• 1 From Emma Tennant’s sequels to coquels and Jeremy Rosen’s ‘minor-character elaborations’ illustrate (...)
• 2 Laura Wade (born in 1977 in Bedford) was critically acclaimed for Posh (2010)—that became the film (...)

1This article proposes to consider the notion of transmission in relation to the process of adaptation since adaptations, whatever form they take, bring—transmit—a text to a new audience while submitting the text to a process of transformation and appropriation. Jane Austen’s relatively small body of work (six novels) has given rise to countless television or film adaptations, stage adaptations but also narrative expansions¹ and continuations that all revisit Austen’s characters and plots. The intermedial adaptation under consideration here is that of a fragment written by Jane Austen in 1805, The Watsons, by Olivier award winner playwright and screenwriter Laura Wade in 2018.² If continuations have been written, this is the first stage adaptation of The Watsons, a text published posthumously along with other unfinished fiction. For Kathryn Sutherland, ‘The manuscript, graphically Austen’s most disordered and unresolved, does not suggest a novel; rather, it appears to be a novella or long short story . . . it is written continuously, without chapter divisions or other strong structural markers’ (Sutherland 2018). This 43-page-long narrative (Austen 275318 in the Oxford paperback edition) introduces Emma Watson, newly returned to her impoverished family home (her father is a parson) after the rich aunt she was raised by dismissed her following her remarriage. Emma is thus gradually reacquainted with her family, notably her sisters who are unmarried and/or still hoping to find a husband, as their ailing father is severely ill. At her first ball, Emma meets Lord Osborne (an early version of Mr Darcy), his popular but flighty friend Tom Musgrave as well as the more modest Mr Howard (Austen 288289).

• 3 I am indebted here to Christine Geraghty who applies this questioning to Joe Wright’s adaptation of (...)

2In his review for The Guardian of Wade’s stage adaptation, Michael Billingdon declares that ‘one of the play’s many pleasures is its capacity to endlessly take us by surprise’. Indeed, to her stage adaptation of Austen’s text, Wade adds a metafictional dimension as she inscribes a version of herself, the author, into the plot under the character name of Laura and brings in echoes of Luigi Pirandello’s Six Characters in Search of an Author (1921), to which this article is of course indebted for its title. The aim of this study is to examine how Wade’s play reflects on its own status as an adaptation³ in the twenty-first century while tackling the issue of authenticity inevitably raised by adaptation and continuation. Following a few remarks on the adaptation of unfinished texts, I will examine the metafiction and metatheatricality at work before focusing on the issue of the ending.

• 4 Austen scholars conjecture that she abandoned the story for good when her father died in real life (...)

4A significant element to take into account is that The Watsons is an unfinished piece, which may lead us to wonder about the particularity of incomplete texts with regards to adaptation. The Watsons was abandoned by Austen.⁴ It differs from Sanditon which was more clearly meant to be a novel and falls within Merritt Moseley’s category of ‘fortuitous fragments’ of uncompleted wholes (Moseley 5) since it was interrupted by Austen’s death. However, what these two texts have in common is that, as unfinished pieces, they stand on the periphery of the Jane Austen canon. They do not generate the same interest as Austen’s completed works, which has made them less likely candidates for adaptation. Jane Austen’s six novels have all been adapted to the screen, big or small at least twice—a most recent example to date being another TV adaptation of Persuasion by Netflix (2022)—and to the stage on both sides of the Atlantic but it is only recently that attention has turned to Austen’s less well-known juvenilia and unfinished texts: Whit Stillman directed an adaptation of Austen’s epistolary novella Lady Susan in a lively and mischievous Love and Friendship (2016) and British channel ITV broadcast a popular adaptation of Austen’s unfinished Sanditon (2019), created by screenwriter Andrew Davies, author of the 1995 BBC adaptation of Pride and Prejudice that left its mark on viewers and later adapters of Austen. The Watsons had been left untouched by adaptors until Wade’s play. The implications of both the relative obscurity and the unfinished status of The Watsons are significant for our analysis of the play.

• 5 The book cover can be seen on the publishers’ website: https://www.bloomsbury.com/uk/watsons-978135 (...)

6Secondly, Austen’s name features in good place on the posters for the play and on the cover of the text published by Methuen. Indeed, although The Watsons may benefit from Jane Austen’s aura, it stands apart from the canon because of its fragmentary nature and unfinished status, which is significant for the adaptation. Whilst expectations of fidelity run rather high for classics, adaptations of Austen’s less well-known works are actually relatively free from this burden. As Susan Speidel aptly notes of Lady Susan, it is ‘a narrative whose brevity and canonical peripherality invites addition and change’ (Speidel). To the freedom conveyed by canonical peripherality, one might add the fragmentary dimension of these texts as further invitation to appropriation that is acknowledged and foregrounded in the paratext of Wade’s play: both book cover and poster bill claim the lineage with Jane Austen while pointing to the contemporaneity of the play through modern artefacts like a pair of trainers under a Georgian dress on the book cover or the addition of headphones or sunglasses on the portraits of the actors dressed in period costume on the bill.⁵ In other words, the postmodern stand is foregrounded.

• 6 Two more seasons were also developed.

7If the link with Austen can be advertised in the paratext and built upon in the text, one of the difficulties that remains for adaptation is how to deal with the unfinished status of the source text. When fragments are taken up for adaptation, they are usually given an ending. Examples include Elizabeth Gaskell’s Wives and Daughters (1864) in the screenplay by Andrew Davies (BBC 1999), Harold Pinter’s scenario for Elia Kazan’s 1976 adaptation of Fitzgerald’s The Last Tycoon (1941), and—possibly the most famous unfinished novel—Charles Dickens’s The Mystery of Edwin Drood (1870), which was given a resolution by Gwyneth Hughes in the 2012 BBC adaptation. It so happens that ITV’s adaptation of Jane Austen’s Sanditon was aired in 2019 at the same time as Wade’s play was performed (see Billington). The two adaptations are very different and not just because of their media. While Andrew Davies actually continues the story, seamlessly expanding an unfinished piece of 12 chapters and about 24,000 words into a screenplay that offered material for eight one-hour episodes as he adapts it to the screen,⁶ Laura Wade advertises her work as adaptation in a dramatisation in two acts of The Watsons that builds on its unfinished status and makes this the actual topic of the play.

• 7 For instance, there is one brother and one sister fewer for Emma in the play; Penelope’s reported a (...)

8When adapting a text to a new medium, the source text can be more or less distorted, deliberately or not, through adding, compressing or subtracting (Laera 4). In her stage adaptation, Wade necessarily slightly slims down the number of characters mentioned by Austen⁷ but uses almost verbatim most of the dialogues that make up the core of Austen’s text and builds on Austen’s supposed indications to her sister that Lord Osborne would propose to Emma and be declined while Lady Osborne’s affection for Mr Howard would be unrequited and he would eventually marry Emma (see Castle xxiv). This constitutes above a quarter of the play (28 pages out of a hundred). Wade takes the story to the point of Lord Osborne’s proposal but the until then speechless character of the servant intervenes, blurting out ‘No!’ (Wade 28) when Emma accepts. This character then talks Osborne into believing that it is better to wait a little and reveals to Emma, and then to the others that they are the unfinished creation of an author called Jane Austen, breaking the illusion for the audience as she steps in the characters’ world. Here is one of the play’s major paradoxes: Laura breaks the illusion and stops the unfolding of the story because she wants things to develop as planned by Jane Austen, in other words for the sake of authenticity and accurate transmission. Her avowed aim is to adapt rather than appropriate Austen’s work, to use Julie Sanders’s distinction according to which ‘[a]n adaptation most often signals a relationship with an informing source text’ whereas ‘appropriation frequently affects a more decisive journey away from the informing text into a wholly new cultural product and domain’ (Sanders 35). Incidentally, it is significant that Laura should have taken the guise of ‘A FEMALE SERVANT’ (22, original capitals and italics) to enter the play inconspicuously, servants being background and, mostly, unnamed characters in Austen’s novels: on the one hand, it participates in Laura’s attempt at authenticity; on the other hand, it indirectly evokes the interest shown to the lower classes in contemporary adaptations and appropriations of Austen, such as Jo Baker’s Longbourn (2013), a coquel to Pride and Prejudice that focuses on the servants of the household (see Parey 2019).

• 8 ‘the hypertext must constantly remain continuous with its hypotext, which it must merely bring to i (...)

16Similarly, in Act Two, once the characters know about their status, the character of the author explains how she intends to develop the plot: ‘OK, here’s what I think should happen. This is based on what we know of Jane Austen’s plans and stuff added by me on a What Would Jane Do kind of basis’ (Wade 51). She then narrates the continuation and ending she plans but it is not performed (see 5153). What is performed is the author discussing her plans for what Gérard Genette calls a ‘proleptic continuation’ (Genette 1997, 177), which imposes a coherence with the existing text⁸ but the process is also acknowledged as very similar to that of adaptation, as both are shown to be based on memory. For John Ellis, as a rule, ‘[t]he adaptation trades upon the memory of the novel, a memory that can derive from actual reading or, as is more likely with a classic of literature, a generally circulated cultural memory’ (Ellis 3), which also means that misremembering may partake of the adaptive process, but is deliberately not the case in Wade’s adaptation.

• 9 See also Parey on the ending to Sense and Sensibility on the page and on the screen in Ang Lee’s ad (...)

23Comedy ends in reconciliation. In the case of Austen’s novels, the popular perception is that they end happily in the form of a wedding, a view that is largely entertained by film and TV adaptations that stress the final union at the expense of the harsher considerations usually also present at the end of the novels. As Kathryn Sutherland pointed out in 2011, ‘[c]urrent adaptations are part of the rebranding of Jane Austen as the godmother of twenty-first-century romance’ (Sutherland 2011, 219220). Deborah Kaplan devised the concept of ‘harlequinization’ thinking of Jane Austen adaptations whose ‘focus is on a hero or heroine’s courtship at the expense of other characters’ (Kaplan 178).⁹ Wade’s adaptation of The Watsons addresses this as the metafictional dimension of the play enables a discussion of Laura’s wish for a traditional happy ending. Through the character of Laura defending and justifying her choice, Wade also provides a commentary of Austen’s fiction in her play: ‘The point is, that when she was writing—now—the only way for a daughter to gain independence from her family was through marriage. What Jane does is give you that independence but makes sure it’s also a love-match. That’s her feminist act’ (Wade 61).

• 10 Another instance is when, following a discussion about freedom in which Robert and Howard exchange (...)

25Laura’s power as author has been performed shortly after she breaks the news to Emma and fasts forward the clock to make her heroine come back sooner (Wade 37)—which is yet another metatheatrical gesture since it actually performs the narrative technique of ellipsis. Even as it is asserted, Laura’s authority however does not go unchallenged. In fact, contrary to Pirandello’s characters in search of an author, Wade’s characters reject authority: ‘Why don’t you try letting us do what we want’ (62) Emma asks. Through this and various other exchanges when Wade stages a version of herself who finds herself upholding traditional views, she lightly addresses the question of authorial control and ideology—sites of contestation for postmodernism.¹⁰

• 11 Margaret, previously portrayed as desperate to marry well, just like Lucy Steele in Sense and Sensi (...)

27In a fairly traditional way, two of Emma’s sisters get married at the end of the play¹¹ even though these are not the unions Austen had apparently planned. Wade too eventually gives a contemporary slant to her continuation cum adaptation of Austen and to the happy endings met by the characters but she is open about it through the self-reflexive dimension of the play. As a result, Wade imagines contemporary options for Austen’s characters. For example, the ill-assorted couple formed by the Roberts—which prefigures the Palmers and the Middletons in Sense and Sensibility and the Bennets in Pride and Prejudice—is now allowed to separate. Lady Osborne voices her dissatisfaction with a life full of constraints, her attraction for Nanny and eventually makes her love public while Nanny’s initial answer to Lady Osborne brings about the unwritten life of lesbianism. A feminist outlook is also given by Lord Osborne’s decision to end male primogeniture (dismissing the entailment that is the cause of worry in several novels by Austen) and to pass on his title to his daughter while his sister Miss Osborne enters the army.