sanditon and the watsons austen's unfinished novels jane austen

Intervention … the playwright (portrayed here by Louise Ford, right) injects herself – and her 21st-century mindset – into The Watsons. Sanditon makes an entertaining addition to the Austen canon even if the hint of oral sex in the first episode might have had dedicated Janeites reaching for the smelling salts. So one episode of Sanditon was almost entirely taken up by a cricket match in which Charlotte rescued the toffs’ team from humiliating defeat by a gang of resentfully unpaid workers. We’re told of the young Catherine Morland in Northanger Abbey that she “greatly preferred cricket not merely to dolls” but to all other childish amusements. Ideas are niftily pinched from other Austen novels as a way of developing plot. TV seizes on this to show Sanditon being built and to follow the fortunes of the speculating Tom Parker, the disdainful Lady Denham (a wonderful Anne Reid) and the highly practical Charlotte Heywood. She was writing about the early 19th-century vogue for seaside resorts and the commercial hazards, burgeoning possibilities and social mobility this involved. For a start, the unfinished novel shows Austen, at the end of her life, opening up new territory. Sanditon, adapted by Andrew Davies and a team of writers, inevitably takes a different tack. Photograph: Simon Ridgway/Red Planet Pictures/ITV What follows is a dazzling meditation on any number of topics: on Austen’s own preferred outcome, on the afterlife of literary creations, on the inherent conflict between invented characters and the writer who brings them into existence.īeside the seaside … Rose Williams and Kate Ashfield in Sanditon. She faithfully sets up the dilemma posed by what little we have of The Watsons: which of three potential suitors should the lively, witty but impoverished Emma Watson choose? A diffident aristo, a sententious parson or a suave bounder? Having established the situation, Wade then springs a surprise – and it is difficult not to give part of the game away – by introducing herself, as the adapter, into the action.

Wade takes a bold approach to adapting Austen. Seeing the two works in conjunction tells us a lot about the challenges of adapting Austen and about the nature of stage and TV drama. Meanwhile an eight-part extension of Sanditon, on which Austen was forced to stop work in 1817 because of illness, occupies a prime-time Sunday night slot on ITV.

Laura Wade’s version of The Watsons, abandoned by Austen after the death of her father in 1805, has moved triumphantly from Chichester to London’s Menier Chocolate Factory. B y a strange chance it is currently possible to see two radically different adaptations of incomplete Jane Austen novels.

Sanditon and the watsons austen's unfinished novels jane austen