Watsons (Dramatic Reading)

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The Watsons is one of two novels that Jane Austen left unfinished at her death in 1817. The premise of The Watsons was known to Austen’s family, and her niece Catherine Hubback wrote a novel using this premise entitled The Younger Sister that was published in 1850, albeit with considerable differences from the novel fragment Austen left behind. In 1871, Austen’s nephew James Edward Austen-Leigh published a revised and enlarged edition of his 1869 biography of Austen, and this second edition included the previously unpublished manuscript of The Watsons along with an introduction by Austen-Leigh.<br><br> In 1923, The Watsons appeared in print again, this time with the story continued by an author identified as L. Oulton. Unlike Hubback’s The Younger Sister, this publication is a true continuation of Austen’s The Watsons, including Austen’s text as she wrote it. Although Austen had not indicated chapter divisions in her text, Oulton’s continuation includes Austen’s text as the first five and a half chapters and supplements these with an additional thirteen and a half chapters as well as Austen-Leigh’s 1871 introduction. Austen’s text comprises just over half of the novel because Oulton’s chapters are so much shorter. With nineteen chapters total, this version of The Watsons is shorter than any of the novels Austen completed in her lifetime. Almost nothing is known about L. Oulton, not even what “L.” stands for nor whether this name is a pseudonym. The Oulton continuation of The Watsons fared poorly among the critics, but it has the distinction of being the first true continuation of The Watsons in a long line of The Watsons continuations; the trend of writing continuations of The Watsons has become increasingly popular with the rise of Jane Austen fan fiction, particularly in the 21st century. - Summary by David Purdy

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