In announcing the acquisition of Jane Austen's novel, the Bodleian Library wrote:
The Watsons is Austen’s first extant draft of a novel in process of development and one of the earliest examples of an English novel to survive in its formative state.
The full pages suggest that Jane Austen did not anticipate a protracted process of redrafting. With no calculated blank spaces and no obvious way of incorporating large revision or expansion she had to find other strategies – the three patches, small pieces of paper, each of which was filled closely and neatly with the new material, attached with straight pins to the precise spot where erased material was to be covered or where an insertion was required to expand the text.
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