Austen Manuscript Never Published

  Photograph courtesy of www.famemagezine.co.uk

Earliest Austen manuscript fetches $1.6 million     

Excerpts from an article by Clare Kane, LONDON | Thu Jul 14, 2011 11:54am EDT

LONDON (Reuters, Thomas Reuters 2011) – The earliest surviving Jane Austen manuscript, a handwritten draft for a book that was never published, sold for 993,250 pounds ($1.6 million) at Sotheby’s on Thursday [7/14/11].

The manuscript for “The Watsons” was bought by an anonymous telephone bidder for more than three times the top estimate.

Also in the London sale focusing on rare books, the earliest codified rules of soccer, part of the archive of the oldest football club in the world, Sheffield FC, fetched 881,250 pounds.

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“The sale of The Watsons [“probably written in 1804”’] has afforded an extremely broad audience an insight into the author’s writing process and reworkings, which this manuscript uniquely displays,” he said.

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“The Watsons is quintessential Jane Austen in style and the influence of this novel on her later works can clearly be seen,” Heaton said.

It was Austen’s only literary work during the period between finishing “Northanger Abbey” in 1799 and starting “Mansfield Park” in 1811.

It is not known why Austen abandoned the manuscript, though it was possibly related to her father’s death in 1805. Austen had told her sister Cassandra that the father in the novel, Mr Watson, would die in the course of the story.

…    (Editing by Steve Addison)