Playwright adapts unpublished Jane Austen work for the stage

Another unfinished Jane Austen work has come to modern fruition.

Austen abandoned work on The Watsons in 1805, according to the New York Times, though several writers (two of them related to Austen) have wrapped it up over the years.

British playwright Laura Wade told the Times that when she was approached about adapting an Austen work for the stage, she balked, not wanting to do yet another version of Pride and Prejudice.

But upon discovering The Watsons in a collection of unpublished works, Wade changed her mind.

Professors theorize that The Watsons, whose main characters are losing their father and thus any sort of financial security, hit too close to home for Austen, hence her abandonment of the manuscript.

The play opened Saturday at the Chichester Festival Theater, in southeast England.

Read more about it (since you likely won’t be seeing it live soon) here.

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