Unpublished Jane Austen Manuscript Sold at Auction

Today is an exciting day for Jane Austen lovers. Her incomplete manuscript for a novel called The Watsons was sold at a Sotheby’s auction in London for 993,250 British pounds, the equivalent of $1.6 million US dollars, more than three times the amount expected by Sotheby’s. According to the LA Times, The Watsons “was begun, then abandoned, by Austen in 1804, after she’d drafted Sense and Sensibility but seven years before its publication. Austen got about one-fourth of the way through the manuscript of The Watsons before abandoning the manuscript.” The handwritten document is 68 pages long (plus six blank pages) and includes Austen’s own corrections and notes; the loose pages are contained in a box. Aside from the first 12 pages belonging to the Morgan Library and Museum in New York, The Watsons is the only known privately owned Jane Austen manuscript.