Watsons, Lady Susan & Sanditon

These three works - one novel unpublished in her lifetime and two unfinished fragments - reveal Jane Austen's development as a great artist. Lady Susan, with its wicked, beautiful, intelligent and energetic heroine, is a sparkling melodrama in letters that takes its tone from the outspoken and rovust 18th century. Written later, and probably abandoned after her father's death, The Watsons is a tantalising and delightful story whose vitality and optimism centres on the marital pospects of the Watson sisters in a small provinical town. Sandition, her last work, left unfinished at her death, is set in a seaside town. Its themes concern the new speculatice consumer society and foreshadow the great social upheavals of the Industrial Revolution.