Frustratingly, Jane Austen completed only seven novels, leaving two unfinished. Sanditon (1817) was stalled by the most common authorial interruption – death – but the other sawn-off story, The Watsons (1805), stopped for unclear reasons after 18,000 words,

Frustratingly, Jane Austen completed only seven novels, leaving two unfinished. Sanditon (1817) was stalled by the most common authorial interruption – death – but the other sawn-off story, The Watsons (1805), stopped for unclear reasons after 18,000 words, taking Emma Watson, youngest daughter of an impoverished and unwell clergyman, to the brink of betrothal to Lord Osborne, an awkward aristocrat.

Attempting to clarify the abandonment, Laura Wade’s play The Watsons also sketches possible endings. Wade’s Home, I’m Darling,  which transfers to the West End from the National in January, has a spectacular coup in which a woman sitting in a 1950s kitchen takes a laptop out of her drawer, for reasons plausibly explained. In a similar chronological disruption, Miss Watson encounters a maid in eighteenth-century clothes but with an iPhone in her pocket.

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