The premise has much potential: Emma Watson comes from a poor family (with three older sisters, all ominously unmarried) but was raised by a wealthy aunt and stands apart in manners and outlook from her more rustic kin. Having suffered the loss of her inheritance before she could ever receive it, Emma has returned to her dying father as one more burden upon him, only to attract the attention of Lord Osborne – the richest man in the province. However, Osborne lacks social grace and Emma does not encourage him: ‘Female economy will do a great deal my Lord, but it cannot turn a small income into a large one.’ From what Jane Austen told her sister, the greater plot of The Watsons (hopefully to have been given a less quotidian name somewhere down the line) would have involved the family’s increasing financial woes and Emma’s pursuit of a more satisfying match with the pleasant Mr. Howard.What we have here is the beginning of a very dark storyline, with a family on the verge of losing its patriarch and all of its prospects. The ailing father figure gives clear reason for why Austen would have laid the manuscript aside upon her own father’s demise and this casts a shadow over the book as the Watson girls have nothing to fall back on. The middle sisters Penelope and Margaret have devolved into thoughtless backbiting as they jockey for a man’s eye while eldest Elizabeth has resigned herself to the hope of a practical match. The most effective moment of the piece comes as Elizabeth quietly relates the story of her lost love, heartbreaking both as a ruined romance and as one person’s selfishness ruins the best hopes of the entire family: