1804-05
Jane Austen
The Watsons
B
This unfinished novel is the first of Austen's surviving works to really offer her "three or four families in a country village." (The neighbourhood of Jack and Alice consists of about a dozen people, but the story is hardly a sincere examination of how the different families interact.) The heroine, Emma Watson, also resembles later Austen main characters in being intelligent and kind. And there are the snobs and fops that will populate the later works. Still, there are some things that set this novel apart, besides its lack of a middle and an end. According to Jane's sister Cassandra's remarks, Emma's romantic rival would've been Lady Osborne, who's pushing fifty. Emma's brother Sam is a surgeon, a very different profession than the ones that Fanny Price's and Catherine Morland's brothers pursue. (Austen heroines tend to either have no brothers or multiple brothers that join either the church or the navy.) And Mr. Watson is an invalid, but a far more intelligent one than the other Emma W's father.
I wonder if Austen did make Sam a surgeon because they were in a situation that would have had a surgeon often attending her parents - her father was aging and her mother was something of a hypochondriac. Maybe she had an encounter with a kind surgeon while at Bath. I wonder if Cassandra got it wrong or the accounts of what she said got it wrong - i think Miss Osborne would have made a more suitable rival than Lady Osborne.
ReplyDeleteBarbara
With Cassandra, I'm going by what it says in that edition, which in turn is a quote from an apparently sometimes inaccurate 1871 biography of Jane. (Never read it, just excerpts.) Interesting suggestions of why Sam is a surgeon, and within the story he might've gotten into surgery because of his invalid father. Doctors seem to come across pretty well in Austen (as opposed to in "Tom Jones").
ReplyDelete