It has always been a source of great frustration to Janeites that Jane Austen abandoned The Watsons after only seventeen and a half thousand words. It is, as Margaret Drabble says, a "tantalising, delightful and highly accomplished fragment, which must surely have proved the equal of her other six novels had she finished it." In Emma Watson, Joan Aiken at long last completes The Watsons. Nineteen-year-old Emma, adopted by her aunt after the death of her mother, has rejoined her ailing father and her favorite sister, Elizabeth. Her stuffy brother Robert is living in Croydon with his grasping wife; her shrewish sister Penelope looks to have made a good match; her brother Sam is trying to make his way as a doctor; and Emma's immediate elder, Margaret, fancies herself in love with Tom Musgrave. Austen characters all, yet Joan Aiken, with consummate skill, makes them her own.