Jane Austen’s unfinished novel The Watsons was later continued by her niece Catherine Hubback. Austen began the manuscript around 1803 or 1804 but abandoned it before completing the story.
The fragment was probably written while Austen was living in Bath. It centres on Emma Watson, the youngest daughter of a clergyman whose family faces financial and social difficulties. The surviving manuscript is about 17,500 words long and introduces the Watson family, their relationships and the pressures surrounding marriage, money and social position.
The work was not originally titled The Watsons by Austen herself. Her nephew James Edward Austen-Leigh gave the fragment that name when he published it in the revised edition of A Memoir of Jane Austen in 1871. Catherine Hubback’s continuation had appeared earlier, in 1850, under the title The Younger Sister.
The manuscript itself is divided between the Morgan Library in New York and the Bodleian Library in Oxford. Readers sometimes confuse The Watsons with Sanditon, another unfinished Austen novel, but Sanditon was begun much later, in 1817.