Austen Auction

Pages from Jane Austen's unfinished novel, The Watsons, is on the auction block.

From a piece in the Wall Street Journal...

"The Watsons" is the only major Austen manuscript still in private hands and one of very few manuscripts to survive, according to Gabriel Heaton, a senior specialist in the books and manuscripts department at Sotheby's. He adds, "It's very much a working draft. You can see how her mind was moving—how she's refining and sharpening her text as she revises."
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The novel tells the story of Emma Watson, a smart and idealistic English girl not unlike Elizabeth Bennet, the heroine of "Pride and Prejudice." Emma must return home to her middle-class family when the wealthy aunt who raised her blows what would have been her inheritance on a messy second marriage. There, she tends to her ill father and observes her sisters' hunt for rich husbands.

There are clues as to what Austen intended to happen in the subsequent chapters, thanks largely to the many letters she wrote to her sister Cassandra.

Update: It sold for A LOT OF MONEY.