This definitely shouldn't be your introduction to Jane Austen, and imagine it would only be picked up by avid fans like myself having read and reread her six mature completed novels and hungry for more. Lady Susan, which feels truncated, is a very early epistolary novel, and The Watsons was abandoned and Sandition left incomplete upon Austen's death. (And incidentally, if you have the version with an introduction with Margaret Drabble, you might want to read it aftewards--she gives too much away.)
Lady Susan, which starts this volume, is really a novella, not a novel--it's only 23,021 words. It was written in 1794 when Austen was still in her teens. I found it hard to get into at first. Unlike her mature, completed novels, this is an epistolary novel told in letters, not third-person narration. The story feels thin compared to those other works as a result, although about halfway through we got more of a sense of scenes, with actual dialogue. It's not that I don't find it worth reading. This is very different in tone than Austen's other novels--her titular heroine is a villain--a catty and malicious adulteress trying to force her daughter Frederica into a marriage of convenience. But if I weren't an Austen fan, I doubt I'd have persisted in reading it far enough for the fascination of Lady Susan's machinations to take hold, although take hold they did. The ending nevertheless feels abrupt to me. (I understand Phyllis Ann Karr did a third person narrative adaptation of the story. Particularly since she's an author I've liked, I'd love to read that. Sadly it's long out of print.)
The Watsons is an abandoned novel of about 17,500 words written in Austen's largely "silent" middle period after Sense and Sensibility and Price and Prejudice but before Mansfield Park and Emma and Persuasion. The protagonist in this novel, Emma Watson, is very likable. Like Fanny Price, she's someone who was raised away from her birth family by a rich relation--except she had expectations of being an heiress, which were disappointed by her rich aunt marrying again, throwing her back to her original family. Her family is respected enough to be able to mix with the best families, including a Lord interested in Emma, and comfortable enough to have a servant, but in the circles they run around in are considered "poor." Only nineteen, Emma has a lot more confidence than Fanny Price, and a lot less snobbishness than her namesake Emma Woodhouse. She endeared herself to me when she goes to the rescue of a ten-year-old boy stood up at a dance. I'm only sorry there wasn't more, and we had to leave Emma soon after a ball parting from her brother and his wife. I'm sure that if Jane Austen had been able to complete this novel, I'd be rating it five or four stars as an equal to Pride and Prejudice or Emma. As it is, this had me running to read Joan Aiken's "continuation" Emma Watson immediately afterwards hungry for more--but was, alas, disappointed. I'm afraid I'll just have to be happy with what Austen left us.
Sanditon was left uncompleted by Jane Austen's death, and I loved what I read to pieces, even more than The Watsons, and can only mourn that her death left Sanditon forever incomplete. It had such possibilities! I really liked our heroine Charlotte Heywood, with her obvious intelligence, lack of pretension and good sense. In the eleven chapters of 26,000 or so words we have left to us, Lady Denham and the three Parker hypochondriac siblings strike me as brilliant comic creations. Then there's Sir Edward Denham, who models himself after rakes like Richardson's Lovelace and schemes to seduce, and if not, abduct, Clara, his rival for Lady Denham's inheritance. Then there's Miss Lambe, "a young West Indian of large fortune," who is "about seventeen, half mulatto, and chilly and tender." What an interesting character to find in an Austen novel! After my experience with Aiken's Watsons completion, I didn't expect much from the 1975 completion by "Another Lady" For what it's worth, I loved it. No, I'm not saying she's Austen's equal. But she tacked on her story seamlessly from where Austen ended, developed the characters very nicely, seemed to get the period details right, and I ended reading the story with a smile.
This book gets only three and a half stars because I can't imagine anyone but us hardcore Austen fanatics or scholars wanting to read incomplete novels and an unpolished bit of juvenalia, and these can't compare to her mature novels. But I did love reading these.
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