In these days of standardized computer fonts and software-assisted editing, one writer’s manuscript probably looks much like another’s. But 220 years ago, when Jane Austen handwrote the 17,000-plus words of her unfinished novel The Watsons, it was a different story.
“A manuscript is a kind of fingerprint of a writer,” the Jane Austen scholar Kathryn Sutherland remarks in a delightful and fascinating new 24-minute documentary on The Watsons. “We sense from it how she works.”
The video, “Spotlight on: The Watsons,” offers a kaleidoscopic look at this bleak, engrossing fragment, which Austen probably wrote in 1804, while living with her parents and sister in Bath. Jane Austen’s House museum posted the full-length film to YouTube late last month; a shorter version is included in “Jane Austen and the Art of Writing,” the exhibit that opened at the museum in October.
In the video, Sutherland talks about the ways in which the plot and style of The Watsons mark a departure from the writing Austen had done before, in the novels eventually published as Northanger Abbey, Pride and Prejudice, and Sense and Sensibility. Sutherland speculates about the reasons Austen abandoned the work and wonders whether it was ever intended to be a full-length novel. *
Andrew Honey, a conservator at Oxford’s Bodleian Library, which owns all but twelve pages of the original manuscript of The Watsons, talks about the physical qualities of the artifact—the paper, the watermarks, the pins Austen used to affix scraps of interpolated writing in their proper place. (In a shot that is somehow both touching and hilarious, we see one of these humble pins, sheathed in plastic and solemnly preserved for posterity.)
In between the talking-heads interviews, we watch as Sutherland and Honey gingerly turn over the precious, closely written pages, marked up with crossings-out and second thoughts in Austen’s tiny, neat handwriting—the fingerprint evidence of a writer hard at work on revision.
Two centuries from now, I suppose, literary scholars will be poring over Word files honeycombed with the red ink of Track Changes, or parsing marginal comments shoehorned into authorial Google Docs. And not a pin in sight.
* In a 2014 blog series, I reviewed The Watsons and the ten fanfic completions of it that were then available. Since then, at least eight more Watsons spinoffs have been published, including a trilogy in English, another in French, and two standalone novels, one in English and one in Portuguese.
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