As noted in the Introduction, Ashley Tauchert has articulated the dynamic between realism and romantic motifs in Austen's completed novels: ‘Austen is working her extraordinarily plausible realism through the magical framework of romance’, in that she deploys ‘aspects of a romance narrative paradigm to structure and to finally resolve, her “realist” representational content’. We know that we are eventually ‘hastening together to perfect felicity’, as the ending of Northanger Abbey points out. Moreover, Tauchert argues, this ending is effected, to a greater or lesser extent, by a significant change in the heroine's understanding of her love interest, and thus her understanding of herself. However these processes play out – and of course they vary among the novels – and there is a strong focus on the heroine's internal life.

What happens in the unfinished texts discussed here is that this development fails to happen and may not be in the offing. In ‘Catharine’, for example, it is not clear that the heroine's eventual husband has yet appeared in the story, while in Sanditon, if he has, then he has been only lightly sketched in. In The Watsons, there are three suitors, one of whom seems upright and intelligent; another, by contrast, is socially inept and self-centred but demonstrates signs of being able to change for the better. But in this latter case, it is not clear what purpose this promising trait serves if he is not to wed the heroine. As far as Lady Susan is concerned, the story's focus is not really on any young marriageable couple, but on the schemings of the charismatic central character, Lady Susan herself. That this tendency is disquieting is shown by the way a couple of recent completions of the text restore the conventional structure: either putting the young woman at the centre of the text (Phyllis Ann Karr) or making the scheming older woman a more noble and thus heroine-like figure (Jane Rubino and Caitlin Rubino-Brodway).

What these characteristics of the unfinished works highlight, in fact, is the arbitrariness of our expectations when we approach these texts with a knowledge of the six completed novels. We expect one figure to emerge clearly, albeit not necessarily early, as the suitable husband for the heroine, and assume that other contenders will be found wanting.

The emotional centre of ‘Catharine’ is arguably the protagonist's bonds with the Wynne sisters, her close friends from childhood who are now forced to be geographically distant both from Catharine and from each other. That is, the story was not self-evidently heading towards a courtship plot focussed on Catharine's entanglements with prospective suitors. In Lady Susan, the world of the story is dominated by female interactions. Except for a narrative ending, the text consists of 41 letters, 36 of which are written by women: the other five are produced by men, but only two of these are between men. The strong family and friendship networks salient in the text are those among women, primarily that between Lady Susan Vernon herself and her friend and confidant Mrs Alicia Johnson, and that between Mrs Catherine Vernon and her mother Lady de Courcy. A major driver of the plot, too, involves the two women who, although they do not write to each other, are the most prolific correspondents in the text: sisters-in-law Lady Susan Vernon and Catherine Vernon.

Catherine Vernon is from the outset suspicious of and antagonistic towards Lady Susan and never alters her attitude throughout the story, while Lady Susan identifies Catherine Vernon as the greatest obstacle to her plans and would very much like to disarm her hostility. Lady Susan can sometimes reduce Catherine Vernon to silence – their verbal antagonism is never overt – but she fails to make a friend of her enemy. On the other hand, Lady Susan has in Alicia Johnson a close ally to whom she expatiates on her feelings and explains her ever-changing plans. Although much of Lady Susan's activity is centred on men, including an adulterous liaison and two potential marriages for herself, the text conveys the impression that her closest emotional bond is with Alicia Johnson.

Lady Susan is a very different kind of fiction from ‘Catharine’, however, not just because it has a mostly epistolary format but also because its primary dynamics are those of older, sexually experienced women. There is a younger potential couple, in Catherine Vernon's brother Reginald and Lady Susan's daughter Frederica, and the narrative summary at the end suggests that they will wed. But throughout most of the text, Reginald is manipulated by Lady Susan (and to some extent by his sister), and Frederica is habitually cowed by her self-willed and self-confident mother.

As noted in the Introduction, there is doubt about the period of composition of The Watsons, but evidence points to a date of around 1804. Compared to those of ‘Catharine’ and Lady Susan, the manuscript is more inchoate, without pagination or chapter divisions, nor clear paragraphing. The number of alterations, too, is considerable, with many additions and deletions. It is worth giving detailed attention to these revisions, as they point to the kinds of emphases Austen was working towards in her style – especially her creation of mood and atmosphere – as well as in her characterization and the dynamics among characters. The Watsons is very much a work in progress.

The courtship plot will also be a prominent motif in discussing The Watsons, because there is a mismatch between the heroine's circumstances here and the kind of story Austen deploys in her published work which relies on such a convention. This contrast emerges especially when this fragment is compared with Pride and Prejudice.

The chapter will explore too the completions of the text which date from 1850 right up to 2018 and which are plentiful but – I will argue – often unconvincing. An exception is the play by Laura Wade from 2018, because it tackles head-on the frustrations involved in ending an unfinished text in a plausible but satisfying way. Relevant to these completions is the temptation to follow what were taken as Jane Austen's intentions for the story. These came from Austen-Leigh's summary of the proposed plot developments, deriving from Cassandra Austen. Heroine Emma Watson was eventually to marry clergyman Mr Howard, but he would have a serious rival in local aristocrat Lord Osborne, while Lord Osborne's widowed mother would complicate matters through her own feelings for Howard. Before the happy ending, too, Emma's father, an invalid clergyman, was to die and leave her dependent for a home on her hard-hearted older brother Robert and his status-obsessed wife Jane. Although the outline comes from family lore rather than from any writings of Jane Austen herself, the fragment as it is contains the beginnings of all these plot elements.

‘Catharine, or the Bower’ is the third of Jane Austen's early writings that were dedicated to her elder sister Cassandra: dated ‘August 1792’ (when Jane was 16), it follows ‘The Beautifull Cassandra’ (1788, after August, when Jane was 12) and ‘The History of England’ (26 November 1791, just before Jane's 16th birthday). This third Dedication pays an extravagant tribute to ‘Miss Austen’, referring to the two earlier works, and declaring that through Cassandra's ‘generous support’, these ‘have obtained a place in every library in the Kingdom, and run through threescore Editions’. ‘The Author’ of the third effort hence seeks similar support for this new novel, affirming that it ‘possesses Merit beyond any already published, or any that will ever in future appear’ – other than her own.

All this is of course a sort of in-joke, directed not only at Cassandra but also at the other family members and friends who were, in Austen's lifetime and for decades beyond, the only other readers of her early works. The Dedication thus expresses, on the one hand, a fantasy about a kind of literary success unlikely to be achieved by anyone in 1792, and on the other, a satirical take on literary hubris.

However hyperbolic and tongue-in-cheek the claims of this tribute may be, the earlier works dedicated to Cassandra Austen, like this Dedication, focus on female agency. In ‘The Beautifull Cassandra’, the heroine, named obviously for Cassandra Austen, is a milliner's daughter who jauntily moves through the streets of London, having uplifted a bonnet intended by her mother for a Countess. She gives short shrift to a Viscount, then buys six ices and knocks down the pastrycook rather than paying him; she makes a round trip to Hampstead by coach, and can defiantly – but conveniently – give the coachman the bonnet in lieu of pay. Returning home, Cassandra declares that ‘This is a day well spent’ (56). This Cassandra is obviously mobile, shows no respect for her social betters, has no interest in a possible marital ‘catch’, breaks the law and suffers no consequences for her transgressive behaviour. In a parody of narratives focussed on change and development, Cassandra returns to where she started out; in a parody of narratives dealing with courtship, she simply curtseys to the Viscount, despite his being ‘a young man, no less celebrated for his Accomplishments and Virtues, than for his Elegance and Beauty’ (56).

Sanditon, composed in the early months of 1817, differs from the other texts covered by this book in that it was the work of a woman who was finally a published novelist, and one who had enjoyed some success, both popular and critical. Jane Austen had eventually brought out in quick succession four novels: Sense and Sensibility (1811), Pride and Prejudice (1813), Mansfield Park (1814) and Emma (1815). By early August 1816, she had completed Persuasion. According to Kathryn Sutherland, the manuscript of Sanditon thus shows ‘the working methods of a confident and experienced professional novelist’, while Linda Bree and Janet Todd observe that Sanditon is ‘neatly divided into chapters’ and was written in larger booklets than the earlier manuscript works. By comparison with The Watsons, there are no interpolated pages or inserted material, and much of the text contains little correction. This last circumstance might speak to Austen's growing confidence in her writing, but it is at least partially explained by the brief period of composition: the first page of the first booklet bears the date 27 January 1817, the first page of the third is marked ‘Mar. 1’, and at the end of the MS appears the date ‘March 18’. There is no evidence that, as her final illness advanced, Austen was able to revisit the text after 18 March: she died exactly four months later, on 18 July.

Mary Lascelles commented long ago that had any of the published novels broken off at the same point as Sanditon ended (part-way through Chapter 12), it would not ‘have left us in such uncertainty as to the way in which it was going to develop’. On the other hand, whereas in the cases of ‘Catharine’, Lady Susan and The Watsons, it can be argued that Austen abandoned her work because of problems inherent to what she had already written, the incompleteness of Sanditon has always been attributed to the deterioration of the author's health. It is assumed that had Austen lived, she would have finished the novel. As a result, a combination of factors – Austen's elusive intentions for this fragment, its status as her last substantial work, and the belief that she would have completed it had she survived – means that Sanditon is a text whose unanswered questions have especially fascinated many readers and critics.

Towards the end of her career, in 1816, Jane Austen produced a comic manuscript which she called ‘Plan of a Novel, according to hints from various quarters’. She noted in its margins the origins in her own circle for some of these ‘hints’, but another source was clearly the Rev. James Stanier Clarke, Librarian to the Prince Regent. In 1815, he had invited Austen to dedicate her forthcoming novel, Emma, to his master. Austen did this, unenthusiastically, but also found herself in a correspondence with Clarke about potential topics for another novel, one of which was obviously founded on Clarke's own view of his personality and career. Austen famously declined, affecting ignorance and incompetence, and declaring that she was ‘the most unlearned & uninformed Female who ever dared to be an Authoress’. She had been obliged to be polite, but she allowed herself some light relief in her ‘Plan of a Novel’.

What this late text does is to ridicule, pointedly and succinctly, some of the conventions of contemporary fiction: in particular, characters represented as implausibly virtuous or vicious, overblown sentiments, hectic and unconvincing plotting, and extended interpolated narratives. Hence the clergyman in the novel was to be ‘the most excellent Man that can be imagined, perfect in Character, Temper & Manners’, and his daughter, the heroine, would be ‘faultless’ and impossibly accomplished. The pair would always ‘converse in long speeches, elegant Language – and a tone of high, serious sentiment’ (228), and much of the novel's first volume would be occupied by the father's account of his life. Otherwise the plot would mostly consist of the daughter being pursued by suitors all over Europe, and constantly uprooted by one of these, a ‘totally unprincipled & heart-less young Man’ (227). There would be a hero, ‘all perfection of course’, and in general ‘the Good will be unexceptionable in every respect’, while the ‘Wicked […] will be completely depraved & infamous’ (227). After she has been ‘worn down to a Skeleton, & now & then starved to death’, the heroine and her father are forced to flee to Kamschatka, where he, ‘after 4 or 5 hours of tender advice and parental Admonition to his miserable Child, expires in a fine burst of Literary Enthusiasm’ (228). The heroine then faces ‘at least 20 narrow escapes’ from the villain, but eventually ‘runs into the arms of the Hero himself’ (229).

The Quarterlies and Their Background

The traditional history of nineteenth-century periodicals normally begins with the founding of the quarterly Edinburgh Review at the outset of the period, in 1802. Supported by the publisher Archibald Constable, the lawyer Francis Jeffrey and his colleagues, Francis Horner, Henry Brougham and clergyman Sydney Smith, set out to transform the practice of reviewing. They challenged the conventions evident in the organs prominent in the late eighteenth century, such as the Monthly Review, the Critical Review and the British Critic.

The earlier periodicals aimed at a very broad coverage of publications as they appeared, and themselves came out monthly. The space devoted to each text might be brief, and the approach more summative than evaluative. But the preface to the first number of the Edinburgh Review claimed to concentrate on ‘works that either have achieved, or deserve, a certain portion of celebrity’ (Butler 2006: 137): evaluation thus figured in the very choice of works to be noticed. So this first issue contained twenty-nine articles, mostly covering a single book, whereas the three monthlies mentioned above featured at least forty-four. The difference soon became more stark, with the average number of articles in the Edinburgh down to ten by 1810. This narrower scope involved, too, specialisation in certain areas linked with the Scottish universities – initially moral philosophy, political economy and the natural sciences, and then foreign relations and the geography and culture of overseas countries, notably those of the Empire (Butler 2006: 137–8). The periodical's Scottishness was also important, as it drew on Scottish traditions of debate and ‘upholding the superiority of Scottish educational and legal systems’ (Finkelstein 2016: 187).

The Edinburgh became notorious for its sardonic, often combative variety of criticism. In his study of its early years, William Christie comments on its ‘consistently clever’ kind of severity which could become ‘especially wilful and especially skilful’ and ‘sometimes even vicious and inexcusable’: fifteen of those twenty-nine articles in the first number were critical in an adverse way (Christie 2009: 20).

In January 1870, a respected British weekly, the Athenaeum, discussed several now-forgotten novels, and gave them short shrift. These included Lady Betty, by Christabel Coleridge, and Herbert Tresham, by the Revd J. M. Neale. Christabel Coleridge's novel is criticised mainly for its plot, which the anonymous reviewer finds badly constructed, tedious and implausible, while the Revd Neale's book is faulted both for being ‘pedantically written’, and for telling an ‘insignificant’ tale which the reviewer believes is ‘a mere pretext for thrusting the author's opinions down the reader's throat’. The review identifies no redeeming features in Herbert Tresham, but acknowledges that Lady Betty does contain ‘some pleasing writing’, and therefore suggests that Christabel Coleridge is ‘capable of something better’. What is notable, however, is that Lady Betty's faults are ascribed to the writer's sex, while this is not the case with the Revd Neale's novel. The review of Christabel Coleridge's text begins: ‘It scarcely needed the author's name affixed to the title page of “Lady Betty”, to tell us it was the work of a lady’ – and goes on to call the novel's story ‘feeble and badly designed’, as if this were the natural corollary of female authorship. By contrast, the pedantry and offensive didacticism of Herbert Tresham are not linked to the Revd Neale's sex, or even to his clerical status.

These reviews represent a minor instance of a practice endemic to nineteenth-century literary criticism – the ascription of particular characteristics to writing on the basis of its author's sex. Although this happened to texts by writers of both sexes, the practice was more common in discussions of women's publications.