Following on from my blog yesterday I read in the paper this morning that Jane Austen's unfinished novel 'The Watsons' has been sold at auction for $1.6 million dollars. The big question is was it worth it? Does it demonstrate breath-taking originality and a ground-breaking leap forward in English literature? Sadly no. It is, or would have been if she'd got round to completing it, more of the same.
This is what is so disappointing about Jane Austen. She writes very nicely but is she a great writer? The answer I fear is no, she was not. Her world is a very narrow one and although she was writing for quite a long time at one of the most revolutionary periods in British History you would not know it. There is no artistic development. The one original feature her writing had at the outset, her quirky sense of humour, disappears half way through leaving us with a picture of, I'm sorry to say, a rather uninteresting and undeveloped mind. Compared with Elizabeth Gaskell and George Eliot,even Maria Edgeworth, style apart, her writing is rather infantile.
It is true that towards the end of her life when money was an object she may have had good reason for sticking to her successful formula but great writers don't do that, they move on and innovate and that is something she never managed to do. I have quite enjoyed reading Jane Austen but then I have quite enjoyed reading a lot of other 'lesser' writers too. I have nothing against formula written novels and have written the odd one myself, but do I think her manuscript is worth $1.6m. Well I wouldn't pay that for it even if I won the lottery. It's a curiosity, nothing more.
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