Book completed
Mar. 29th, 2023 01:58 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
eve_primeSanditon and Other Stories, by Jane Austen. It's actually the full novella Lady Susan and the beginnings of two novels, Sanditon and The Watsons. I hadn't read them before now, when I was motivated by curiosity to see how much of Sanditon she'd actually written before season 3 of Andrew Davies' continuation began.
Lady Susan is an epistolary novella (a story in letters, like Dracula), written when Jane was young. It's about a highly charismatic but secretly conniving middle-aged woman who's awful to her daughter and working hard to get a rich new husband (she's recently widowed), while her late husband's family tries to protect themselves. I was surprised!
The Watsons is a novel she started in the middle of her writing career and never bothered to finish, though she told her sister how it was going to go, so when you get to the end of what she's written you can at least learn how things end up for the main character.
And Sanditon, oh Sanditon. She started this in January of the last year of her life, wrote twelve chapters, then by March was too ill to continue. She was trying new things - an all-new setting, a character who was half-Black, and the unusual motivation of building a seaside resort. It's all there in the TV show, though I expect Austen would be surprised at some of the places Davies has taken it.
(I actually finished this two days ago.)
Lady Susan is an epistolary novella (a story in letters, like Dracula), written when Jane was young. It's about a highly charismatic but secretly conniving middle-aged woman who's awful to her daughter and working hard to get a rich new husband (she's recently widowed), while her late husband's family tries to protect themselves. I was surprised!
The Watsons is a novel she started in the middle of her writing career and never bothered to finish, though she told her sister how it was going to go, so when you get to the end of what she's written you can at least learn how things end up for the main character.
And Sanditon, oh Sanditon. She started this in January of the last year of her life, wrote twelve chapters, then by March was too ill to continue. She was trying new things - an all-new setting, a character who was half-Black, and the unusual motivation of building a seaside resort. It's all there in the TV show, though I expect Austen would be surprised at some of the places Davies has taken it.
(I actually finished this two days ago.)
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Date: 2023-04-01 12:29 pm (UTC)Thank you so much for posting about it. :)
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Date: 2023-04-01 08:56 pm (UTC)