Dissatisfaction that the fragment's promising beginning was not brought to fulfilment eventually resulted in attempts to finish the novel. Some of the earliest of these were authored by descendants of the Austen family itself. In 1850, Jane's niece
Catherine Hubback adapted the plot into a three-volume novel under the title
The Younger Sister. The initial chapters were based on Jane's fragmentary story, which was known to family members but had not yet been published. The writing, however, was not word for word from the manuscript and in the development of the story some names were changed and new characters and episodes introduced, as well as long moralising passages and a good deal of descriptive detail. The continuation is recognisably
Victorian in its themes and attitudes to social class. Possibly the new focus on the economics of the penniless heroine's situation could not have been adequately treated until this later date. In the opinion of Jane Austen's great-nephew, William Austen-Leigh (1843–1921), his aunt may have become aware of the difficulty "of having placed her heroine too low, in a position of poverty and obscurity…and therefore, like a singer who has begun on too low a note, she discontinued the strain." Mrs Hubback's novel differs importantly from later continuations of
The Watsons, in that it was not presented as a continuation when it appeared in 1850. That fact would not become apparent until Jane Austen's earlier fragment was first published in 1871, although Mrs Hubback's relationship with her is made clear by the dedication at the start: "To the memory of her aunt, the late Jane Austen, this work is affectionately inscribed by the authoress who, though too young to have known her personally, was from childhood taught to esteem her virtues, and admire her talents." Moreover, it is not until the opening paragraphs of Chapter 2, following a digression on the style of ball-dresses over the centuries, that Mrs Hubback announces the period in which her novel is set. It is "sixty years ago", at which time "the liveliest fancy would have never pictured an English ball such as we now see it." With these clues, the reader is guided to expect a pastiche of an Austen novel, a
Regency era situation described from the point of view of mid-Victorian times. No more continuations of
The Watsons appeared until some fifty years after Austen-Leigh had published Jane Austen's manuscript. Then came
The Watsons – A Fragment by Jane Austen & Concluded by L. Oulton, published in 1923 and prefaced by Austen-Leigh's original introduction of 1871, as if to give it authenticity. The American edition went further in suggesting that the continuation had family sanction by claiming that Miss Oulton "has carried out her task so successfully that the reader will share with the members of the Austen family, to whom she showed her work, an inability to recognize the place where she took up the story from her distinguished predecessor". A contemporary reviewer for
The Spectator certainly noticed, however, commenting that "soon after she has taken up the tale, we become aware that all the rich reality has faded out of it and from being, as it were, a perfect little
Dresden group, it has shrunk to a two-dimensional drawing", for all that the author "is often successful in hitting off Miss Austen's style and intonation". Another family response followed five years later with the publication of
The Watsons, by Jane Austen. Completed in accordance with her intentions by
Edith, the granddaughter of Catherine Hubback, and her husband Francis Brown. The aim, according to the book's introduction, had been to "disentangle Jane's story from that of her niece", although a dependence on
The Younger Sister remained. Mrs Hubback's novel was quarried yet again in 1977 by David Hopkinson (1914–2002), the husband of Diana Hubback – a niece of Edith Brown. This relationship was coyly concealed on publication under the title
The Watsons by Jane Austen and Another. A postscript surveyed the history of the family continuations and criticised the Brown version which "so greatly compressed the plot's development that it did less than justice to Jane's own work when all it yielded was so perfunctory a conclusion". Nevertheless, believing that Catherine Hubback had absorbed from family members "an accurate picture of the author's intentions", he too kept his version close to Catherine's original wording and incorporated all of Jane Austen's fragment at its start. What are curtailed are all the digressions that Mrs Hubback had added to give her novel context and the subplots that maintained its momentum. A further continuation came from John Coates (1912–1963), a writer with no family connection but who had earlier written a
time-travel novel,
Here Today (1949), featuring a man who claimed to have wooed Jane Austen. His ''The Watsons: Jane Austen's fragment continued and completed'' appeared from British and American publishers in 1958. In his postscript (pages 314–18) he admitted to having rewritten the original fragment in order to develop the characters differently, including renaming Emma Watson as Emily. He also pointed out that the tempo of Jane Austen's contribution had been "leisurely…It is the start of a long book, not of a short one. Yet it comprises a half of [Ms] Oulton's book and almost half of the Browns' book." In his own book that proportion is reduced to less than a quarter of the total length. As a result of giving himself this extra leg-room, his version of the story has been judged "more successful in capturing the feel of early 19th-century society than many of the other sequels, but [is] probably much lighter and cheerier than Austen had originally intended the book to turn out". Since then, as part of the burgeoning genre of "Austenesque fiction", author
Joan Aiken wrote sequels to several Jane Austen novels, among them her
Emma Watson: The Watsons Completed (1996). New continuations also include
The Watsons by Merryn Williams in 2005; the self-published
The Watsons, by Jane Austen and Another Lady by
Helen Baker in 2008; the religiously-themed
The Watsons Revisited by Eucharista Ward in 2012; and
The Watsons by Jane Austen, completed by Jennifer Bettiol in 2012. Yet another continuation was written by Irish author Rose Servitova, whose earlier
The Longbourn Letters (2017) was based within the world of
Pride and Prejudice. Her newer Austen-inspired work,
A Completing of The Watsons (2019), won the Bronze prize in the
Self-Publishing Review Book Awards. ==Adaptations==