Now that we’re in July, I’ve been able to crack open the other Jane Austen books that I bought before the month of rereading. While I think I’ve at least a copy of Austen’s novels, I didn’t have any of her juvenilia… until now, that is. Apart from Lady Susan, I also bought a copy of Sandition and what I thought was Love and Freindship (more on that in a later post).

Sandition & Other Stories collects three of Austen’s young and/or unfinished words:

• Sandition, the work she was working on when she passed away
• The Watsons, written after Sense and Sensibility, Pride and Prejudice, and Northanger Abbey had been written and not published
• Lady Susan, one of her earliest completed works

Given that I had already just read Lady Susan, I opted to start with The Watsons and then Sandition, going in order of when Austen had written these.

The Watsons is an unfinished piece about a poor family – certainly poorer than the Bennets. One of their daughters has failed to receive an inheritance from an uncle she was living with and has now returned home, and the piece ends just after she has gone to her first ball in the neighbourhood.

Honestly, this was the first piece that made me think “wow, this was Austen as a young writer”. Lady Susan had great sense of character and the epistolary style worked well for it. The Watsons, on the other hand, felt a bit clunky and I thought the first chapter contained far too much info-dumping via dialogue. It made me wonder how many revisions Austen’s published novels underwent to get to their polished final state.

Sandition, while also unfinished, showed how much Austen had matured in her first draft. It’s about a family who consider themselves invalids but want to help others, with a patriarch who is determined to make Sandition a sea-town where sick people can seek refuge in. While I cannot see the structure of the story yet, it is delightfully comic and makes me think that if Austen continued writing, we would see her dabble in many types of novels, not just “love stories” (as we think of Pride & Prejudice, Emma, and the like).

I also wondered if we would see more diversity in Austen’s later stories; we see that she experimented with class in The Watsons, and in Sandition, Austen introduces a mixed-race character. One criticism Austen gets is that she writes about a very narrow world; I wonder if this would still be the case a few books later!

Overall, this is a great collection of stories and one that I’m happy to finally add to my shelves!