The Watsons in Winter: David Hopkinson ("Another")
What is it with the extended Hubback clan? They just can’t seem to get enough of Jane Austen’s fragment The Watsons.
The first person to continue The Watsons was Catherine Anne Austen Hubback, Jane Austen’s niece, with her 1850 novel The Younger Sister. Seventy-eight years later came Catherine’s granddaughter, Edith Hubback Brown, with a radically abridged version of Hubback’s novel that, Brown argued, hewed closer to Austen’s intentions.
And forty-nine years after that came yet another Hubback family production, which is the subject of today’s post in my “Watsons in Winter” blog series: a completion of The Watsons coyly attributed to “Jane Austen and Another." Despite the official cloak of anonymity, it seems to have been an open secret in Janeite circles that the author was David Hopkinson, the husband of Diana Hubback, a niece of Edith Brown.
Like Brown, Hopkinson aimed not to imagine his own ending to The Watsons but rather to rewrite Hubback’s novel, stripping away her subplots and dated interventions to allow what he perceived as a more Austen-like book to emerge.
Since we can’t know what Austen would have written had she ever returned to The Watsons, it’s hard to know how well Hopkinson succeeds in this effort. What’s clear is that his book is only partially successful as a novel in its own right.
