The Watsons and Sanditon are generally published in a volume with either Jane Austen’s Lady Susan or her Juvenilia, but aren’t actually very much like either of them. The Juvenilia is a group of short, intentionally ridiculous pieces written “for the fun of it.” They don’t do much for me, but I find them easier to follow than what survives of the Brontes’ early fantasy worlds: Glass Town, Angria and Gondal. Lady Susan, on the other hand, is a complete novella, told mostly through letters, which was apparently circulated within the family for entertainment but not intended for publication.

The Watsons, meanwhile, is the opening of an unfinished novel,

supposedly begun about 1803-1804 and believed to have been abandoned about 1805, although Austen told her family something about how it was supposed to proceed. I mostly find it interesting for details about Georgian/Regency life that her finished novels gloss over, and a charming incident where the heroine dances with a disappointed small boy to cheer him up. You can tell Austen mined this failed(1) novel idea for later plots: the overly refined heroine who’s come down in the world becomes Fanny Price at Portsmouth and Jane Fairfax at Highbury and maybe Anne Elliot at Bath, the buffoonish Lord Osbourne becomes Mr. Rushworth and perhaps Mr. Yates, the dashing Tom Musgrave becomes Henry Crawford or perhaps Frank Churchill, etc.

Sanditon is a sketchier, more diffuse opening for a novel, written in the last months of Austen’s life. We have no idea where she was going with it, although there’s a consensus that the briefly seen character Sidney Parker was *probably* meant to be the hero. As with Mr. Howard, the romantic lead in The Watsons, he’s introduced in a somewhat perfunctory way that suggests it was going to take Austen a while to nail him down. As with The Watsons, we are kind of bombarded by a horde of supporting characters whose plot purpose is not necessarily obvious, and maybe that was just part of Austen’s creative process: throwing potentially interesting characters on the page to see which of them would coalesce into interesting dynamics. I haven’t paid much attention to the tv adaptation of Sanditon, and am not about to start. Here’s my thoughts about where the book was possibly going:

-I feel that this was probably a reiteration of themes and ideas from the work we call(2) Northanger Abbey, with the eldest daughter of a large, cheerful family (she is named Charlotte in Sanditon) going to stay at the seaside with friends and finding love in the process. Catherine Morland’s disordered love of literature, which is played mostly for laughs in Northanger, becomes Sir Edward Denham’s disordered love of literature in Sanditon: still played for laughs, but with a darker side to it, because Denham is an edgelord type, a posturing fanboy of Byronic anti-heroes and the then-famous fictional villain Lovelace. Meanwhile, Sidney Parker, as described by his brothers and sisters, sounds a lot like Henry Tilney with a larger income and no career in the clergy.

–This does not actually help us much in figuring out what Austen had in mind for a plot, because Northanger is notably plot-challenged. We can say that the setup in Sanditon doesn’t seem to allow for the heroine to have a big, dramatic return home under adverse circumstances like in Northanger, but it does allow for some kind of quasi-comedic “kidnapping”(3) of the heroine by the villain, similar to the Thorpes hijacking Catherine Morland when she’s promised to go out with the Tilneys instead.

-I think Miss Lamb, the biracial West Indies heiress,was probably not meant to be anything all that aggressively stereotyped (compared to, say, the equivalent character in Vanity Fair). Based on what is said of her, she mostly seems to be timid, in poor health, and uncomfortable with the chilly English climate. (Who can blame her?) In my opinion, she was probably meant to be a bland, enigmatic figure similar to Ann De Bourg, more of a maguffin than a character.

–My suspicion is that Austen planned to have the villainous Denham attempt to elope with either Clara Brereton (his rich aunt’s companion and heir) or Miss Lamb, only for Sidney to intercept them and become betrothed to the woman to protect her reputation. These events would be largely “off-stage,” allowing Austen to handwave the details. After multiple revisions, they might even have ended up as backstory, although some of the things the narrator says seem to rule out these events being backstory for the fragment we have. Much of the plot would resemble Elinor Dashwood(4) angsting over Edward Ferrars’s engagement to Lucy Steele, with a somewhat more charitable view of The Other Woman. In the background, Sanditon and its residents and visitors would form a strong milieu, more Highbury in Emma than Meryton in P&P.

—I lean towards this Other Woman being Miss Lamb just because it’s easier to fix: the rest of her West Indies family swoops into Sanditon in late August, saying “nope, she’s already engaged to a business partner of ours back home” and carries her off, after staying long enough and spending enough money to save Mr. Parker’s(5) investments in Sanditon. This idea has vague parallels to the Italian subplot in Sir Charles Grandison, a novel the Austen family seems to have been fascinated by. It was written by Samuel Richardson, the same author who created Lovelace, and the fact that Austen name-checks him in the Sanditon fragment suggests that she may have had a more extended parody of his works in mind than her usual sideways riffing on tropes that Richardson also used. (“Good woman pining for unavailable but honorable man” is a key motif in Grandison that appears in most of Austen’s finished works in one form or another.)

—-Lady Denham, Mr. Parker’s business partner and Lord Denham’s rich aunt, has by this point chickened out and sold off her Sanditon investments to someone else; I think possibly Sidney’s and Mr. Parker’s brother Arthur. Arthur is allegedly sickly, actually a dorky and self-indulgent young man with a certain amount of gallantry towards pretty women; my headcanon is that he meets and falls for Clara Brereton, who is exactly the kind of attractive, rather passive woman who would find him an improvement on Edward Denham. Possibly Arthur, backed by his bossy sisters, would rescue Clara from some situation with Denham, in a parodic version of whatever dramatic intervention Sidney pulled on the Denham/Miss Lamb situation.

—–you can flip Miss Brereton and Miss Lamb above, if you like. Uncharacteristically for an Englishman, Arthur likes his rooms toasty, so Miss Lamb, raised in the tropics, would at least survive being married to him. If Miss Brereton is the Other Woman standing in the way of Sidney’s and Charlotte’s relationship, it will probably turn out that she does in fact prefer Denham and he successfully elopes with her. The main advantage of Clara as the Other Woman is that there would be strong pressure from Lady Denham and a milder pressure from Mr. Parker to make a match happen between Sidney and Clara. Also, by the end of the fragment, Charlotte has met and rather liked Clara, so it would be a more nuanced and uncomfortable rivalry than the usual good-girl/bad-girl thing that underlies the equivalent storylines in S&S and Mansfield Park.

-Mr. Parker possibly loses his fine seaside house in a storm when he and his family are out on an overnight visit somewhere else. Or he deals with his financial reverses by selling it to Sidney, or Arthur, or something. Regardless, he and his wife move back to their other house, the one the wife prefers. Meanwhile, Sidney and Charlotte end up together. The end.

(1) My own theory about why she abandoned The Watsons is that she couldn’t make Mr. Howard, the heroine’s love interest and future husband, work as a character. The fragment portrays him as a Knightley-esque paragon of all manly virtues, but somehow the future plot would have required him to be vulnerable to harassment and interference by his employer Lady Osbourne. Meanwhile, Howard seems to have been rather a failure as a tutor to the young adult Lord Osbourne, a sporting-mad, oblivious idiot who nonetheless only needs a gentle hint from the heroine to mend his manners.

(2) Northanger Abbey was not published in her lifetime, and underwent several name changes in manuscript form. If Sanditon was another iteration of it, and had been completed to Austen’s satisfaction, I think the Northanger manuscript would have been destroyed just as the prototypes for S&S and P&P were destroyed.

(3) I think one of the Sanditon continuations does in fact do this.

(4) The character who Sanditon’s heroine most resembles.

(5) This is Sidney’s older married brother, who is trying to make Sanditon a success. Austen’s title for this fragment was The Brothers, implying the drama was to center on Arthur, Sidney, and their elder brother.