Lady Susan ; The Watsons ; Sanditon

LADY SUSAN, Austen's one epistolary novel, recounts the adventures of the beautiful, widowed, and utterly self-serving femme fatale Lady Susan, who manages to capture the heart of every man who comes her way, including the husband of one friend and the fiancé of another. Meanwhile, she attempts to marry her innocent young daughter off to a man she doesn't love--for money, of course. Austen left this wicked novel unfinished, but appended an epilogue detailing the fates of all the characters. THE WATSONS is a fragment about a young woman named Emma Watson (no relation to the Emma of the novel of that name) who is cursed with three flighty sisters whose efforts to make good marriages provide the comic plot. This minor work includes all Jane Austen's favorite satirical themes but was left unfinished with no explanation. Austen's third unfinished novel, SANDITON, is worth reading for its satirical look at pomposity, hypocrisy, and the intricacies of courtship in early 19th-century England. Austen was writing this novel during her last months, when she was seriously ill with Addison's disease; an odd but endearing characteristic of SANDITON is her satirical treatment of hypochondria.