FICTION

EMMA WATSON: The Watsons Completed by Joan Aiken (St. Martin’s: $20.95, 221 pp.). The Jane Austen revival, now a Hollywood juggernaut, rolls on (see following review as well). Joan Aiken is not a Janey-come-lately, however; she’s been writing Austen sequels for more than a decade, and her prose style shows most of Austen’s confidence.

“Emma Watson” is the realization of the unfinished novel “The Watsons,” and it’s familiar Austen territory: unmarried young women, remarkably bright but conspicuously poor, attempting to retain their hopes and dignity in a frequently dishonest world. This Emma is a musical child, one of six siblings, and charged with taking care of her father, a beloved parson. At his death, however, she must find a new home and ends up residing with two siblings--first the grasping, profligate Penelope, who with her unloved husband is attempting to restore a mansion, then Robert, an insufferable Babbitt with an even more insufferable wife and child.

Emma bears the brunt of much family anger, for being both independently minded and morally superior, but her Austenian pluck assures eventual success. Her fortunes rise, due to fate as well as charm and dedication, even as her unpleasant siblings fall. Emma rescues a beloved aunt from ill health and poverty, meets the prince regent through her editing of her father’s sermons and marries a man of real substance. There are traces of a modern sensibility at work here--Robert’s disgust at Emma’s finding employment as a piano teacher, scheming capitalists bringing ruin on the innocent--but they end up lending gravity to what can seem, today, lightweight social concerns.

Would Austen approve of “Emma Watson”? Lord knows, but she surely would enjoy her heroine’s redemption.