ABSTRACT
The Watsons is an unfinished sketch of a novel, written in 1803 and abandoned, according to a great-niece, on the death of Jane Austen's father. Unlike The Watsons, it is completed, and is written in letters. Lady Susan is a widow of thirty-five, with great personal charm and no scruples at all; she has a daughter of marriageable age whom she first neglects, then suppresses, and finally tries to marry off to a rich nincompoop whom she eventually marries herself. The stage is always small, and the cast corresponds, though it is never quite as scanty as the '3 or 4 Families in a Country Village', which Jane Austen told her niece Anna was 'the very thing to work on'. This variety arises from the novelist's use of three distinct ways of 'learning' people, each of them natural to the experience of non-fictional life.
