Popular Sequels to Jane Austen's Novels

Emma & Knightley

Rachel Billington

Excerpt from Chapter 1

EMMA KNIGHTLEY, HANDSOME, CLEVER and rich, with a husband whose affection for her was only equalled by her affection for him, had passed upward of a year of marriage in what may be described as perfect happiness; certainly this is how she described it to herself as she sat at her writing desk from which she had an excellent view of her father, Mr Woodhouse, taking a turn round the shrubbery on the arm of her beloved Mr Knightley.

Emma smiled as she watched them, smiled and repressed a sigh as she saw the tender way in which Mr Knightley – she would never bring herself to call him George – put his upright, manly self between the cool autumnal breeze and the frail figure of her father. Since she, herself, usually performed this daily office for her father – Mr Knightley often being occupied in the mornings when her father felt the air most conducive to good health – seldom did she have the opportunity of seeing her parent as he appeared at a distance to the objective eye.

His walking was tentative, it could not be denied, but then he had never been quick, or never since she could remember him. It was possible – Emma considered the idea from the heights of her still new stature as a wife – that his sense of himself as an invalid had stemmed from the early death of Mrs Woodhouse, causing him to distrust health. If that were the cause – and, by his affectionate accounts of his wife, she had possessed all the vivacity, intellectual vigour and good health that any woman could wish for – then it was understandable that her adoring husband’s temperament should receive a severe shock at her unexpected death; that he would never be the same, but always fearful, not just for himself, but for his daughters (Emma had an elder sister, Isabella), their husbands, Isabella’s five children (soon to be six), his friends, acquaintances and, in short, the whole world, small as it was, that he inhabited.

For Mr Woodhouse, a draught from a not properly closed window was as dangerous as a wind chased from Petersburg over the snowy wastes of Siberia; a sneeze from relation or friend caused as much consternation as the plague spots in a Turkoman port; a boot only slightly damp from a walk across mown grass excited his terror to such an extent that the wearer – usually Emma, who was his nearest and dearest, although not of an especially active, energetic disposition – must submit to a hot mustard bath and constant enquiries as to her temperature.

All this Emma had known since she was a child and such was her love for her father, so fond was she of him, that she had thought of it as illustrating the kindness of his heart rather than as any weakness of character. But that had been before her marriage.

The Watsons and
Emma Watson

Joan Aiken

Excerpt from Chapter 1 of Emma Watson

WHAT A VERY FORTUNATE CIRCUMSTANCE IT WAS THAT ROBERT and Jane chose this day to visit their friends at Alford,’ said Emma Watson, walking into the wash-house with a large bundle of table-linen in her arms.

‘Indeed yes!’ agreed her sister Elizabeth, briskly giving a stir to various tubs of laundry soaking in solutions of household soda and unslaked lime. ‘Those cloths you have there, Emma, can go straight into the copper, unless any of them is badly stained.’

‘Only this handkerchief of my father’s, which has ink on it.’

‘Spread it out in a pan of oxalic acid. Or spirits of sorrel. You will find the bottles next door, on the shelf.’

The wash-house at Stanton Parsonage was a large, draughty room with a York stone floor, a copper, and a range of wooden tubs. The bleaching-room, next to it, was used for ironing, mangling, and drying. These two rooms were, of course, on the ground floor, with doors and windows giving on to the stable-yard; all the windows were wide open at the moment to let out the steam.

Both sisters wore pattens, and had tied voluminous linen aprons over their cambric gowns.

‘I do think that Margaret, at least, might have stayed behind and helped us, since she knew poor old Nanny was laid up with her bad foot,’ observed Emma dispassionately, spreading out the stained kerchief in a pan of bleaching solution.

‘Hah! Margaret would be of no more use than a child of three. Less! She would grumble and stand about and argue and complain that the soda spoilt her white hands. No; we go on very well as we are, Emma! I am infinitely obliged to you for your good nature in sharing the work with me, and only thankful that it is such a capital drying-day; if we can get the bed-linen out into the orchard by nine o’clock, everything may well be put away before our guests return for dinner. For once it is an advantage that they like to keep late, fashionable hours.’

‘I am only sorry that you could not go with them, Elizabeth; you never seem to get a day’s holiday.’

‘Oh, it pleases me much better to get this great wash done,’ said Elizabeth simply. ‘Besides I would not, no, I would not at all have wished to go along with Robert and Jane today – not for the universe, indeed! The visit would only arouse the most painful recollections; in fact—’ Her voice was choked, she stood silently over the boiling copper, biting her lips in an effort to control a rising sob, as she stirred the white and steamy brew with a wooden batten.

Emma threw a quick, unhappy glance at her elder sister.

Elizabeth Watson was now twenty-nine, long past all hope of matrimonial prospects. The sisters had been parted for fourteen years, and Emma’s last recollections of Elizabeth were from when the latter was fifteen, a tall, lively, handsome girl, with a fresh complexion and a wonderful head of thick, pale-gold hair, like that of a Nordic princess; now her face was thin, careworn, and at the moment flushed and greasy with steam; the hair, lank and flat, long since concealed under an old-maid’s cap.

It is so unfair, thought Emma helplessly; Eliza was far prettier than either Margaret or Penelope; why should she have been obliged to waste her youth and good looks in this kind of task while they may go away visiting and enjoying themselves?

Old Friends and New Fancies

Sybil G. Brinton

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Excerpt:

In this little attempt at picturing the after-adventures of some of Jane Austen’s characters I have made use of the references to them which she herself made, and which are recorded in Mr. Austen-Leigh’s “Memoir.” More grateful acknowledgments than I can ever express are due to my friend Edith Barran, without whom this book could not have been written. The difficulties, as well as the presumption, of such an undertaking, are alike evident; but the fascination of the subject must be our apology to those who, like ourselves, “owe to Jane Austen of the happiest hours of their lives.”
S.G.B.

The following characters are introduced into the story.

CHAPTER 1

There is one characteristic which may be safely said to belong to nearly all happily-married couples—that of desiring to see equally happy marriages among their young friends; and in some cases, where their wishes are strong and circumstances seem favourable to the exertion of their own efforts, they may even embark upon the perilous but delightful course of helping those persons whose minds are as yet not made up, to form a decision respecting this important crisis in life, and this done, to assist in clearing the way in order that this decision may forthwith be acted upon.

Some good intentions of this kind, arising out of a very sincere affection for both the persons concerned, and a real anxiety about the future of the younger and dearer of the two, had actuated Elizabeth and Mr. Darcy in promoting an engagement between Georgiana Darcy and Colonel Fitzwilliam. Georgiana was then twenty, and had lived entirely with her brother during the three and a half years of his married life. Reserved, shy, without self-reliance, and slow to form new attachments, she had been accustomed to look upon the Colonel as, after her brother, her eldest and best friend, a feeling which the disparity of their ages served to strengthen. She had therefore accepted the fact of their new relations with a kind of timid pleasure, only imploring Elizabeth that nothing need be said about marriage for some time to come.

“Elizabeth, when I am married, shall I have to go and stay at Rosings without you?” she had asked; and on being assured that such might be the terrible consequences of matrimony, she had manifested a strong inclination not to look beyond the present, but to enjoy for some time longer the love and protection she had always met with as an inmate of her brother’s house.

Lady Catherine de Bourgh had thought it necessary to go through the form of expressing displeasure at the whole proceeding, in consequence of Darcy’s omission to ask her advice in the disposal of his sister’s hand, but in reality she so thoroughly approved of the match between her nephew and niece that she forgot her chagrin, and talked everywhere of her satisfaction in at last seeing a prospect of a member of the Darcy family being united to one who was in every respect worthy of the position.

Eliza's Daughter

Joan Aiken

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 Mansfield Park Revisited

Joan Aiken

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