noted that past generations had been content with Bristol, Bath and Tunbridge:

But now alike, gay widow, virgin, wife
Ingenious to diversify dull life,
In coaches, chaises, caravans and hoys,
Fly to the coast for daily, nightly joys,
And all impatient of dry land, agree
With one consent to rush into the sea.¹⁵³

In the early decades of the next century seaside resorts continued to be objects of mockery: for their claims, their rivalry, their mingling visitors and their trivial amusements. William Cobbett in Rural Rides noted the ‘morbid restlessness’ communicated by such towns where there is no trade or commerce but only tourism, ‘dismal to think of ’.¹⁵⁴ Comically praising Margate, the satirist Peter Pindar wrote, ‘What’s Brighton, when to thee compar’d!—poor thing; / Whose barren hills in mist for ever weep; / Or what is Weymouth, though a queen and king / Wash, walk and prattle there, and wake and sleep?’¹⁵⁵ In 1824 Walter Scott described not a seaside resort but a new inland watering place in Saint Ronan’s Well:

a fanciful lady of rank in the neighbourhood chanced to recover of some imaginary complaint by the use of a mineral well about a mile and a half from the village; a fashionable doctor was found to write an analysis of the healing stream, with a list of sundry cures; a speculative builder took land in the feu, and erected lodging-houses, shops, and even streets. At length a tontine subscription was obtained to erect an inn, which, for the more grace, was called a hotel.

   A resort is made rather in the manner of Sanditon; it attracts similarly silly painting- and poetry-reading tourists.¹⁵⁶

   Nearer to Jane Austen’s moment of writing and perhaps influencing her choice of setting is a novel by the popular writer T. S. Surr. The Magic of Wealth (1815) depicted the new seaside town of ‘Flimflamton’, erected by the rich and foolish banker Flimflam, who, with the help of agents Puff and Rattle and the building of hotels, a theatre, an infirmary and a grand pavilion library, makes his resort the ‘magnet of Fashion’. Flimflam’s riches are associated with the ‘trafficking spirit of the times’¹⁵⁷ which has destroyed the traditional gentry, and much of the book is an attack on capitalism, speculation and the new credit economy. This is to some extent also Jane Austen’s subject, and the topic might have appealed to her for personal reasons: she had just experienced the failure in March 1816 of Henry Austen’s bank – although this failure was due partly to the post-war slump and too much lending to extravagant noblemen. In the crash Jane’s brothers Edward, James and Frank and her uncle James Leigh Perrot all lost considerable sums, and Jane herself lost £26.2s.0d., part of the profits on Mansfield Park and income from the second edition of Sense and Sensibility.¹⁵⁸ The result was a sharp diminution in the income of the Austen women, since Henry and Frank could no longer contribute to their maintenance, and James and Edward had difficulty doing so. However, from the fragment of ‘Sanditon’ there is no evidence that Jane Austen is attacking the whole capitalist enterprise as Surr was doing, but only the avaricious and foolish who form part of it, and the influence of The Magic of Wealth, with its schematic characters and melodramatic incidents, can at best have been slight.¹⁵⁹ The French Revolution and the long wars had put paid to the optimistic notion, associated with the Scottish Enlightenment philosophers such as James Steuart and less so with the more ambivalent Adam Smith, that money pursuits, once condemned as avarice and greed, had entirely positive effects on society, but few sensed the enormous and disturbing transformation which capitalism was bringing about. In ‘Sanditon’, for all its mockery of speculation, Jane Austen seems closest to Samuel Johnson’s tolerant, eighteenth-century opinion that ‘There are few ways in which a man can be more innocently employed than in getting money.’¹⁶⁰

   Jane Austen had begun ‘Sanditon’ before the final touches had been put to Persuasion – if they ever were. In that novel Virginia Woolf found a peculiar and new beauty together with a peculiar dullness; she mused that, had the author lived, ‘she would have been the forerunner of Henry James and Proust’.¹⁶¹ Such an opinion cannot be supported by this last manuscript work, which failed to continue the psychological developments of the later novels in subject matter or style. It shocked and puzzled early readers, as Austen Leigh feared it would. R. Brimley Johnson thought the work skeletal, a series of notes rather than a composed narrative – it would need not revision but rewriting.¹⁶² E. M. Forster regarded it as ‘of small literary merit’; it gave ‘the effect of weakness’ if only because its characters feebly imitate earlier ones: ‘we realize with pain that we are listening to a slightly tiresome spinster, who has talked too much in the past to be silent unaided’.¹⁶³ Terming it a precious trace of the great writer, Chapman yet noted ‘a certain roughness and harshness of satire’; revision would have smoothed these but ‘a degree of savagery’ would have remained.¹⁶⁴ Mary Lascelles remarked on the enigma of ‘Sanditon’, noting that none of the other novels, ‘if broken off short at the eleventh chapter, [would] have left us in such uncertainty as to the way in which it was going to develop’.¹⁶⁵

   Perhaps the only recent critic to exceed the initial shocked response is D. A. Miller, who argued in a tour de force of disapproval that, following the decadence of Persuasion, ‘Sanditon’ effects the ‘formal ruination of the Austen Novel as we have come to know it’.¹⁶⁶ Tony Tanner had called its revisions dizzying and described the excessive effect as ‘a new kind of phenomenological complexity' where ‘identification is deferred, vision itself is becoming narrativised’: ‘Sanditon’ was built on and by ‘careless and eroding grammar; a grammar for which the characters are responsible’.¹⁶⁷ Miller went a great deal further and thoroughly implicated the dying author. Mr Parker’s speculation seems heading for a crash at odds with the comic marriage plot, while the proscription on the death of any major character in romantic comedy frustrates any development of the theme of foolish yet prescient hypochondria. But, Miller argued, the structural collapse pales beside ‘the breakdown, registered on every page of the novel, of Austen Style’. In its bad writing, ‘Sanditon’ dramatizes the only death scene to be found in all Austen: ‘the passing of the stylothete’. At her best she had given correctness ‘a theatrical form’, but ‘Sanditon’ is full of repetitions and unhappy associations, such as the eliminated ‘Hollies’ owned by Mr Hollis; it is ‘beyond the reach of correction’.¹⁶⁸ In direct contrast, however, Arthur Axelrad, who perceptively described Jane Austen as a ‘process writer’, declared of ‘Sanditon’: ‘I remain convinced that it would have been her undoubted masterpiece.’¹⁶⁹

   Some readers took issue with the earlier disapproval. Clara Tuite, for example, attacked the patronizing attitude of E. M. Forster. Noting his view of a sick female body producing a sick text, she claimed that Forster pathologized ‘the female-identified genre of the novel through images of female corporeality’ and discredited Austen’s credentials for male Augustan wit, usually associated with her writing. Forster’s depreciation should be read ‘in terms of the logic between the homosexual son and his mother [Austen]’, she declared.¹⁷⁰ Reginald Hill noted that the name ‘Sanditon’ had ‘overtones of shifting uncertainty, of grittiness, of getting in the eye and causing irritation. The fragment of the novel that we have is busier, more vibrant with nervous energy, showing greater variety of theme and a more crowded canvas than any of the other novels in their entirety let alone in their opening chapters.’¹⁷¹

   While also separating themselves from his sexist disapproval, other later critics did sometimes follow Forster in associating the diseased body with the text. Litz saw ‘Sanditon’ as a response to the author’s ill health, its ‘impersonal tone’ a barrier against regret and depression. Like Miller, John Halperin related Austen’s bodily state to the syntax of ‘Sanditon’, a novel, which, had she still been developing her skill with the human psyche, ‘might have been her most savagely cynical performance’: ‘there are no paragraph divisions, and much is abbreviated’. The whole thing seems to have been ‘written fast to keep pace with the speed of composition – as if, that is, the writer, puffing and breathless, could not get it all down fast enough’. This suggested to Halperin ‘both mental vivacity and physical decline’.¹⁷²

   Peter Knox-Shaw made the connection between Jane Austen’s sick body and her unfinished text more positively. She had long been ill and much of ‘Sanditon’ must have been written ‘with the inkling that it would be left incomplete’, he thought. The author ‘played up the comedy at the expense of narrative requirements, and turned her last piece into something of a coda. The main theme of “Sanditon” is quixotry.’¹⁷³ Seeing surreal ‘gallows humour’ in the text, Bharat Tandon noted that Sanditon’s ‘very name is repeated like a magic shibboleth’ with the power to cure all ills. With Knox-Shaw he saw the work as a sceptical text; he made play with the fact that the author wrote that the sea air and bathing were ‘anti-spasmodic, anti-pulmonary, anti-sceptic’; it was tempting to see a suggestive misspelling in Austen’s ‘anti-sceptic’.¹⁷⁴

   Regarding less the body of the text than the hypochondriacal bodies within it, John Wiltshire noted the ‘amazing inventiveness, brio and zest’ with which they are presented. The characters are not covertly using illness to control others but rather allowing their bodies to fill their imaginations and direct their actions. Invalidism here is no longer merely private but the ‘pivot of economic activity’; it is like sensibility a result of wealth, and a compromise formation ‘between the possession of leisure and the need for outlet and activity’. The hypochondriacs’ ‘bodies have become the grounds of inventiveness and energy, preoccupying their imaginations and becoming the source of sufficient activity to direct the conduct of every hour of the day’. In Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain, ‘the medical merges in a most unnerving (so to speak) fashion with the sexual’: Wiltshire wondered if something similar would happen to Charlotte, whose moralizing staidness was so persistently under siege.¹⁷⁵ Building on Wiltshire’s work, Galperin believed that the allegorical mode of ‘Sanditon’ underscored ‘the culture of sickness to which the status quo – as both represented and advocated by fictions of probability – is figuratively tantamount’. If there is a melancholy in a world that can be opposed or escaped only through pathological abjection, ‘there is also something bracing about a possibility that, however consigned to the realm of the ridiculous, marks an alternative to the “group glossolalia” (Tanner’s phrase) where, to follow Mr. Parker’s own logic, “civilization” remains a homeopathic entity whose afflictions and remedies are virtually undifferentiable’.¹⁷⁶

   The difference between ‘Sanditon’ and its predecessors provoked much comment. B. C. Southam argued that it showed Jane Austen responding to the new currents of Romanticism in her amplified subject matter, sense of place and experimental style.¹⁷⁷ Marilyn Butler disagreed. Far from discerning Romantic trends within its content and style, she found the work anachronistic, associated with the 1790s partisan Austen of the early novels. Its would-be seducer, Sir Edward Denham, is simply ‘the bogeyman of the run-of-the-mill anti-jacobin novel’ of the 1790s and his literary taste is in tune with ‘the exaggerated terms of literary warfare of around 1798’ when conservatives associated sentimentalism with conscious intrigue and villainy. Although this was the first time Austen had made a seaside town her subject, the depiction in symbolic terms was familiar, since Sanditon had been perverted from its original state as a fishing and agricultural community. ‘The people who flock to Sanditon are of the type of gentry she always censures: urban, rootless, irresponsible, self-indulgent.’ Other contemporary novelists criticized new resorts but Austen was the most conservative in her analysis, the most concerned to compare them with ‘a notional older way, an inherited organic community reminiscent of the imaginative construct made by Burke’.¹⁷⁸

   Alistair M. Duckworth made a similar analysis but came to a different conclusion: he argued that Austen had provided ‘another description of the transvaluation of social and moral attitudes in her society which she so deplored’. Sanditon is ‘a world . . . so far removed from traditional grounds of moral action that its retrieval through former fictional means is no longer possible’. The heroine remains a moral figure but she cannot here be an agent of social renewal.¹⁷⁹

   Bringing together Charles Darwin and Austen as observers of the external world, Peter W. Graham followed Butler and Duckworth in arguing that Sanditon seems to be ‘taking shape as a denunciation of the enterprising (here, not naval officers but land developers), with the vanishing rural status quo glowing in a particularly attractive light because it’s about to vanish’.¹⁸⁰ In turn, Edward Copeland took issue with the Duckworth and Butler view. The old method could survive, he thought. Austen would not let Sanditon, ‘dancing & sparkling in Sunshine & Freshness’, go under completely: although the traditional and foolish gentleman Mr Parker was out of his depth, the business man of the pseudo-gentry, Sidney Parker, would probably ‘set things straight’; as Copeland suspected would happen in ‘The Watsons’, representatives of this social group would manage to win out. He noted the moral distinction being made in the fragment between two types of capitalism or credit economy: Lady Denham’s mean-spirited, calculating commercial spirit, a kind of ‘rationalized avarice’, and Mr Parker’s imaginative and generous speculation directed to the good of the individual and the state.¹⁸¹

   Holding to his view of Jane Austen as a sceptical Enlightenment figure, Knox-Shaw was inevitably uncomfortable with the reading of ‘Sanditon’, stemming primarily from Marilyn Butler, in terms of a contrast between bustling improvers and worthy landed gentry. Like Copeland, he noted that the speculating Mr Parker is most concerned with stewardship and community, caring for those he set up in business and raising a subscription for an impoverished family. Butler had argued that the hypochondria of the Parker family indicated ‘Sanditon’s’ decadence and Austen’s distaste for Regency culture; Knox Shaw considered that this analysis muddles symptom and cause.¹⁸² John Wiltshire had suggested that Austen satirizes newfangled Romantic attitudes to the body from an Augustan viewpoint; for Knox-Shaw the quackery of the Parkers is however backward-looking, and Charlotte’s breezy dismissal is not so much moral as empirical. ‘When Arthur complains that two cups of green tea have the effect of paralysing his right side, Charlotte dryly refers the matter to “those who have studied right sides & Green Tea scientifically & thoroughly understand all the possibilities of their action on each other”.’¹⁸³

   Several critics connected ‘Sanditon’ with Northanger Abbey, conceived in the 1790s; the latter was being considered and perhaps revised while the former was being composed. In both novels the subject of fiction permeating life is to the fore, but B. C. Southam noted that, in ‘Sanditon’, ‘the state of fictional illusion is deliberately and continually violated’.¹⁸⁴ Responding rather differently and interested in the juxtaposition of ‘realism’ with a self-conscious connection with fiction displayed by several of the inhabitants of Sanditon, Tanner remarked that ‘everybody is likely to live a para-fictional life to some extent. The texture of everyday life now includes the texture of the fictions it produces.’¹⁸⁵ Kathryn Sutherland agreed: she focused on the moment when, intending to regulate herself, the heroine Charlotte takes up, then puts down, the volume of Burney’s Camilla, which suggested to Sutherland that she submits her actions to fictional authority. The action accords with the disturbing sense running through the book ‘that life is being lived at a critical distance, as a second-order reality’.¹⁸⁶ To Susan Allen Ford, ‘Sanditon’ revealed ‘the very power of fiction to simultaneously serve and critique the marketplace of which it is a part’.¹⁸⁷

   To catch the depiction in ‘Sanditon’ of a speculative, rootless world, several critics concentrated on the opening: the overturned carriage. Tanner claimed that it symbolizes the overturning of established social values: ‘Everything . . . represented by, and embodied in, the small, self-sealing circle of the Heywoods will be shown to be degraded, debased, forgotten or transgressed – “overturned” – in the course even of the fragment we have.’¹⁸⁸ Colin Winborn remarked that the carriage fall occurs when the Parkers are toiling up a hill, half sand half rock, and he saw this as a salient image of people struggling upwards in general, socially, economically or physically, throughout the book – and inevitably facing a fall. Nature is domesticated, harnessed and prettified, and cannot any longer serve as a timely check on the lives of those living beside it.¹⁸⁹ Melissa Sodeman noted that as early as 1799 Hannah More had attacked mobility in modern culture and its manic restlessness; while possessing a curative value for the ill, travelling endangered the moral well-being of the healthy: ‘Far from praising travel . . . Sanditon appears to assail it, beginning with an episode that satirizes the senselessness of wasted movement’; yet, while the work appears anxious about restless fashionable society, the heroine’s own movement remains advantageous, allowing her to ‘attain a definitive subjectivity’ and ‘learn to interpret properly the characters surrounding her and to assess value in the marketplace’.¹⁹⁰

   Similar to the concentration on an episode is the isolation of a particular minor character. When Anna Lefroy first considered ‘Sanditon’, she commented on the vibrancy of the incidental characters, and Austen Leigh had agreed with her assessment when he chose to excerpt passages describing the Parkers and Lady Denham, together with their special ways of speaking.

   Two characters strike modern post-colonialist and feminist critics in a way unlikely in earlier times. The first is the West Indian visitor, the pampered pupil Miss Lambe. Considering her exploited, Elaine Jordan concluded, ‘Sanditon studies, in a comic mode, how our native frailty and mortality, our common kindness and need for both compassion and respect, are transformed and deformed by ambitious commerce.’¹⁹¹ Gabrielle D. V. White noted that it would be anachronistic to include Jane Austen in the context of imperialistic novelists, but she believed it ‘a crucial part’ of Austen’s context ‘that she writes during a transitional period between the two great events of legislation for abolition’.¹⁹² Galperin speculated that Jane Austen might have recruited the half mulatto with her ‘radical otherness’ into a courtship plot with the impoverished Sir Edward Denham, though he admitted that this ‘specter of miscegenation and its projected adulteration of aristocratic bloodlines is undoubtedly deflected by Miss Lambe’s ambiguous constitution as someone “chilly and tender” ’.¹⁹³ (In fact such a plot would not necessarily evoke such a ‘specter’: as Lady Denham’s hopes suggest, rich West Indian mulatto offspring were routinely courted by European men for their money.¹⁹⁴)

   The other character is Lady Denham, an interesting development from Lady Catherine de Bourgh, with just a hint, perhaps, of Lady Susan. Attitudes to her reflect changing critical fashion over a century and a half. In 1862 Anna Lefroy declared that in Jane Austen’s hands she ‘would have been delightful’.¹⁹⁵ In 1964 Southam suggested that ‘the relationship between Lady Denham and her niece is open to speculation’; in 1995 Terry Castle stated that Lady Denham is ‘the vulgar case for Austen’s homoeroticism’ – a notion roundly opposed by Southam; while in 2000 Clara Tuite declared, ‘Lady Denham represents the new Gothic plot of wealthy lesbian vampirism, as she sucks her male partners dry in order to bequeath to the female favorite . . . [it] is the nonheterosexual romance that cuts at the nexus of property and reproduction and revises their usual standing in the Austen romance.’¹⁹⁶

   Like ‘The Watsons’, ‘Sanditon’ inspired the Austen family. Irritated perhaps at Catherine Hubback’s continuation of the earlier work and the possibility that her cousin would publish their aunt’s ‘Sanditon’ in the original form, Anna Lefroy began her own continuation. Her version doubled the length of Jane Austen’s text without completing it. Mary Gaither Marshall, who edited the work in the late twentieth century, speculated that some of the continuation perhaps accorded with Jane Austen’s aims since she may have discussed the later stages of the plot with Anna and indeed encouraged her to continue the work – a rather doubtful idea since Anna herself declared that her aunt’s enigmatic ‘story was too little advanced to enable one to form any idea of the plot’.¹⁹⁷

   Anna Lefroy knew her continuation inferior to her aunt’s work but she also judged some parts of the original insufficiently subtle. For example, the Parkers, who were, she claimed, based on real-life originals and whom she believed she had discussed with Jane Austen, were, apart from Mr Parker, too ‘broadly stated’.¹⁹⁸ For her continuation she kept the original characters but invented more townspeople – including an old fisherman, a schoolteacher and boys who run donkey rides. Perhaps she was inspired to include this last by reading ‘News from Worthing’ by Robert Bloomfield, which deals with the lot of a poor donkey trotting up and down Worthing beach, carrying delicate ladies to the door of the library, ‘Where, nonsense preferring to sleeping, / She loads me with novels a score.’¹⁹⁹ She also added a sinister un-Austenian villain, Mr Tracy. The most tantalizing moment of the fragment is its ending: ‘Charlotte felt a little nervous—What could have happened—’

JANE AUSTEN ON FICTION

Throughout her life Jane Austen was fascinated by the craft of fiction, by her own habits of writing and by those of her contemporary authors. She read and commented on novels in her letters, and she used her responses to entertain her family, as in the burlesque ‘Plan of a Novel' and the comic letter ‘To Mrs. Hunter of Norwich’. In more serious vein she discussed fiction within a series of letters to her niece Anna, and, concerned with her own reputation and the effect of her novels on her readers, she collected comments on Mansfield Park and Emma.

   Caroline Austen remembered her aunt as entertainer:

The laugh she occasionally raised was by imagining for her neighbours impossible contingencies—by relating in prose or verse some trifling incident coloured to her own fancy, or in writing a history of what they had said or done, that could deceive nobody—As an instance I would give her description of the pursuits of Miss Mills and Miss Yates—two young ladies of whom she knew next to nothing—they were only on a visit to a near neighbour but their names tempted her into rhyme—and so on she went.²⁰⁰

Family enthusiasm may sometimes have enhanced memory: Constance Hill, who gained much of her information from Anna Lefroy, described Jane Austen at Godmersham waiting by the window for the arrival of brother Frank and his new wife and amusing impatient nephews and nieces ‘by a poetical account of the bride and bridegroom’s journey’ – however, the verses concerning the Frank Austens were in fact sent in a letter to Fanny Knight at Godmersham and they empathized with Fanny’s feelings in waiting; Jane Austen herself was then holidaying in Clifton, near Bristol, with her mother, sister and Martha Lloyd.²⁰¹

   Also part of family entertainment were Jane Austen’s written responses to what she regarded as the continuing absurdity of the English novel. This had inspired her earliest burlesques, which she had copied out and kept as three notebooks, published in this edition as Juvenilia. In later life she could still be amused by what she regarded as seriously silly novels. During 1812, Anna and her aunt enjoyed ridiculing Lady Maclairn, the Victim of Villany [sic] (1806) by Rachel Hunter, who wrote as ‘Mrs Hunter of Norwich’.²⁰² In 1864 Anna remembered, ‘there was no harm in the book, except that in a most unaccountable manner the same story about the same people, most of whom I think had died before the real story began was repeated 3 or 4 times over’.²⁰³ Jane Austen invented a facetious note to be sent to Mrs Hunter thanking her for a thread paper and describing how she had dissolved into tears over the story.

   The reaction seems a little unfair since, although ill-constructed and featuring suicide and bigamy, the novel is not hugely melodramatic (except perhaps in the final volume) or unrealistic – people assault relatives, suffer from depression and cheat others for the usual reasons – while the work is as full of commonsense as of sentiment: the heroine writes that her ‘interesting languor’ and pale complexion were improved by a hearty dinner of boiled fowl²⁰⁴ and that she has ‘no talent at a fainting fit'.²⁰⁵ However, the epistolary form of the novel is clumsily used, the same episodes from the recent Maclairn family history are told and retold from slightly different points of view, and the presentation of stories within stories has a bewildering effect: at one point in the final volume a long, involved narrative is contained within another as recounted to the person writing of it in the letter which forms part of the novel. It is also a feature of the work that almost every stranger who meets with the main characters, however concidentally, turns out to be related to them or to have a significance in the Maclairn story, past and present. Overall it is easy to see how Jane Austen and her niece, in humorous mood, could find the failures of the novel more entertaining than its successes.

   Something of what Jane Austen thought a novel should be can be gauged from the series of letters she sent to her niece Anna a little later, during the summer and autumn of 1814, which were preserved by Anna and her descendants and which are now lodged at George and James Austen’s college, St John’s, Oxford. At various times in the 1810s Anna and her half-siblings Caroline and James Edward were prompted by their aunt’s success to write fiction of their own, and they all asked Jane Austen’s views on their work. The most sustained attempt at fiction was made by Anna, and between July and November she sent her aunt draft chapters of her work, on which Jane Austen commented. Anna’s marriage to Ben Lefroy in November 1814 and subsequent frequent pregnancies seem to have interrupted her writing and the advice ceased. In 1818, after her aunt’s death, Anna returned to her novel, called first ‘Enthusiasm’ and then ‘Which is the Heroine?’, but finally abandoned it.²⁰⁶ Her third daughter Fanny Caroline later recollected that the manuscript was thrown on to the fire towards the end of the 1820s: ‘In later years when I expressed my sorrow that she had destroyed it, she said she could never have borne to finish it, but incomplete as it was Jane Austen’s criticisms would have made it valuable.’²⁰⁷ The criticism that does survive in the letters of 1814 is significant for the insight it provides into Jane Austen’s own principles and practice as a novelist. The letters are remarkable for the fluency of the writing: on these manuscripts there are almost no additions or deletions, in striking contrast to the drafts of the fictions, ‘The Watsons’ and ‘Sanditon’.

   Some years before the letters concerning Anna’s novel, Jane Austen had addressed a mock panegyric to her niece beginning, ‘In measured verse I’ll now rehearse / The charms of lovely Anna’. The young woman in the poem was described in the literary terms of a popular Mary Brunton novel, her mind unexhausted by comparison with the unfathomed continent of America from the southern savannahs to Lake Ontario and Niagara Falls. Jane Austen was also reading or remembering Brunton’s Self-Control (1811) when, probably in 1816, she composed ‘Plan of a Novel according to hints from various quarters’. In October 1813, writing to Cassandra, she had described Brunton’s novel as an ‘excellently-meant, elegantly-written Work, without anything of Nature or Probability in it’.²⁰⁸ Some of its many adventures bear a striking resemblance to those plotted for the proposed heroine of ‘Plan of a Novel’. Reasonably so, since Jane Austen told Anna that she intended to write ‘a close imitation of “Self-control” as soon as I can;—I will improve upon it;—my Heroine shall not merely be wafted down an American river in a boat by herself, she shall cross the Atlantic in the same way, & never stop till she reaches Gravesent’.²⁰⁹ The novel described in the ‘Plan’ sounds like such an ‘imitation’.

   Two other obvious antecedents of ‘Plan’ are The Heroine, or Adventures of a Fair Romance Reader (1813) by Eaton Stannard Barrett and its predecessor Charlotte Lennox’s The Female Quixote (1752). Lennox’s novel mocked seventeenth-century heroic French romance, while Barrett ridiculed more recent English-authored sentimental fiction, which in his story turned the head of a country squire’s daughter. Jane Austen was rereading The Female Quixote in 1807: it ‘makes our evening amusement; to me a very high one, as I find the work quite equal to what I remembered it’, and in March 1814 she declared herself ‘very much amused’ by The Heroine – it was ‘a delightful burlesque’.²¹⁰ She probably also alluded to Barrett’s work in Emma where Harriet Smith, whom Emma sees as just such a heroine of interestingly obscured parentage as Barrett’s, reads some of the same novels as Barrett’s Cherry Wilkinson. Like Harriet Smith, Cherry is alienated through most of the book from the proper young gentleman farmer, who, in the end, marries her and urges on her more suitable novels such as The Vicar of Wakefield, Hannah More’s Cælebs in Search of a Wife and Edgeworth’s Tales of Fashionable Life. Like Barrett’s Cherry, the heroine of ‘Plan of a Novel’ struggles through fantastic adventures and tumbles from high life into beggary.

   People mentioned as the sources of particular suggestions in ‘Plan of a Novel’ are relatives – including Jane Austen’s second cousin Mary Cooke, with whom she stayed in 1814 – and less expected men such as Henry Sanford, a friend and business associate of Henry Austen, and William Gifford, editor of the Quarterly Review for John Murray, who may have discussed novels and their plots with her in London in late 1815. Given Fanny Knight’s input, and the mention of Mr Sherer, the vicar at Fanny’s Godmersham home, it is possible that ‘Plan’ was composed when Fanny and her aunt were together during three weeks of May 1816 at Chawton Cottage, but the mention of a relative and a neighbour of Jane Austen’s friends, the Fowles, raises the possibility that it might have been written in their home at Kintbury.

   The immediate context of ‘Plan of a Novel’, which strongly suggests that it was composed some time at the end of 1815 or early 1816, is the correspondence between Jane Austen and James Stanier Clarke. The Prince Regent’s Domestic Chaplain and Librarian at Carlton House, Clarke had intimated that Jane Austen should dedicate Emma to his master; he also suggested a fitting subject for a novel: she might like to ‘delineate in some future Work the Habits of Life and Character and enthusiasm of a Clergyman—who should pass his time between the metropolis & the Country’ and should be ‘something like Beatties Minstrel’,²¹¹ a reference to the main figure in James Beattie’s popular poem The Minstrel: Or, The Progress of Genius (1771 and 1774). While offering him a copy of her new novel Emma, Jane Austen tactfully rejected his suggestion, declaring herself ‘the most unlearned, & uninformed Female who ever dared to be an Authoress’.²¹²

   A week later, having read only a few pages of Emma, Clarke renewed his assault: ‘Carry your Clergyman to Sea as the Friend of some distinguished Naval Character about a Court’. Now he revealed how autobiographical were his suggestions: in the 1790s he himself had been to sea as a naval chaplain. He added the advice, ‘shew dear Madam what good would be done if Tythes were taken away entirely, and describe him burying his own mother—as I did—because the High Priest of the Parish in which she died—did not pay her remains the respect he ought to do’, a reference to an embarrassing event in 1802 when Clarke had interrupted his mother’s funeral by insisting that he himself take over conducting the ceremony.²¹³

   In March 1816, noting the approaching marriage of the Regent’s daughter to Prince Leopold of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha, Clarke again wrote to Jane Austen, on the Regent’s behalf, thanking her for the red morocco bound copy of Emma and proposing a new subject for her art: she should write a ‘Historical Romance illustrative of the History of the august house of Cobourg’.²¹⁴ When she declared she would die laughing if she tried such a thing, he withdrew. The irony inherent in Austen’s mock-demure replies to the pompous Clarke and in her ‘Plan’ were utterly lost on her stuffy nephew – as Margaret Oliphant, among the sharpest of the early commentators, pointed out with glee: ‘Mr Austen Leigh does not seem to see the fun’; Clarke’s ‘clever correspondent exults over him; she gives him the gravest answers, and draws her victim out’.²¹⁵

   Jane Austen’s own novels, she knew, differed substantially from those of Mary Brunton and from both the moral tale and the royal romance James Stanier Clarke would have had her write. She was aware of her worth but was fascinated by opinions others held of her books: for Mansfield Park and Emma, the two last novels published in her lifetime, she kept a brief record of what some of her friends and relatives thought and said. She found that the majority of readers enjoyed the new works but retained Pride and Prejudice as the favourite. Although Mansfield Park prompted some criticism, it was the style and manner of Emma that raised most objection. Mrs Digweed, so similar in her vacuous speech to Miss Bates, declared that, ‘if she had not known the Author, [she] could hardly have got through it’. Mrs Guiton ‘thought it too natural to be interesting’ and Mr Cockerell ‘liked it so little, that Fanny wd not send me his opinion’. But her brother Charles, who was sent the book while at sea, compensated for such ill thoughts by claiming it was his favourite – he read it ‘three times in the Passage’.²¹⁶

THE POEMS

George Henry Lewes told Charlotte Brontë that Jane Austen was ‘not a poetess’ and that she had ‘none of the ravishing enthusiasm of poetry’.²¹⁷ Certainly in the Romantic sense meant by Lewes she was no poet, but she loved words and the comedy of rhyme and she revelled in the succinctness of verse. Even after ‘Sanditon’ had been put aside, she continued writing or dictating, and her final production was a comic poem on Winchester races.

   Apart from the stanzas in memory of Madam Lefroy, most of her verses are in similar light vein. Occasional pieces, they sometimes form part of collective rhyming games with the rest of the family, responses to poems they wrote on the same theme. Or they were reactions to absurdities she read in the newspaper or heard as gossip. Such writing was a gentry- and middle-class pastime, feeding sometimes into experimental versification; it was a tradition passing from the eighteenth into the nineteenth century, untouched by the prevailing public mode of self-absorbed Romantic poetry. Jane’s mother Cassandra was perhaps the most skilful light versifier of the family, using what she called her ‘sprack wit’ to write amusing comic lines on local people and events.²¹⁸ Her brother James Leigh Perrot also composed epigrams and riddles, including verses on a union of Captain Edward Foote and Miss Mary Patton in 1803 (see p. 732), which Austen Leigh reproduced in the Memoir ; these have occasionally been attributed to Jane Austen, including in at least one posthumously revised edition of Chapman’s Minor Works, presumably because a copy was found in her handwriting.²¹⁹ Jane’s poems often sprang from similar observation of incongruous or too congruous names.

   Eighteen poems, not all in Austen’s hand, but which can confidently be ascribed to her, are now extant, together with three charades recorded in a family collection;²²⁰ these undoubtedly represent only a proportion of the poems she actually wrote, many of which – including the one on Miss Mills and Miss Yates mentioned by Caroline Austen (see p. xcix) – have not survived. With the exception of a small poem created to accompany a gift in 1792, and the stanzas on the Winchester races of July 1817, the poems all derive from an eight-year period between 1805 and 1812 – a period for which we have very little original Austen prose. No fewer than five poems, more than a quarter of the whole, come from the months between February and October 1811; possibly, as she was awaiting publication of Sense and Sensibility, she was feeling particularly ebullient (although two of the five poems concern a headache, one of them being her own). No poems have survived from the period between November 1812 and July 1817 when she was gaining success as a published novelist, but this may be sheer accident; everything we know about Austen’s versifying suggests that she continued to amuse herself and those close to her with light poetry.

   The ‘Verses to rhyme with “Rose” ’ illustrate the difficulty of dating and placing some of the poems, along with the ways in which they are thoroughly embedded in Jane Austen’s family and domestic life. The ‘Verses’ are a collection of four short poems, by Jane Austen, her mother Mrs Austen, Cassandra and Edward’s wife Elizabeth. The series displays the inventiveness of all four women in writing verses where every line rhymes with the given word, ‘rose’, and bears testimony to the way in which the Austens enjoyed wordplay as a social as well as an individual recreation. (This feature of their activities is also reflected in a series of charades by various members of the family, carefully preserved in family albums.) Jane Austen evidently thought the ‘Rose’ poems worth keeping since she made a fair copy on a sheet of paper on to which she also copied her poem on the trial of the controversial naval hero Sir Home Popham in 1807, and two poems she wrote as alternative accompaniments to the gift of a cambric handkerchief in 1808.

   The ‘Rose’ poems are undated, but must have been written before Elizabeth’s death in October 1808. Deirdre Le Faye has identified three possible occasions when the four women were together in circumstances where they could have written such verses; the most likely of these are June–July 1805 at Godmersham, and September 1807 at Chawton House, both properties owned by Edward, with Godmersham as his main residence. Most scholars have favoured the 1807 date, and therefore the Chawton location, because Lord Brabourne, who first published the poems, had found them folded in a family letter of 1807, and – unaware that other writing on the sheet had a later date – assumed that the poems derived from that year. However, the earlier date of 1805 and the Godmersham location seem equally if not more plausible, partly because of domestic detail mentioned in the poems themselves. Mrs Austen’s poem describes looking out of the window and seeing bucks and does, cows and bullocks, wethers and ewes, which might refer to the ‘cattle’ Jane Austen mentions in July 1806 as being in the Godmersham park (‘See they come’, pp. 245–246); and she describes joining the family in the library, which again suggests Godmersham, where the library was substantial in size, and regularly used as a family parlour.²²¹ Elizabeth’s poem may offer a more precise hint: in it she reflects on being ill in a way that suggests she had been in a poor state of health for some time. During the visit of Mrs Austen, Cassandra and Jane to Godmersham in 1805, Fanny records that a Dr Wilmot visited on 4 July; on 20 July she wrote that ‘mama was well enough to come down’,²²² which strongly suggests her mother had been ill in bed for an extended period. The 1805 date, unlike that in 1807, is in a season of the year when roses would have been in full bloom, possibly suggesting the topic for the poem.

   Other poems also relate to the Knights, sometimes unexpectedly: ‘Alas poor Brag’ directly comments on family Christmas festivities at Godmersham; the verses ‘Between session and session’ concern moves to defer a controversial Parliamentary Bill on a subject of great interest to Edward Knight, whose Godmersham estate was directly affected by its proposal to cut a canal through the Kent countryside.

   One uncharacteristically serious poem by Jane Austen is ‘To the Memory of Mrs. Lefroy’, written to elegize Anne Lefroy, wife of George Lefroy, rector of Ashe, two miles north west of Steventon. Known as ‘Madam Lefroy’ and highly respected in her parish for her good works, she had become a friend and mentor to the young Jane Austen. On 16 December 1804, Jane’s twenty-ninth birthday, Madam Lefroy went shopping in the local town of Overton and, meeting Jane’s brother James by chance, complained to him of the stupidity and sluggishness of her horse. On her way home, the horse bolted and she fell on to hard ground; she died a few hours later and was buried at Ashe on 21 December, with James officiating. The shocking news must have spread very quickly to Bath, where Jane was living with her family. The verses include the lines ‘Beloved friend, four years have pass’d away / Since thou wert snatch’d forever from our eyes’, giving a date of composition in 1808 on or around the fourth anniversary of her death.

   By contrast with ‘To the Memory of Mrs. Lefroy’, the poem which Jane Austen wrote just before her own death has a macabre humour. ‘When Winchester races first took their beginning’ concerns the popular belief that, if it rained on St Swithin’s Day, 15 July, the rain would continue for forty days. Jane Austen wrote her poem on 15 July 1817 in Winchester, where she had gone to seek medical attention. Possibly in earlier years she had been to the horse races there, which usually took place in July. The day before she composed the poem, the Hampshire Chronicle advertised the Winchester meeting forthcoming that year on 29–31 July and Jane Austen could well have seen the notice. As so often before in her life, she was being prompted by the newspaper to write light verse.²²³

   Of the two extant manuscripts of this poem, one is in an unknown hand, perhaps belonging to a friend of Jane Austen. Possibly it was the result of direct authorial dictation: the word ‘Venta’ (the Roman name for Winchester) is spelt ‘Ventar’ twice, as it might be if written by someone ignorant of Latin listening to a speaker with a Hampshire accent which would lengthen and soften the last syllable, and there are cancellations which would be unlikely if the poem were being copied from a written original. Interestingly, in stanza 4, within the lines where the saint addresses Win- chester, ‘When once we are buried you think we are dead / But behold me Immortal’, the words are roughly underlined and the word ‘gone’ is used instead of ‘dead’, which is necessary for the rhyme. Perhaps ‘dead’ was avoided from superstition or grief, or perhaps the substitution was a black joke between dying author and amanuensis.

   Since the poems are so embedded in Jane Austen’s life and quotidian events, it is not surprising that most of the few twentieth-century comments occur within biographies. ‘To the Memory of Mrs. Lefroy’, for example, provoked differing responses in the biographers Claire Tomalin and David Nokes, as well as the commentators Laura and Robert Lambdin and David Selwyn. Tomalin, who thought ‘See they come’ Austen’s ‘best piece of verse’, found the poem on Madam Lefroy ‘warm but disappointingly general in its terms’ – one cannot, she thought, see a living personality through the stock phrases, ‘Angelic woman’, ‘solid worth’ and ‘captivating grace’.²²⁴ The Lambdins saw the poem as a search for connection; they called it ‘a moving tribute’ to a good friend while noting its ‘maudlin tone’; Selwyn found in it a ‘gentle acknowledgement’ of Jane Austen’s own lack of reason in trying to unite with her friend, conveyed ‘in a tone of indulgent good sense familiar from the novels’.²²⁵ David Nokes drew attention to the unique aspect of the verses: he wrote that Austen composed nothing similar for the wives of Edward and James or for her own father; clearly she was inspired by ‘the ominous coincidence of this day’. Failing to find in the verses the tenderness, warmth and good sense caught by Tomalin and Selwyn, Nokes saw the poem as in part a response to Madam Lefroy’s interference in the once budding romance between Jane and her young nephew, Tom Lefroy; it is full of ‘bitter torture’ and self-reproach for Austen’s earlier resentment of a woman who now seemed perfect in her eyes.²²⁶

ATTRIBUTION

The dating of ‘Lady Susan’ and ‘The Watsons’ may be disputed, but, together with ‘Sanditon’, they are secure in authorship: all three are in Jane Austen’s handwriting, and both ‘The Watsons’ and ‘Sanditon’ were identified as Austen’s by family members with a direct knowledge of her work. We can be equally confident about the poems, riddles, charades and spoofs, and, of course, the letters, which are signed. But several prose and poetic works have been ascribed to Jane Austen about which there is no such security. For these we have looked again at the evidence, including paper, watermarks and origin; the appearance of handwriting; the context of generation and reception, family tradition and biographical circumstance; style, content and manner. Where we have concluded that authorship is unlikely, or possible but not absolutely secure, we have reproduced the items in Appendices to, rather than in the main body of, the volume. The two most controversial such works are the play ‘Sir Charles Grandison’, a fifty-three-page manuscript in Jane Austen’s hand, and the three prayers written in two manuscripts and passed down in the family of her brother Charles.

‘Sir Charles Grandison’

‘Sir Charles Grandison’, a short play in five acts based on Samuel Richardson’s seven-volume epistolary novel of 1753–4, is written on five groups of pages of different sizes: the first four pages are 95 mm × 108 mm, the next eight (which may together have originally made a 12-page booklet) 95 mm × 95 mm; there follows a booklet of twenty-eight pages, 95 mm × 153 mm, written through; a booklet of eight, 184 mm × 120 mm, with one sheet watermarked 1796, of which the first four are written on; and a booklet of twelve, 158 mm × 95 mm, with one sheet watermarked 1799, of which the first seven are written on, to complete the play. Paper used for Acts 2–5 is watermarked Portal & Co. 1796 and Sharp 1799, which suggests the play was written down some time in or shortly after 1800; this dating is supported by a reference in Act 3 to a piece of piano music deriving from the ‘Grand Ballet’ Laura et Lenza, which was performed in London in May 1800 and for which the sheet music was not available till after that. The different sorts and sizes of paper, together with the varying degrees of neatness in the handwriting within the manuscript suggest the possibility that the work, while clearly in a single hand, might have been written at different times. In addition the play might perhaps have been altered without much care for the whole, possibly while being rehearsed or performed – if it ever was performed.

   The idea of reducing one of the longest of eighteenth-century novels to a short play was a humorous and audacious one, but the enterprise of abridging Richardson was not wholly original. Several abridgements had appeared in the late eighteenth century, including The History of Sir Charles Grandison and the Hon. Miss Byron, in which is included the Memoirs of a Noble Italian Family (c. 1780) and The History of Sir Charles Grandison (1789, in its tenth edition by 1798).

   Within the family ‘Sir Charles Grandison’ was accepted as by Anna Lefroy. According to Anna’s daughter, Fanny Caroline, ‘To my mother she [Jane Austen] was especially kind writing for her the stories she invented for herself long ere she could write . . . I have still in my possession in Aunt Jane’s writing a drama my mother dictated to her founded on Sir Charles Grandison a book with which she was familiar at seven years old.’²²⁷ Constance Hill made this statement public in 1902 in Jane Austen: Her Homes and Her Friends.²²⁸ Jane Austen’s twentieth-century editor R. W. Chapman did not include ‘Sir Charles Grandison’ either in his published listing of Austen’s manuscripts, or in his 1954 edition of Jane Austen’s Minor Works. The idea that the play was, despite this secure family tradition, actually written by Jane Austen herself came from Brian Southam in 1977; on his detailed arguments first published in 1980 all later scholars who accept the attribution have relied, and so we need to rehearse them here.²²⁹

   Southam’s case is based on the assumption that the play ‘bears the stamp of an adult mind’ not that of ‘a child of seven, too young to write out the play for herself’; such a child could hardly be capable of composing such ‘a shrewd and amusing’ work in her head. If it were composed later than 1800 by Anna (b. 1793), then she would have been old enough to write it down herself. As for the play, he judged it a ‘deadly accurate’ burlesque, not brilliant but ‘amusing enough and highly performable’; linked to the mature novels, it suggests their strongly dramatic vein and it adds ‘considerably to our understanding of Jane Austen’s experience of Richardson’. Like two of the short playlets Jane Austen wrote in her juvenilia, the play’s Act 1 has a laid-out title page with a formal cast list, suggesting that it might have started like them as a brief joke, in this case an ‘abridgement’– especially since it has ‘the same spirit of fun’ as the similarly abridged ‘History of England’. Act I, the opening scene of which is, Southam declared, ‘wholly of Jane Austen’s devising’, comes in realistic mode and can be dated to about 1791–2 (before Anna was born) when Jane was moving from the extravagant burlesque of ‘Love and Freindship’ to the greater realism of ‘Catharine’, and trying her hand at Grandison jokes in the small prose satires. This act is ‘much less amusing . . . much less accomplished dramatically’ than the later acts but, Southam surmised, its ‘commonplaceness and banality’ could be part of the joke. The play was then put aside for some years and hurriedly finished about 1800 when the family wanted something to perform and, fully knowing the original novel, all would enjoy the style of ‘allusive counterpoint’. Although firmly stating his claim for Jane Austen’s authorship, Southam concedes that, if she were working intermittently on the play between 1796 and 1800, Anna, often at Steventon, might have been allowed to make some childish scribbles in pencil on the manuscript and the odd alteration in ink. ‘That, almost certainly, was the extent of Anna’s contribution,’ he concluded. Her later claim was a ‘slight and flattering misrecollection’ of a woman whose memory was usually ‘detailed and accurate’.²³⁰

   With an endorsement from the distinguished Austen critic, Lord David Cecil, in 1980 Southam published the play as Jane Austen’s. The excitement at the new attribution even produced a film, Jane Austen in Manhattan (1980), scripted by Ruth Prawer Jhabvala and directed by James Ivory. It concerned two rival producers of the new play and began with the Sotheby auction of the manuscript as definitely a work of the great novelist. (In real life the manuscript, ‘officially authenticated’ by Southam, was bought in 1992 for £30,800, and is now in Chawton House Library.)

   Since 1980 many critics and biographers have accepted Southam’s conclusion about authorship and dating. John Halperin hailed ‘Grandison’ (which he agreed was probably completed in 1800) as ‘the last bit of sustained writing she [Jane Austen] would do for four years’. He noted ‘its tendency towards burlesque and parody’ and its resemblance to Northanger Abbey; he considered that some of its weaknesses illuminated Richardson’s vulnerable sides, his ‘ineptness in handling action, periodic prurience, a tendency to pursue far beyond their interest various strands of his story’. He concluded that ‘The play probably was written for domestic consumption. But the Steventon household, which was soon to break up, never saw it performed so far as we know.’²³¹ Deirdre Le Faye raised the question of collaboration, while assuming the majority of the play to be by Jane Austen. She suggested that it was performed not at Steventon but at Godmersham, but made the point that Fanny Knight’s diaries began in 1804 and included no mention of a performance of ‘Grandison’; consequently Le Faye dated the work to somewhere between 1800 and 1804.²³² Margaret Anne Doody was more sceptical of Jane Austen’s involvement. Noting that Southam proposed 1800 for most of the work, a date when Jane Austen was twenty-four, Doody remarked, ‘she wrote better at age fourteen’.²³³

   The most detailed support of the sceptical view came from Marilyn Butler in an article in the London Review of Books. She declared the play ‘a very literal transposition of the more memorable scenes’ from Sir Charles Grandison’s main plot, ‘executed by a probably young and certainly not very practical dramatist. The first act is only unembarrassing on the assumption that the author is at most 12 years old.’ She called the whole a record ‘of a semi-improvised production by a group of children’ and asked if it could really be ‘the writing of one of our greatest novelists, at a stage in her development when she had already completed versions of Pride and Prejudice and Northanger Abbey’.²³⁴

   Judging by the variation in handwriting, Southam had considered that Act 1 was written long before the other acts. Butler however suggested that there need be little time between the two composings. She based her case on the cancelled page at the end of Act 1, intended as two possible beginnings of Act 2, where the abduction and attempted forced marriage of the heroine Harriet Byron need to be presented. The false starts follow the story as told by Richardson, but his is an epistolary novel where Harriet has to be safe before she can write her drama. However, the final Act 2 of the play, in what Butler regarded as new or different handwriting, begins by selecting a dramatic moment from the abduction: Butler speculated that this better beginning ‘could in all probability signal Aunt Jane’s arrival on the scene’. Concerning Act 1 she further pointed out that in Southam’s hypothesis of a Steventon performance in the 1790s, the Austen family would have had only this part available. There is no record of family theatricals during this period and, in any case, Butler noted the absurdity of the child Jane writing such limp lines for her educated older brothers and their sophisticated cousin Eliza de Feuillide to act. The playlet as a whole most likely dated from the period when Jane Austen was helping her neglected niece Anna by encouraging an interest in reading and writing; most of the play has ‘the awkwardness and redundancy of children wondering what to say next’ with occasional ‘more polite and adult lines’.²³⁵

   We have noted these arguments and examined the manuscript anew. To us the handwriting appears indeed to be Jane Austen’s, and to be hers throughout. From the evidence of this handwriting, there seems no necessity to assume a gap between the writing of Act 1 and the rest. The difference in watermark dates does not necessarily suggest a difference in date of composition: ‘Sanditon’, for example, which we know was written in a two-month period at the beginning of 1817, uses paper watermarked 1812 and 1815, and this at a time when Austen was writing as a professional author. As for the authorship of the play, we see no compelling reason to contradict family tradition, reported by Anna’s daughter, possibly during her mother’s lifetime, that Anna composed the piece with her aunt writing out her words. The little plays Jane Austen invented in the juvenilia – ‘The Visit’, ‘The Mystery’ and ‘The first Act of a Comedy’ – are comic spoofs quite different from and far more sparkling than ‘Grandison’.²³⁶ The artefactual printing formality that Southam felt linked Act 1 of ‘Grandison’ with the juvenilia is certainly a habit of the child Jane Austen, but it is a common habit of young people imagining themselves writers, and of grown-ups encouraging youngsters to think seriously about the creative process. Butler’s suggestion that Jane Austen or some other experienced person helped the beginning of Act 2 seems a good one, although there is perhaps no need to go further – or even perhaps so far. This scene, in which Sir Hargrave attempts to force Harriet into a marriage ceremony, is one of the most obviously dramatic in the novel, and is featured in several of the published abbreviations; each, like the version reproduced here, includes similar details from Richardson – the painful squeezing of Harriet’s stomach in a slamming door, the use of a capuchin cloak (the word ‘capuchin’ to describe the cloak is deleted in the manuscript). In her letters to Anna concerning the novel her niece was writing, Jane Austen suggested many devices to facilitate her niece’s plot and to encourage naturalness over literariness without providing actual lines. She could have made similar suggestion for ‘Grandison’ while Anna was composing.

   The attribution to Anna is made the more plausible since the child was much in her aunt’s company: indeed, she became part of the Steventon household for two years after her mother’s death in 1795 and was raised with her aunt’s novels. At the age of four or five she knew Pride and Prejudice so well that she embarrassed Jane Austen by repeating the names of the characters when the work was still supposed to be secret.

   Anna herself began writing young. Southam took the statement that Anna knew Grandison from the age of seven to suggest that the claim was that she wrote it at seven. But in fact she could have composed the work a year or two later. Anna’s half sister Caroline was similarly precocious and in her old age recalled her ‘wonderful facility . . . for a child of ten years old’.²³⁷ In truth there seems little in ‘Sir Charles Grandison’ beyond the ability of an intelligent child between seven and ten since the few decent lines are in the original or based closely on it. For example, Harriet in the play cleverly states, ‘I will not be bribed into liking your wit’; in the novel Sir Charles tells Harriet that ‘Beauty shall not bribe me on your side’ and Harriet says of Charlotte, ‘See . . . how high this dear flighty creature bribes! But I will not be influenced, by her bribery, to take her part’. One striking Richardsonian word in Southam’s transcription – ‘overfrown’ (Act 5, scene 2) – turns out, on close examination of the manuscript, to be the much more conventional ‘overpower’. Nothing in the play signals the kind of creative engagement with Richardson that might have increased the comedy, satire or drama of the original. But, if not composing the work, a caring aunt might easily have acted as an amanuensis for it, so aiding a niece, and perhaps a group of children, who wished to write and act a little play.

   In the mid nineteenth century the Austen family were eager to produce all bits of writing by Jane Austen and were proud to be in possession of any examples of her composing; yet this item was never presented as hers. In her letter of December 1864 to her brother James Edward Austen Leigh, about to embark on the Memoir, Anna Lefroy – whose memory even Southam acknowledged was `usually detailed and accurate' – made no mention of the event of the writing of ‘Grandison’, which, if the play were by her aunt, one would have expected her to do. She simply remembered with affection Jane Austen's ability to create stories for her nephews and nieces – `Ah! if but one of them could be now recovered!'²³⁸

Prayers

In the early 1920s two granddaughters of Jane Austen’s brother Charles sold, through Sotheby's, the manuscripts of three prayers, which they, and Sotheby's, declared to be by Jane Austen. The manuscripts are now held at the F. W. Olin Library at Mills College, Oakland, California.

   The prayers are written on two separate sheets of paper, each folded in half to make four pages for writing on. The first sheet, watermarked 1818, offers four manuscript pages of 235 mm × 187 mm. There are marks showing that at one time the paper was folded over into three, and fainter signs of further folds. The first page is headed ‘Evening Prayer—’ and the prayer itself extends over three of the four pages. On the fourth page, written sideways in what might have been the centre of the centre fold, in a different hand, is a note, ‘Prayers Composed by my ever dear Sister Jane’. Beneath this, in pencil (now very faint) is, in yet another hand, the name ‘Charles Austen’. The other sheet of paper is slightly larger, making four pages of 227 mm × 212 mm. The paper is watermarked with an elaborate design with plumes and fleur de lys, common at the time and not indicative of a particular year. This paper too has foldmarks, but, like the paper itself, the marks in no way match those of the other sheet. It has no title, but contains two prayers, each covering two of the four pages; the paper has been folded out both ways, but since the handwriting changes half-way through one of the prayers it is reasonable to assume that this was the one written second. All three prayers are written without correction.

   In his article in the Times Literary Supplement of 14 January 1926, listing the Prayers among ‘manuscripts by or relating to Jane Austen . . . recently . . . dispersed’, R. W. Chapman, who had advised Charles Austen’s granddaughters on the sale, included as item 18 ‘(a) ‘Prayers composed by my own [sic] dear Sister Jane . . . in the hand of Cassandra Austen (?)’ and ‘(b) Prayer . . . in two hands, of which the first is Henry Austen’s (the author?) and the second is doubtful’. Chapman was careful therefore not to claim Jane Austen’s authorship of the prayers on the second of the two sheets, and for the first he simply reproduced the annotation, with its potentially misleading plural word ‘Prayers’.

   This account by Chapman, concerned at the time with the sale of the manuscripts rather than with recording research about them, contains some inaccuracies, including in the wording of the annotation on the first sheet, and it does not identify the annotator; it seems clear that Chapman was working from memory rather than from direct view of the manuscripts. When he reproduced all three prayers in the Minor Works (1954) – implicitly as Jane Austen’s, not-withstanding his earlier suggestion that the second and third prayers were by Henry – he reproduced the wording of the annotation correctly but stated that the hand in the first manuscript was ‘probably – almost certainly? – Cassandra’s’ while the second is ‘partly in a hand which I think may be Henry Austen’s, partly in a hand which has been thought by experts to be JA’s own’.²³⁹ By now, in addition to his own notes from the 1920s, he had the rather doubtful advantage of the first published version of the manuscripts. These had been acquired by the Californian William Matson Roth, who published them for the first time in 1940 in a limited edition with Colt Press in San Francisco (of which Roth was a director). The edition is not a scholarly one: it reproduces the prayers in a ‘presentation’ format, in capital letters in black and red type, and it adjusts punctuation as well as presentation. It does however reproduce the second page of the third prayer – the page it claims is in Jane Austen’s own hand – in facsimile. Finally, in 2007, two separate editions of the prayers were published in more accurate versions taken from the xeroxes of the original manuscripts.²⁴⁰

   In a 1996 article Bruce Stovel revisited the problem of the handwriting. He too believed the final hand was Jane Austen’s, and, although he was unsure of the identity of the copyist or copyists of the rest, he thought the matter unimportant since there was no reason to doubt the attribution to Jane Austen of all three, based on what he took to be Charles Austen’s words on the back of the first manuscript, applying to all; he simply assumed that ‘they were copied out, at two different times, by a combination of the Austen brothers and sisters’.²⁴¹

   Deirdre Le Faye believed that, of the two hands present, the first was that of Jane Austen’s eldest brother James, and the second that of Cassandra, not Jane. The very likely identification of the writing as James’s is important in dating the manuscripts, since James died in December 1819 after several months of very poor health. Le Faye plausibly speculated that he had begun to copy out some of his sister’s prayers in late 1818 or early 1819 (using, for the first prayer, new paper watermarked 1818) as a tribute to her after her death, and that Cassandra, ever concerned to preserve her sister’s work, may have finished a task which he became too ill to complete.

   Accepting the attribution to Jane Austen, as with ‘Grandison’ biographers and critics have used the works to comment on her other writing – though not as much as one might expect, since relatively few critics have addressed in detail the religious aspect of Austen’s oeuvre. G. H. Tucker saw the prayers affirming the fact that, ‘From her childhood until her death, Jane Austen’s life and religious beliefs were governed by the rites and teachings of the Anglican church’,²⁴² while Michael Giffin, who stressed that Austen was ‘an Anglican author who wrote Christian stories’, used the prayers together with the logic developed in the novels to argue that she was ‘acutely aware of the fallen condition of her self and her characters’.²⁴³ Bruce Stovel also drew attention to the relationship between the prayers and the novels. Since the prayers tell us that Jane Austen was a devout Christian, they ‘suggest that the novels are more suffused with religious feelings than we might have thought’: for example, Marianne’s speech of contrition in Sense and Sensibility relates to the assumption in the prayers that religious and moral duties coincide.²⁴⁴ Marilyn Butler too read the difficult (for the reader) humbling of Marianne in the light of Jane Austen’s prayers for humility and self-knowledge.²⁴⁵ Gene Koppel quoted the words ‘we have perhaps sinned against thee and against our fellow-creatures in many instances of which we have no remembrance’, noting Austen’s emphasis on flawed perception.²⁴⁶

   But are the prayers indisputably by Jane Austen? As we have seen, Chapman, who was recording the appearance and sale of these items, made no such claim for the two prayers on the second sheet of paper in his first account in the TLS; and even in Minor Works his language is ambiguous. In trying to reach a conclusion about authorship we have carefully inspected the original manuscripts, have considered the handwriting and the possible circumstances of composition, and have examined the internal evidence provided by the content of the prayers themselves.

   We agree with Le Faye that the hand of the prayer on the first sheet, and the first three pages of the second sheet containing the second and third prayers, is likely to be that of James Austen – though written on separate occasions, with the hand of the second sheet of paper showing more haste (or less health) than the first – and also that the hand of the last part of the third prayer is that of Cassandra. And therefore we agree that the first prayer must have been copied, or written out, by James, between late 1818 (the earliest possible date given the watermark) and late 1819 (when James became too sick to undertake such a task), while the second and third prayers could have been written, and the copying begun, at any time before late 1819.

   The inscription, ‘Prayers composed by my ever dear Sister Jane’, on the first sheet, with the pencil identification of ‘Charles Austen’, offers several puzzles. The inscription does seem very close, in sentiment and in the appearance of the handwriting, to a note on the back of a letter from Jane to Charles dated 6 April 1817: ‘My last letter from dearest Jane – C-JA [that is, Charles-John Austen]’. However, even if we accept from this that the inscription on the first sheet of prayers is in Charles’s hand, it is impossible to tell when it was made, or what authority it confers: the manuscript could have come into Charles’s possession after James’s death (he attended James’s funeral at Steventon in December 1819) or after Cassandra’s death in 1845, when Jane Austen’s manuscripts were distributed around the family according to Cassandra’s wishes. At this point Cassy Esten, on her father Charles’s behalf, was sorting out her aunt Cassandra’s effects; it was a time when memories might have been fading. Moreover, it is impossible to be sure what the inscription on the first prayer refers to: the mention of ‘Prayers’ in the plural suggests more than one prayer, but there is nothing other than the coincidence of handwriting to indicate that it is referring to the two sheets of paper now held together, especially since they are of different sizes, and the folds in the papers are entirely distinct. So, even if Charles did correctly identify the first prayer as the composition of his ‘ever dear Sister Jane’, there is only the most circumstantial evidence to associate the attribution with the second paper.

   The internal evidence of the prayers is equally inconclusive. Certainly they have a lot in common with each other, but chiefly in the sense in which they are conventional variations on a familiar Church of England formula. Each prayer is followed by the beginning of the Lord’s Prayer, so that worshippers are to continue in a known vein and enter or re-enter an accepted framework; each was clearly intended to form part of a longer session of evening worship.

   The prayers are liberally pious, examining personal conduct and passing judgement only on the self, and, responsibly, they refer out to the wider world. They echo in simplified extemporized form aspects of the intercessional collects of the Book of Common Prayer. They were almost certainly written for family rather than congregational use since they do not fit into the pattern of the Church’s Evensong, in which the Lord’s Prayer comes early on among the said or sung responses, with intercessions occurring later.

   The six novels present no examples of communal family and servant prayers, and the episode in the chapel at Sotherton in Mansfield Park suggests that the custom was not very common in the Regency period. In Jane Austen’s surviving letters there is only one reference to home worshipping, in a letter of 24–25 October 1808 from Southampton to Cassandra in Godmersham; this mentions psalms not newly created prayers. Her two teenaged Knight nephews were on a visit after the death of their mother and on Sunday, after a church service which included a very apposite sermon for the bereaved children, Jane Austen amused them with excursions on the river and games like riddles and conundrums: ‘In the evening we had the Psalms and Lessons, and a sermon at home, to which they were very attentive; but you will not expect to hear that they did not return to conundrums the moment it was over,’ she reported.²⁴⁷ Deirdre Le Faye has suggested that the prayers were written by Jane Austen shortly after this time: in the rainy January of 1809 when for two Sundays running the Austen ladies were unable to go to church.²⁴⁸ This begs the question as to why, if they wished to worship at home together, they did not simply open the Book of Common Prayer and read psalms as they did with the Knight boys. On many other occasions after they moved to Chawton, the Austens did not attend Sunday church, usually because one or other of them was ailing, on 14 February 1813, for example. By the end of March 1817 Jane Austen was too ill to attend at all and it remains possible that she wrote the prayers at this point, although no one in the family, including Henry, who was much concerned the following year to stress her piety, made reference to such composition. Fanny Knight, who recorded her own churchgoing with some consistency, referred to reading prayers in her diary entry from Chawton for Sunday, 30 August 1807, at a time when Jane Austen, Cassandra and their mother were visiting from Southampton: ‘We none of us went to Church but read prayers in the morning & the Psalms and lessons in the afternoon with a sermon.’

   Contemporary published works on family prayers stress that they should be recited by the master of the house or, in his absence, the mistress or oldest male member. The preface in The Family Prayer-Book: or Prayers to be used in Families (1743, fourth edition 1797 in Bath) states: ‘The Master of the Family is to read the Service himself; kneeling down in a reverent Posture’, adding, ‘in the Absence of a Master, let the devout Mistress . . . read the same’. In Brunton’s Self-Control the man of the house, seating himself ‘in a patriarchal-looking chair’, extemporizes prayers with family and servants in attendance,²⁴⁹ while in Hannah More’s exemplary tract The History of Charles Jones (1790) the good mother assembles her children and reads ‘with great solemnity’ a short form of prayers given her by the clergyman and ending with the Lord’s Prayer.

   It seems unlikely that Jane Austen would have been composing prayers such as these in her father’s lifetime; after his death it would still be unusual for her to compose or perhaps even read communal prayers when her mother and/or her elder sister were with her. Occasionally a daughter did read (if not compose) such prayers. In Boswell’s Tour to the Hebrides, when he and Dr Johnson visited Inchkenneth on a Sunday, ‘Miss M’Lean [Sir Allan’s daughter] read the evening service, in which we all joined.’ However, Johnson must have thought this was irregular practice, since, in the Latin poem he composed in praise of the experience (‘Insula Sancti Kennethi’), he wrote ‘Respect for the gods was here also the concern. / What though a woman handled the books of the priest— / Pure hearts make prayers lawful’, which perhaps expresses some uneasiness.²⁵⁰

   In terms of attribution, these are the works that most trouble us. Those poems for which we only have family evidence of authorship yet sit neatly, in style and content, into the group of verses known to be by Jane Austen. With ‘Sir Charles Grandison’ – a children’s play based on a novel we know she admired and knew very well – a range of collaboration possibilities between Jane Austen and her niece Anna are plausible. The prayers are utterly conventional in content, and there is nothing in their context (either in terms of Jane Austen’s own writings, or the habits of the Austens and their immediate contemporaries in the exercise of their religious duty) to suggest her authorship; if it had not been for the scribbled annotation probably by her brother Charles – an attribution itself unsupported by any other family evidence through to the 1920s – we would not be considering any of these prayers as even possibly by Jane Austen. Charles’s note is highly significant, and it does indeed raise the strong possibility that the prayer on one of the two sheets of paper is indeed hers; but, given the lack of any supporting evidence of any kind, we have decided to place all three in an Appendix, rather than in the main body of our volume.

Other attributions

Jane Austen liked to make and keep copies of poems she enjoyed, and this has caused some confusion over the years. Two of particular interest are by Lord Byron and Charlotte Smith and in both Jane Austen made small adjustments either through intention or carelessness in the phrasing of the original. For example, ‘Lines of Lord Byron, in the Character of Buonaparte’ substitutes ‘bloom’ for Byron’s ‘gloom’ in the opening line, ‘FAREWELL to the Land where the gloom of my Glory’, and ‘Victory’ for ‘Liberty’ in the lines ‘Farewell to thee, France—but when Liberty rallies / Once more in thy regions, remember me then’.²⁵¹ In Charlotte Smith’s ‘Kalendar of Flora’, Smith’s ‘freckled cowslips’ become Austen’s ‘pockled cowslips’ (introducing a homely dialect word to accompany the country flowers), and Smith’s phrase ‘Sheltering the coot’s’ becomes Austen’s ‘Near the lone coot’s’.²⁵²

   These and other poems she copied out were at least never attributed to Jane Austen herself, but some less prominent verses were so until their sources were found, as has happened recently with ‘Charade by a Lady’, of which a manuscript in Austen’s hand is held at Winchester College; it is now known to be a riddle by the occasional poet, Catherine Maria Fanshawe. ‘On the Universities’, the manuscript of which is held in the Henry W. and Albert A. Berg Collection at New York Public Library, was for a time considered to be by Austen and appears among Austen’s poems in Minor Works (1954, p. 447). It was discovered that the lines were an anonymous epigram reproduced in a number of poetry collections from about 1790, including the often-reprinted Elegant Extracts (a very popular, developing collection of verse which circulated in many editions towards the end of the eighteenth century; ‘On the Universities’ appears from about 1790 onwards).²⁵³ The poem ‘On Captain Foote’s Marriage with Miss Patton’ was added by B. C. Southam to his 1967 revision of Chapman’s Minor Works (p. 452) despite the fact that it was reproduced in the Memoir with the statement that the author was Jane’s uncle, James Leigh Perrot. We reproduce the poem on p. 732 because of its interesting connection with Jane Austen’s poem ‘On the Marriage of Mr. Gell of East Bourn to Miss Gill’.

   One poem remains a matter of doubt. ‘Sigh Lady Sigh’ was recently discovered, written in pencil, upside down, on the inside front cover and title page of a copy of Ann Murry’s Mentoria: or, The Young Ladies Instructor, owned by Jane Austen in the 1790s and presented by her to Anna Lefroy in 1801. The title page bears the inscription ‘Jane Anna Eliz:th Austen / 1801’ in Jane Austen’s hand, and ‘From her Aunt Jane’, in another hand. Anna in turn gave the book to her eldest daughter Anna Jemima Lefroy. Deirdre Le Faye has discussed the possibility that this poem was written by Austen in the late 1790s.²⁵⁴ We have looked at the manuscript, which is held by the Jane Austen Memorial Trust at Chawton Cottage. Since the handwriting is difficult to identify with certainty, and the poem is written on the title page in a contrary direction to the dedication from ‘Aunt Jane’, we think that, while Jane Austen’s authorship remains a possibility, it seems more likely that the lines were written neither by Jane Austen nor by Anna Lefroy but perhaps (since the writing seems more typical of the late eighteenth or early nineteenth century than of any later period) by some other contemporary, for whom the book and dedication would have had less value. Since the question remains open, however, we have included the poem in Appendix F.

   There has also, over the years, been some confusion in attribution of two notes of composition of Jane Austen’s novels. Both documents are now held in the Morgan Library, making comparison relatively straightforward. The longer, and probably later, of the notes is signed ‘C. E. A.’, indicating Cassandra Austen. The shorter, and probably earlier (in that it contains some corrections which appear in fair copy in the C. E. A. version), has been thought to be Jane Austen’s own account of the dates of preparation of her novels. However, it is clear that the handwriting of both notes is the same, and the use of the word ‘Persuasion’ to describe Austen’s last novel – a title which was not given to the novel in Austen’s lifetime – seems conclusively to indicate that the note was written after her death.²⁵⁵

*

The manuscripts printed in this volume include fair copies, unfinished works, family poems, riddles, scraps and oddments, all that is left of the words of the adult Jane Austen outside the novels and letters. Most of her manuscripts she herself kept, guarding them throughout a lifetime of house moves and handing them on to Cassandra, who continued to value them as a part of the record of a remarkable sister. We have been privileged to see the originals of almost all of these manuscripts now scattered in Switzerland, the USA and Canada, as well as in Bath, Cambridge, Chawton, Leeds, London, Oxford, Swindon and Winchester, and we have personally examined every one of the copy texts for this volume. We hope that we have described the works in such a way that the sense of the documents as original artefacts remains for readers, and that in addition we have provided enough historical and cultural context to allow them to illuminate Jane Austen’s life and major novels. In converting manuscript into print, we have tried to avoid over-stabilizing what are in some cases shifting texts and destroying their ‘aura’.²⁵⁶

   This is the last of the nine volumes of the Cambridge Jane Austen; in providing for the first time a scholarly, fully annotated edition of the manuscripts of her adult life, it completes the picture – as far as we now have it – of the work of one of the greatest of British novelists.