This is a fine study of a limited topic in Jane Austen studies. It is also far more worth reading than Irene Collins’s other book, Jane Austen: The PaThis is a fine study of a limited topic in Jane Austen studies. It is also far more worth reading than Irene Collins’s other book, Jane Austen: The Parson's Daughter. Unfortunately, this volume is much less available, and only at inflated prices, in the United States. The Parson’s Daughter is the “lite” version of this book, with much less information about the Church in Austen’s day; it is padded out with biographical material and literary criticism, neither area Collins’s strong suit.
Jane Austen and the Clergy starts from the premise—impossible to deny but generally overlooked by modern critics and historians—that Austen was fundamentally a religious person and her understanding of her society was rooted in her religion. The book begins with a survey of her clerical family members and proceeds to give details about how clergymen got their jobs, their education, income, home life, place in the community, and other practical details. The final section of the book addresses the manners and morals implicit in adherence to the Church of England at the end of the eighteenth century, the place of morals in society, and Austen’s own worship habits. It is altogether a comprehensive survey of the subject and I found it very useful.
The writing is unexciting but competent and Collins makes her subject matter clear. I appreciated her depth of reading in the sermons, theology, and philosophy of the era, basing her choice of materials in what Austen most likely would have read or been aware of. The book has ample notes and bibliography for anyone inclined to dig deeper, but the notes don’t intrude on the text.
I wish I had read this book first: it would have obviated reading her second....more
This book was not what I expected from reading the title and cover blurb. The first four chapters seemed promising enough, but my opinion declined as This book was not what I expected from reading the title and cover blurb. The first four chapters seemed promising enough, but my opinion declined as I went along. What I was expecting was a close examination of the ways life in a parsonage and Jane Austen’s personal piety affected her writing—and I did get some of what I sought. (Perhaps there is more to be found in the author’s less-available first book, Jane Austen and the Clergy.)
But most of the book was really just sketchy popular biography, of a type all too common in Jane Austen studies aimed at the general reader. There is a woeful lack of rigor in the Austen studies field that has promoted and perpetuated myths about the author’s life and opinions, and this book dives confidently into those turgid waters. So we get, for instance, the statement that the first version of Sense and Sensibility was written in epistolary form, when in fact that claim rests only on the hazy recollection of one niece that one of the earliest novels was in its first draft epistolary, and the niece thought it was S&S—even though Pride and Prejudice shows far more signs of an epistolary origin, with many crucial plot developments being revealed in letters. Collins passes on as established fact many such shaky speculations. This habit of over-assuming is rampant among the popular biographers; only the most scholarly biographers cite their sources for a claim and analyze the reliability of the source, and even some of those speculate far too freely about Austen’s motivations or what was really going on.
Aside from this lack of discipline, most of Collins’s comments about the novels are fairly mainstream; only rarely did she surprise me with an insight that derived from her knowledge of the English clergy and Church of England doctrine. I valued those scattered insights but wish I hadn’t had to plow my way through the whole book to find them. All too often, the author seeks to make her discussion of a particular novel relevant to her book’s title simply by mentioning a clergyman: one of the more egregious instances was when talking about First Impressions, the first version of Pride and Prejudice: “The members of Jane Austen’s family who were privileged to have ‘First Impressions’ read out to them whilst it was in progress (including her father and her eldest brother, James—clergymen both) heard it with great enjoyment.”
I did finish this book—mainly so that I wouldn’t be guilty of criticizing it unjustly—and for my current purposes will probably read her first book to see if I can pick up any more details about the clergy and the life of a clergyman’s daughter; but the pearls of wisdom I hoped for based on the title were scanty enough to disappoint me. A general reader who has not read widely about Jane Austen might enjoy this, but should do so with caution....more
This book might easily disappoint readers who come to it with mistaken expectations. As I read it, I kept having to adjust my sense of what it was aboThis book might easily disappoint readers who come to it with mistaken expectations. As I read it, I kept having to adjust my sense of what it was about and what it was trying to do.
What it is not: (1) A study of Jane Austen’s novels. (2) A work of scholarship tracing Austen’s literary influences in her texts.
Once I had rid myself of these suppositions, I could enjoy the book more. What it is: a memoir by a rare book dealer about her journey of discovering the greatness of female authors who were recognized and praised (more or less) by Jane Austen; and an interrogation of the notion that authorities can determine what is, and isn’t, worth reading. Rebecca Romney achieves these aims quite well.
Each of the book’s chapters zeroes in on a single author. After a short introductory chapter about Austen herself, Romney examines the life and literary contributions of Frances Burney, Ann Radcliffe, Charlotte Lennox, Hannah More, Charlotte Smith, Elizabeth Inchbald, Hester Lynch Thrale Piozzi, and Maria Edgeworth. (The chapter on Maria Edgeworth disappointed me a bit by leaving out what happened to Edgeworth after her father died; the back half of that chapter is devoted to laying out Romney’s main thesis.)
Romney takes an interesting path in her explorations, one non-obvious to those accustomed to scholarly research but nevertheless revealing and suited to her skills: she traces the reputations of the writers through editions of their books and literary commentaries about them over the course of centuries. She has a persistent interest in why these authors, so famous and revered in their day, largely disappeared from view after their deaths. What she uncovers is a pattern familiar to feminist critics—minimization, what I call “niching,” even lies attributing their work to others. She articulates clearly what many female readers have noticed over the years—that there is space in the “canon” of important literature for an infinite number of men but a limited number of women (basically, one per era), so the inclusion of one Georgian-era female author (Austen) demands the exclusion of all the others.
This is a familiar consequence of the “othering” of women, so I felt the observation could have been made at less length. I did find the book sometimes self-absorbed and windy; Romney could have articulated her conclusions without quite so lovingly tracing every step she took to get there. Nevertheless, for people who have not read about the lives or works of the authors she covers, the biographical details and the windows into their literary oeuvre are very valuable. Although I’m moderately fluent in eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century fiction, I learned some new things along the way.
I also enjoyed the book-dealer-style detective work. It was fascinating to see how her collation discipline—the process of examining each page of a newly acquired volume to understand it better—and her critical reading of dealers’ book descriptions gave her important clues to the writers’ lives and the devaluation and revaluation of their reputations.
This examination of Austen’s precursors is not comprehensive: I missed mentions of Jane West, Susan Ferrier, Clara Reeves, Mary Hays, and more. That’s not a knock on the book, it’s just a recognition that there is more lode in this mine—an acknowledgment that would probably please Romney, since she situates her work explicitly in a larger context of explorers devoted to rediscovering the works of female writers. I don’t think Romney would object to being called a “partial, prejudiced historian.”...more
It is a sad rule of Austenesque fiction that the more famous the author, the worse the end product. I entertained hopes that this book would be the exIt is a sad rule of Austenesque fiction that the more famous the author, the worse the end product. I entertained hopes that this book would be the exception, but the rule held.
Paula Byrne wrote an interesting study of small details in Austen’s novels and their significance, so I took her for an Austen scholar. Sadly, the multiple errors in this book undeceived me. She centers a plot point on the release of Maria Edgeworth’s novel Belinda in scenes beginning in May 1801 and in the afterword claims a summer 1801 publication date for the book—but it was actually published in December of that year. She mentions twice the “breeching” of Jane Austen’s cousin’s son Hastings—but Hastings was born in 1783 and died the year this story is set. She waxes poetic about a lamplighter going about the streets of Bath extinguishing the streetlamps—but Bath did not get its gas lamps until 1818. Capability Brown died in 1783 so he could not have built a fake ruin in a garden two or three years before the story is set. I could go on.
If you still intend to read this book, this paragraph contains spoilers. I won’t dignify them by using the spoiler feature. Most egregious to this writer of historical fiction was the abuse of the life of the man she chose as her hero, Samuel Rose. Rose was a real person, a lawyer who, in 1804, defended William Blake in court on a charge of sedition. Rose collapsed in court and died not long afterward. Note the date: three years after this story was set. Rose was also a married man. Fancying him as a suitable suitor for Jane Austen, Byrne throws out the facts of his life and tells a false story about him. I abhor this increasingly common practice: if you want to use a historical figure in a story but the facts of his life are inconvenient, you change the names of the parties involved and create your own character based on your model. You don’t tell a false story.
For those who think these are nitpicky objections, the storytelling is jerky and inconsistent. Sometimes it relies on a thorough knowledge of the Austen family, sometimes it over-explains. There are narrative gaps that made it hard to follow in spots. Sometimes the language is a pleasing simulacrum of Georgian prose, sometimes it is flat-out modern. (And some words intended to lend a Georgian flavor were misused: “preferment” did not mean “having a preference for.”) Characters are introduced who have little or no function in the story: why on earth are several paragraphs from The Watsons dragged in wholesale, introducing Tom Musgrave, only to have him vanish for the remainder of the story?
I enjoyed some of the literary conversations, and in an alternate universe Samuel Rose might have been a fitting suitor for Jane Austen, so there was a good idea for a novel here. But the execution was tremendously disappointing to me....more
As my survey of completions of Jane Austen’s unfinished novel The Watsons draws to a close (only one to go save for three that are inaccessible to me)As my survey of completions of Jane Austen’s unfinished novel The Watsons draws to a close (only one to go save for three that are inaccessible to me), I find myself impressed with the wide range of imaginative possibilities authors have found in this work. This version is one of the most original.
Kaila Haines latched on to one aspect of Austen’s description of her heroine, Emma Watson: her brown skin. I don’t think Austen intended what Haines assumed she intended, but Haines’s interpretation—that she had West Indies ancestry on her mother’s side, i.e., that she was part Black or possibly part Indigenous—opens a whole new alternative universe on the story, and I was all in for that! Emma’s brother Samuel is also described as being dark-complected, and that external plays an interesting and plausible part in both their storylines. Both the reactions of others and the impact on Emma and Samuel themselves are given due attention in a way that is sensitive but not preachy.
Haines disposes of Austen’s text in a summary prologue before diving into her story. This brief summary leaves out some things that are later alluded to in the plot, so readers who have not read The Watsons might sometimes find themselves bewildered. She proceeds to change aspects of the characters, including the birth order of the Watson siblings, and she takes other liberties, some that work and some that create fresh problems. Mr. Watson senior is killed off quickly, and the entire focus is on what happens to the siblings afterward.
Unfortunately, much of what happens afterward is implausible to any reader familiar with the manners and society of Georgian or Regency England. Several Watson sisters take on professions that would forever exclude them from polite society, much less admit them to the acquaintance of a duke and duchess. The author has no idea about mealtimes or how meals were conducted, and the fashions she describes cover about 50 years of style changes. A parsonage did not belong to its incumbent and could not stay in the family after his death; the family would need to vacate within a few months to make way for his successor. These are just a few cosmetic examples of how Haines gets the period details wrong.
Nevertheless, I enjoyed this completion—why? In part it was the character and personality of the heroine. She is excessively idealized, making her a somewhat static figure and forcing the book to rely too much on incident, but she is always charming and universally kind (the lone exception being one scene at the end when she unleashes on Tom Musgrave, called “Musgrove” in this story). The tale is full of instances of her charitable response to the foibles of others, of domestic joy, of humble virtues—elements too often overlooked in stories that focus on attraction. Her process of falling in love with the hero is gradual and deliberate and based in assessment of character, which matters a great deal to me as a reader.
We are offered regular insight into the hero’s thought processes—something Austen usually excludes from her novels—and I found him less satisfying. A story with two idealized protagonists has to rely on either physical separation or misunderstanding to delay a happy ending, and there was too much artificial misunderstanding, especially on his side. Mr. Howard is given a noble family but his personality, demeanor, and relationships with the Osbornes did not match the position in society his heritage would provide him. Haines fundamentally misunderstands the British class structure of the early nineteenth century, which led to many situations I could not accept.
But I keep coming back to how much I enjoyed this book, and that enjoyment was rooted in character and the ways that values played out in the characters’ lives. Haines has created a world in which real love cannot exist without a sober respect for a person’s motives and actions. My enjoyment would probably have been greater if the author had moved the story to another era, which wouldn’t have challenged my credulity so far. Even so, this version is very much worth reading for its originality and heart....more
For my taste, Shapard over-annotates his Jane Austen editions, as well as including spoilers unfair to first-time readers. But his Persuasion is one oFor my taste, Shapard over-annotates his Jane Austen editions, as well as including spoilers unfair to first-time readers. But his Persuasion is one of the least over-annotated among them (there are a lot of spoilers but mostly they cover only what is about to happen, not events further out in the stotyline). So I didn’t mind this edition as much as I have some of his others, though I still prefer the Harvard/Belknap annotated editions, save for the Northanger Abbey one.
I’ve reviewed Persuasion in other editions so I won’t go into depth here. Suffice it to say that this is one of my least favorite Austen novels (declined from being the favorite of my youth). I believe Austen ran out of time to expand and revise it, so there are underdeveloped characters and subplots. And every time I read about Frederick Wentworth, I like him less. His assessment of his own character in the final chapters echoes my own views. Perhaps his time living among the brutalities of the British Navy coarsened him, but his tendency to cruelty and resentment makes me dread the “happy” ending.
On this reading I sought for, and did not find, attenuating circumstances for Wentworth, but derived more satisfaction from studying Austen’s techniques for conveying emotion through irregular syntax....more
For some decades it seems, ladies descended from Jane Austen’s siblings made a cottage industry out of completing her unfinished novel The Watsons. ThFor some decades it seems, ladies descended from Jane Austen’s siblings made a cottage industry out of completing her unfinished novel The Watsons. This is the third such book I have read.
The earliest attempt, The Younger Sister by Catherine Hubback, is by far the most substantial, and the other efforts are direct descendants of it. The one by L. Oulton offers no more than a summary of a plot that picks up where Austen left off; this one is fuller but still quite a sketchy effort. The original fragment takes up nearly half the book, where it should by rights have been no more than a quarter.
Most of the events in this Edith and Francis Brown version (Edith being the Austen descendant) follow those in The Younger Sister, albeit somewhat rearranged. The Browns make some stabs at Austenesque witty bon mots, a few of them successful, and much of the dialogue is effective, but otherwise this book has little to recommend it. It is all incident and no theme. Like so many completers of this work, the authors imagine that the point of the story is a romance, and the romance must be impeded by jealousy and misunderstanding.
How can I say this more clearly? Getting married is not what Jane Austen novels are about. They are about the moral education of the protagonists, their process of learning to live with integrity, amiability, propriety, and dignity. They must learn to do right by others and by themselves. “Love” meant something different to Jane Austen than it does to most of those who attempt to ape or interpret her, and the love her protagonists earn has more to do with finding their right place in the world than with mere attraction.
A much later completion, the one by Helen Baker writing as “Another Lady,” also hews closely to The Younger Sister’s lineage (in fact, that one is basically a truncated plagiarism) and it is more successful. However much these completions may rely on insider knowledge, however, I find I prefer the completions such as Ann Toledo’s or Rose Servitova’s that stray further afield, pairing different characters together and inventing more scenarios to test them. I think it is because those authors were forced to think more deeply about the fragment and see more deeply into the characters’ motives and impulses....more
In a notice at the beginning of this thin volume, the author claims to love Jane Austen’s works and to be “unable to bear not knowing what happened toIn a notice at the beginning of this thin volume, the author claims to love Jane Austen’s works and to be “unable to bear not knowing what happened to the characters in the unfinished The Watsons.” I find the expression of her love somewhat mystifying. How is it affectionate to change the setting of the story, the material circumstances, and even the characters’ personalities from the original in order to spin her own tale? She would have done better to change the names of the characters and start from scratch, calling it an homage to Jane Austen.
Since Andrews is making wholesale changes to the story, she does not include Austen’s fragment in the volume, instead offering a very pared-down one-page summary of its essentials, leaving out all the inconvenient facts she wishes to change. In her rendition, Mr. Watson is not a clergyman but a gentleman of slim means living in a parish known sometimes as Stanton and sometimes as S, where Mr. Howard is the clergyman and the aristocratic Osbornes are also parishioners. The Edwards family is also resident in the same village; gone are Dorking and Wickstead.
Mr. Watson has the same array of children and all but Robert are recognizable. Robert is transformed from a small-town attorney to a well-to-do merchant; he still lives in Croydon, but the author appears to consider Croydon a neighborho0d of London, instead of being its own town a three-and-a-half-hour carriage ride away. The Edwards family is sunk to the status of the Watsons’ inferiors, though they are still genteel enough to give musical parties to which all the gentry are invited; they seemed to change status according to the needs of the scene. The result of these changes is a measure of disorientation in any reader familiar with The Watsons, and even a bit of internal incoherence.
The story is told mostly in narrative, with only occasional bursts of dialogue, making it feel like a summary. It changes point of view often, revealing much of what is going on at Osborne Castle when the heroine is far away—which is a tempting convenience but tends to make the story less suspenseful for the reader. The action also takes place in some era other than the original: an offstage character is off on the Grand Tour, which was not possible during the Napoleonic Wars. Another character goes off to Europe, with no mention of any conflict. Why then do we still have a militia in town?
To the positives: Andrews has made a pretty good stab at period language in both the narrative and the dialogue, and she seems to have a good grasp of the manners and social distinctions of the age. I liked many of her ideas about how the story might play out in terms of the characters’ motivations; (view spoiler)[her Lord Osborne, for instance, is secretly a bit relieved that Emma rejects him, his attraction to her not being stronger than his worries about how such an unequal match might play out in real life and his wish for peace in his home. (hide spoiler)]
This small paperback is only 124 pages long, so even if the original fragment had been added, the story would feel a bit thin. What there is did offer some satisfactions, despite my sense of disorientation....more
Laura Place, the last of Ann Mychal’s trilogy based on Jane Austen’s fragment The Watsons, includes at the back of the book a list of characters and tLaura Place, the last of Ann Mychal’s trilogy based on Jane Austen’s fragment The Watsons, includes at the back of the book a list of characters and their connections to one another. Familiar as I am with the original fragment and all of Austen’s novels, I found it useful on occasion.
Part of the problem is a naming issue: the trilogy spans multiple generations, so there are multiple characters of the same or similar names. Mychal follows correct Regency-era naming conventions, which exacerbates the problem—a lesser writer would have resorted to first names for the reader’s convenience. The difficulties I encountered with the proliferation of Lady Osbornes and Mrs. Beresfords, however, exposes another issue I had with the trilogy: Mychal is so deeply immersed in her characters that she tends to forget her readers are less so.
This leads both to confusion along the lines of “Remind me now why Captain Blake is avoiding Lady Dalrymple?” or “Why is Lady Allersham not telling Mrs. Beresford that secret?” and to a tendency for characters’ personalities to be a little flat. Characters can be so vivid in a writer’s mind that she invests their words and actions with a weight of significance not immediately apparent to the reader, and I found that to be the case here. I didn’t feel the characters’ struggles and growth very often, particularly when much of the action involved married people conspiring to pair up the singletons instead of the singletons’ own struggles.
Mychal’s greatest strengths lie in an elegant deployment of Regency-esque language and her grasp of the history and manners of the age. These are not inconsiderable skills, and they make the reading of her books a pleasure. Plotting is not one of her greater strengths, nor is shaping a story in such a way that it is told by the characters who have the most at stake. In both the second and the third novels in the series, I felt we were standing outside the heart of the action, spending too much time inside the mind of the wrong persons. In this book especially, I grew tired of people sitting around conversing elegantly while the story stalled.
In my reviews I tend to focus on what did not work for me because it interests me the most to tease out the source and nature of my dissatisfactions. That makes me a more severe critic than I would like to be. I admire Ann Mychal’s work a great deal and hope to read more of it, especially when she has not placedsuch constraints on her storyline by insisting on drawing in characters from multiple Austen works once....more
In volume 2 of Ann Mychal’s Watson Novels series, we move beyond the original intended storyline of Jane Austen’s fragment—an entire generation ahead,In volume 2 of Ann Mychal’s Watson Novels series, we move beyond the original intended storyline of Jane Austen’s fragment—an entire generation ahead, in fact. All the characters whose distresses were chronicled in Emma and Elizabeth are now settled, happily or unhappily according to their deserts, with few surprises. And so we move on to a new pair of heroines, Miss Emma Osborne and Miss Anne Musgrave, the daughters of the principals from the first book.
Unfortunately, to my mind the author picked badly when she chose this new Emma to center the story on. For much of the novel, she is a spoiled, self-centered airhead. Over the course of the book she becomes less spoiled and less self-centered, but the only sign of her becoming less of an airhead is her reading Jane Austen’s novels at the behest of an eligible young man. The author gives her moments of courage and determination, but after the punishment of living with her unregenerate self for too many pages, I did not really believe in the better Emma. (Truth be told, I have the same problem with Jane Austen’s Emma Woodhouse, making me a poor choice of reader for this type of narrative.) I found Anne a much more interesting character, but (a) we see her only through Emma’s eyes and (b) I struggled to believe in her as the issue of Tom Musgrave and Elizabeth Watson.
There are compensations, and they are sizable ones. Mychal’s gift for Regency dialogue is great, and it’s given more scope in this second book because she is largely freed of the original Austen characters (they are a bit like the walking dead here, nominally alive but just background figures). Lady Forbes is a delicious character, worthy of Georgette Heyer—and I say that as an unalloyed compliment. The interactions of the Dowager and Mrs. Turner are generally fun as well. Penelope is unfortunately one-note and Margaret is mercifully invisible.
There are two eligible young men, and I liked the mature self-possession of one of them, but for too long his backstory remains no more than sketched in. I would have liked to see more of his life away from the nubile marital candidates. It was obvious to me from the first introduction which one would end up with whom, so there was little suspense and I needed more than the pleasure of the writing style to get me really engaged.
The story visits the scene of another unfinished Austen work, Sanditon. Some of the delightful characters from that work are alluded to, but sadly they do not appear in scenes. The 1816-17 timeline allows for some discussion of published Austen novels. Clearly we were supposed to make connections between the Anne and Emma of this story and the characters of the same name in the novels.
I think a Watsons sequel would have given me greater pleasure had the author forgone the tired young-people-pairing-up drama and given the original Watsons characters more engaging middle-aged dramas of their own. That would have been truly novel....more
I give this book a four-star rating with a huge asterisk, because it is a massive plagiarism. Nevertheless, it is one of the best attempts at completiI give this book a four-star rating with a huge asterisk, because it is a massive plagiarism. Nevertheless, it is one of the best attempts at completing Jane Austen’s unfinished novel, The Watsons.
The author, Helen Baker, does not tamper with Austen’s text. Where it breaks off, she continues the story by copying, in many places word for word for pages at a time, the completion written by Austen’s niece, Catherine Hubback, in 1850, titled The Younger Sister.
The Younger Sister is blessed with a great deal of clever dialogue and elegant narration, but it is windy and overblown and succumbs to the Victorian pulp fiction penchant for melodramatic plot twists. (Mr. Howard’s supposed death and speedy resurrection is only the most egregious.) The novel is sentimental and at times laughable. Baker has stripped away most of the excesses and left behind a much tighter story, with the best qualities of the original left intact. It is Baker’s belief (apparently based on her acquaintance with some Austen descendants) that Catherine Hubback, who grew up much in the company of Jane Austen’s sister and who was the stepdaughter of Jane’s closest friend, had access to a rich family tradition of how the story was to intended to proceed and wrote The Younger Sister along those lines. It is clear from Hubback’s rendition of the portion of the story originally wriiten by Austen that she was very familiar with the fragment, had in fact memorized or almost memorized whole sections of it, even though she did not have access to the manuscript.
So Baker’s compressed rendition of Hubback’s novel might be seen as a reclamation project, trying to remove the Victorian encrustations and keep what Austen originally intended. The result is a good deal closer to something Austen might have written than most modern Austenesque writers achieve.
To my mind, however, Baker overestimates how much of The Younger Sister is really true to what Austen might have written. My dubiety is based solely, I confess, on my sense of Austen’s taste and the places where the Hubback/Baker storyline violates that taste. The ugliness of the Tom-Margaret scenes, the wicked-stepmother cruelty of Jane Watson, and a few other elements feel far removed from Austen; and I have my own ideas about what Austen was intending with this story that aren’t reflected here.
Still, it’s a good effort and if anyone is looking to read a Watsons continuation, this is probably the one to try....more
This continuation of The Watsons, published in 1923, may be read in about an hour; it was 111 pages long in my edition, of which exactly half was JaneThis continuation of The Watsons, published in 1923, may be read in about an hour; it was 111 pages long in my edition, of which exactly half was Jane Austen’s fragment. It could better be described as a summary than a novel. One example of its brevity will do: “The next day Mr. Watson was taken seriously ill; and although he lingered for some weeks, his daughters were almost completely cut off from all social intercourse. Towards Christmas he died.”
Oulton—whom I believe to be a member of the extended Austen family and therefore most likely had access to family traditions about how the story was intended to play out—packs a lot of disruption into Emma Watson’s life over the course of those scant pages. Over their course she spends time in Stanton, Croydon, the seashore, Croydon again, Guildford, Wickstead, and Cumberland. Too many writers attempting to complete this book overlook the difficulty of travel for an impoverished young lady, and seek by varying the scenery to lend excitement to the narrative.
As in other completions, (view spoiler)[Mr. Howard is long prevented from pursuing his suit by jealousy and false reports. Both hero and heroine are beset by unwanted admirers, in Mr. Howard’s case by both Lady Osborne and Miss Osborne. And Emma Watson is falsely accused of being a flirt and entertaining the advances of the men she repulses. (hide spoiler)]
I found this version to be largely devoid of psychological intuition, and its style is late-Victorian sentimental to an embarrassing degree. The author relies heavily on timely deaths and convenient inheritances. There is an attempt to make Lady Osborne a poignant figure, but otherwise there are no surprises in the narrative....more
Honestly, this completion of The Watsons wasn’t as bad as I feared. I’ve been avoiding this chunkster of a novel (my edition—not the one pictured—is mHonestly, this completion of The Watsons wasn’t as bad as I feared. I’ve been avoiding this chunkster of a novel (my edition—not the one pictured—is more than 600 unnumbered pages long), but it reads quickly and has some very Austen-sounding dialogue. It has the antiquarian interest of being the first known Austenesque novel (published in 1850) and of being written by Catherine Hubback, a grand-niece (? I think) of Jane Austen, with the plot of the novel adhering closely to family traditions about how Austen herself envisioned the storyline.
It is also pretty one-note, so in the end I was glad to finish (and the ending drags along for quite a while). The author—a grand-niece of Jane Austen, I believe—doesn’t really understand how to develop characters or give them an arc, so mostly they are presented as a small cluster of characteristics, which repeat and repeat in slightly varying situations. Despite sometimes sprightly dialogue, the sensibilities of the novel are all off, as it ping-pongs between heavy-handed sarcasm about social follies and damsel-in-distress melodrama. The gossips and the harm they can do are exaggerated; the ill-tempered characters get way too much page time and their quarrels are dwelt on in excruciating detail; villains are practically twirling their mustaches and would tie the heroine to the railroad tracks if railways had existed in the 1790s, when the story appears to be set.
The author strings out the obstacles to a happy ending in ways both ridiculous and ultimately risible. (view spoiler)[(Does anyone really believe the hero has fallen from a horse to his death when he has finally, after hundreds of pointless delays, come to the point of confessing his love? I was thinking, What will be next—retrograde amnesia?) (hide spoiler)] Hubback has difficulty thinking beyond the most obvious human emotions, so the hero trivializes his character by sulking and being rude to the heroine over and over in fits of jealousy. About 500 pages in we’re suddenly told by an occasionally intrusive narrator that he has no self-confidence, a trait of which he has previously shown no sign (stolen from Mr. Bingley no doubt) and which appears introduced solely to delay the denouement. To level a criticism more prevalent in Jane Austen’s day than the author’s, Catherine Hubback has clearly read too many sentimental novels.
Despite all that, I admired the clever repartee put in the mouths of several characters and was intrigued by the plot ideas that seem to reflect a richer family tradition about Austen’s intended storyline than has come down to us publicly. The section of the book that’s based on Austen’s fragment is a paraphrase of the original with some of the names changed, leading me to wonder whether Mrs. Hubback had access to the manuscript or had merely heard it read aloud a number of times. And the story spends considerable time in locales hinted at but never visited in Austen’s fragment—Mr. Howard’s parsonage, Osborne Castle, and Croydon. Most completers of The Watsons shy away from going there.
I wish the author had been more skilled and subtle, but this novel is full of intriguing hints of how Jane Austen envisioned the story she set aside would have played out....more
I am a severe critic of Austenesque fiction but found little to disparage here. I did wonder why so many of the young ladies in the story wore hats inI am a severe critic of Austenesque fiction but found little to disparage here. I did wonder why so many of the young ladies in the story wore hats instead of bonnets and why characters took tea at all hours instead of after dinner, but these nitpicks were minor when set against the enormously satisfying story.
For some years there has been a trend toward focusing on Jane Austen’s minor characters and giving them new life, and Mary Bennet from Pride and Prejudice is the target of many of these efforts. I particularly enjoy the stories that give her magical powers, since they allow her to have fun while exercising her intellectual leanings. There is no magic here but instead a thoroughly considered psychological profile. Janice Hadlow has taken the time to explore what it must have been like to be the less pretty, less gifted, highly serious middle sister in a family of pretty, fun-loving often shallow girls, a family in which surface attractions were most highly valued. Her yearning to belong and to be cared for, combined with an inability to understand how to do so, was deeply moving.
I also found convincing Mary’s slow emergence from that unenviable position, and the effort required for her to overcome insecurity and self-consciousness. (view spoiler)[The role played by the Gardiners and other characters in her transformation was well thought out. She became quite a redoubtable young woman and gradually earned the ability to evaluate justly the books she read, and she earned the happiness that eventually came her way. (hide spoiler)]
The license Mary was given to explore on her own was sometimes startling to me, but having just read a book about the Bluestockings, I was prepared to give the author some latitude to describe manners that never appeared in Austen’s novels. Perhaps I wished this Mary Bennet might exist more than I believed her to do so, but isn’t that why it’s called fiction?...more
This book delighted me from start to finish. I can be a harsh critic of modern fiction that draws on Jane Austen and Georgette Heyer to spin a RegencyThis book delighted me from start to finish. I can be a harsh critic of modern fiction that draws on Jane Austen and Georgette Heyer to spin a Regency-era romance, but A Little Folly satisfied and impressed me on every level. The language is smoothly and comfortably “period” without indulging in excesses. The romantic plot is secondary to the development of character. The dialogue is breathtakingly clever and the narration witty and insightful in equal measure. Don’t be fooled by the frivolous title: under the sprightly surface, a serious story is being told.
That story focuses on a brother and sister brought up in the wilds of Devonshire (the Cornwallish end) by a tyrannical father. The father has just died when we meet them, young adults who have never seen much of the world and who have grown up very closely attached as a result of the repressive cruelties of their parent. I loved their relationship, its mutual respect and tact and understanding—and the limits of their mutual understanding. It takes them a little while to recover, but soon they resolve to take advantage of their liberation to live a little. The author carefully constructs their situation to ensure that their childhood determines many of their actions, whether they are acting under its influence or in rebellion against it. It is easy to become attached to them both.
They have a few local friends and take pleasure in renewing acquaintance with those who had been excluded by their father’s dictatorial ways; but their lives really begin to change when a pair of cousins arrive to visit—charming but rather shallow, fashionable Londoners who are like ambassadors from another planet. Soon the brother and sister are off to London to experience the rackety life of England’s Upper Ten Thousand. Luckily, a few of their old Devonshire soon join them there to provide a little ballast.
One of the things I most admire about this novel is the author’s ability to juggle the light and the dark, the trivial and the profound. He seems in full control of his material at every moment, and has a precision of mind that brings to life a world that feels complete without chaos. The real world often feels so senseless that I turn to fiction to dwell for a time in a more ordered, logical space, and this book gave me that without ever being dull or seeming artifically constrained.
I can’t readily imagine a better conceived or executed novel of this type. Highly recommended for anyone who enjoys drawing-room comedy with deeper undercurrents. I suspect I will happily reread this book more than once....more
Emma Woodhouse is a modern '70s girl: she's interested in college and a career; she's independent and not simply looking for a man. But her expectatioEmma Woodhouse is a modern '70s girl: she's interested in college and a career; she's independent and not simply looking for a man. But her expectations get derailed when her father is taken ill and she comes home to take care of him, transferring to a local college to complete her degree. Home is a small village in Kentucky's horse country, where she's either intimately familiar with or related to everyone, so the change represents a significant narrowing of her life's prospects. But she's a loving and loyal person and refuses to repine.
This variation on Jane Austen's Emma doesn't stray very far from the canon, so for those readers familiar with the original, it doesn't hold many surprises. Sometimes there's pleasure and jolts of humor to be found in the ways a modern author adapts an Austen story, but here everything just felt predictable to me. I think I would have liked this book more if I had never read the original; it's certainly a competently written novel with good characters and the kind of life lessons I like to read about. Being so familiar with Austen's novel in this case only led me to invidious comparisons, sadly: the modern characters seemed more vulgar, the direction of the plot too broadly hinted at. The parallels only highlighted for me Austen's subtlety versus the relative obviousness of this tale. The setting was interesting--I haven't read many books set in the 1970s, when I too came of age--but the cultures of the American South hold little appeal for me. It doesn't help that Emma Woodhouse is the one Austen heroine I really loathe; this modern version was very true to the original and I couldn't warm to her, no matter how lovely she was to her father.
Rating this four stars for its skill and how I believe others will find it, rather than for the pleasure I derived. The is one scene for mature audiences.
Merged review:
Emma Woodhouse is a modern '70s girl: she's interested in college and a career; she's independent and not simply looking for a man. But her expectations get derailed when her father is taken ill and she comes home to take care of him, transferring to a local college to complete her degree. Home is a small village in Kentucky's horse country, where she's either intimately familiar with or related to everyone, so the change represents a significant narrowing of her life's prospects. But she's a loving and loyal person and refuses to repine.
This variation on Jane Austen's Emma doesn't stray very far from the canon, so for those readers familiar with the original, it doesn't hold many surprises. Sometimes there's pleasure and jolts of humor to be found in the ways a modern author adapts an Austen story, but here everything just felt predictable to me. I think I would have liked this book more if I had never read the original; it's certainly a competently written novel with good characters and the kind of life lessons I like to read about. Being so familiar with Austen's novel in this case only led me to invidious comparisons, sadly: the modern characters seemed more vulgar, the direction of the plot too broadly hinted at. The parallels only highlighted for me Austen's subtlety versus the relative obviousness of this tale. The setting was interesting--I haven't read many books set in the 1970s, when I too came of age--but the cultures of the American South hold little appeal for me. It doesn't help that Emma Woodhouse is the one Austen heroine I really loathe; this modern version was very true to the original and I couldn't warm to her, no matter how lovely she was to her father.
Rating this four stars for its skill and how I believe others will find it, rather than for the pleasure I derived. The is one scene for mature audiences....more
This book is a miniature gem of Austen criticism. Geared to the Austen fan taking first steps into literary analysis, it lucidly introduces readers toThis book is a miniature gem of Austen criticism. Geared to the Austen fan taking first steps into literary analysis, it lucidly introduces readers to the central ideas embodied in each novel, avoiding scholarly excesses of jargon or interpretation.
One chapter is devoted to each of the published novels, prefaced by a shrewd survey of her juvenilia titled “Jane Austen Practising.” I regret that he did not address Lady Susan, The Watsons, or Sanditon in their own chapters, though each gets passing mention.
Keymer is well read in eighteenth-century literature—fiction, poetry, and nonfiction—and provides useful context to the novels as well as tantalizing hints of obscure works that might have provided an inspiration or springboard for Austen. There is little biography here, the focus is almost entirely on texts.
He is equally well versed in Austen criticism, from her lifetime to the present, and draws thoughtfully from the more mainstream critics up to 2018, without wasting the readers’ time on the outré. There are backnotes to the chapters for those who want to explore further, and a very selective bibliography.
My one knock on the book is not the author’s responsibility: the glossy, white paper and lightly leaded type made it exhausting for me to read, my eyes growing heavy about every ten pages. The small-scale hardcover edition is charming to look at but rather tiring to force open. And the occasional illustrations were not clear or striking enough to warrant the choice of glossy paper.
Tom Keymer’s Jane Austen: Writing, Society, Politics will take a place of honor next to John Mullan’s What Matters in Jane Austen: Twenty Crucial Puzzles Solved as my favorite works of accessible Austen criticism to recommend....more
This is a book best read by a Jane Austen fan familiar with all her novels, since the characters are drawn from across her oeuvre. A reader lacking thThis is a book best read by a Jane Austen fan familiar with all her novels, since the characters are drawn from across her oeuvre. A reader lacking that familiarity would probably find the number of characters overwhelming and their backstories hard to keep straight. The title of the book betrays that this is a murder mystery story, so it’s no spoiler to say so, and I believe much of the pleasure in following the intricacies of whodunit would be lost on someone without a strong basis in Austen’s fiction.
The author, in crafting the plot, has taken a number of liberties with the original characters. She has tinkered with their ages and has put her own spin on some of their personalities. I was particularly disappointed in her treatment of Edmund and Fanny Bertram, whose characters were both exaggerated and distorted. She has also introduced modern themes into their lives, and modern vocabulary to go with theose themes.
Normally such anachronisms would bother me. I find it jarring to enter a period story and find it littered with modern elements, as if Jasper Fforde’s Thursday Next had carelessly left behind traces of a visit into the plot. But for the most part I enjoyed this tale a good deal. I think that is attributable to two factors: the well-crafted mystery and the entertaining central characters. Gray has not just borrowed Austen’s characters, she has invented two progeny: Jonathan Darcy, eldest son of Fitzwilliam and Elizabeth Darcy; and Juliet Tilney, daughter of Henry and Catherine Tilney. Both are well-drawn, interesting, and fully rounded characters. Jonathan Darcy is convincingly neurodivergent, and his social challenges are touchingly portrayed. Juliet Tilney is just innocent and unconventional enough to accept his difference. Together they form a sleuthing duo I was happy to follow.
I did figure out the perpetrator before the reveal, but that rarely troubles me when reading a whodunit, I still like to see the details worked out....more
Three prayers written by Jane Austen survive. In this handsomely produced little volume, Rachel Dodge prints them in full and then weaves a devotionalThree prayers written by Jane Austen survive. In this handsomely produced little volume, Rachel Dodge prints them in full and then weaves a devotional around them, jumping off from snippets quoted from each to reflect on connections to Austen’s life and works, the Christian context of the text, and ways to use the prayers for personal prayer and contemplation.
I am not the ideal audience for such a book, but I found it sufficiently interesting and even enlightening. My personal preference would have been for more on Austen and less on personal reflection, but that’s not the book the author was writing.
I was interested in Jane Austen’s prayers because I believe that as a writer of novels she was first and foremost a moralist. The wit and the romance in her books are the sugar that makes the spoonful go down smoothly. What, then, can these three short prayers tell us about Austen’s own character and her works? Quite a lot, I think.
Several preoccupations recur in the text of the prayers, notably the desire to walk humbly and to show kindness and consideration for others. These virtues—and their opposites, selfishness, pride, and vanity—lie at the heart of all her writing. Hers was a narrow, relatively unvarying society in which people had to find ways to get along with those around them—a modern equivalent might be a small office where you hold a job you can’t quit. It was moreover a society with clear rules of conduct and limited scope for self-expression.
In such a world the foundational sin is selfishness; it is the wellspring of all other sins and vices. So it is not surprising to find Austen begging to “bring to our knowledge every fault of Temper and every evil Habit in which we may have indulged to the discomfort of our fellow-creatures.” She adds, “Save us from deceiving ourselves by Pride or Vanity.” These themes are repeated when she prays for patience and forbearance and to think humbly of herself, “to be severe only in the examination of our own conduct.” It is easy to imagine how a person as brilliant as Jane Austen might feel the need to caution herself in this way; she did not by nature suffer fools gladly.
A weakness in this book is Dodge’s uncritical acceptance of the version of Austen’s character promoted by her family in the nineteenth century—the kindly aunt, ever-patient with children, leading a retired life of domestic happiness and devotion to God. The reality is that Jane Austen was not just more sophisticated but also fiercer than that and more ambitious, and her sister ran interference for her to allow her to pursue her ambitions. I would have liked to see more attention devoted to the darker sides of her nature, the struggle she faced in attempting to live up to the aspirations in these prayers. She wouldn’t have had to pray so hard for these virtues if she possessed them naturally.
But I am grateful for this little volume which makes these prayers accessible, and for the very thoughtful and pretty design of the book. Readers more pious than I would find it a more enriching experience as they walk through Dodge’s take on Austen’s spiritual landscape....more
In A Life of Her Own, Wendy Zomparelli takes on a minor character from Jane Austen’s Sense and Sensibility, Margaret Dashwood—or perhaps I should say In A Life of Her Own, Wendy Zomparelli takes on a minor character from Jane Austen’s Sense and Sensibility, Margaret Dashwood—or perhaps I should say “a minor character from Emma Thompson’s Sense and Sensibility, because Zomparelli’s character resembles that version of Margaret far more than the original. The Margaret of Austen’s book is a shadow copy of her mother and younger sister, bidding fair to become as overly emotional as they are. Thompson, in one of the shrewd changes she made to the novel, turned Margaret into an adventuresome tomboy—opening the way for the shy hero, Edward Ferrars, to show a kind and humorous side largely lacking in the book.
Zomparelli’s Margaret grows up just as adventurous as the tomboy version and even shows a good deal of impatience with her sister Marianne’s airs and graces. {Warning to all Team Marianne members: this Marianne will infuriate you until very near the end, when she redeems herself briefly. Even I, who have no use for Marianne, thought this portrayal might have gone a bit too far, though it did make me laugh.} From her early years Margaret has an obsession with antiquity, both that of the natural world and in human history. Her deepest desire is to travel, especially to see Pompeii with her own eyes.
This ambition shapes her relationships and sets her feet on an unusual course for a Regency heroine. The novel often hovers close to the edge of implausibility but, to my mind at least, manages to avoid pitching over the edge in depicting a heroine out of step with her era.
Zomparelli’s prose style is pleasingly elegant without going overboard into Regency verisimilitude. The most exacting reader will find annoying modernisms (“I’m fine” among them) but they are not constant and the general run of the narrative feels comfortably old-fashioned. Zomparelli’s research is a bit thin here and there—things I noticed that she got wrong included mealtimes; a Jewish girl being admitted to Almack’s; a music recital being held before dinner; circulating library books being leather-bound; income arriving annually instead of quarterly; etc. But these did not detract from my absorption in the story. In the early going I felt there was too much narrative explanation and not enough scene—describing instead of including that masterful scene of Austen’s in which Fanny Dashwood persuades John not to help his sisters felt simply criminal to me, an instance of taking dread of plagiarism way too far. But as things began to happen, the heavy ratio of narrative to dialogue no longer troubled me.
It is notable that with the exception of Margaret and, to a degree, Edward, the characters hew closely to Austen’s originals and are used in ingenious ways to move Margaret along in life. Some of the new characters are quite delightful (Mrs. Stimpson the harridan flirt, and spoilt baby Harry Dashwood growing up to be an entirely charming schoolboy stood out for me). I loved seeing more of Mrs. Jennings and thought there was just enough and not too much of Fanny Ferrars Dashwood. Zomparelli is astute enough not to make Mr. Palmer a caricature; I’ve always rather liked him. Family relationships play a big role in Margaret’s life options, as so they should, but in her quest for the “life of her own” of the title she also finds ways to carve her own path.
Once Margaret achieves her goal of travel, the book becomes a bit more problematic. It is extraordinarily difficult to maintain a forward momentum in a plot while simultaneously moving from place to place; Ava Farmer discovered this in her P&P sequel Second Impressions, which devolved into little more than a travel journal. The nature of a journey is to be episodic and full of dislocations, and description can overwhelm storyline. Zomparelli works hard to avoid this dilemma and partially succeeds. Certainly the climactic episode in which Margaret finds herself in mortal peril is a page-turner, and Zomaparelli almost gets there in making it simultaneously an occasion for self-revelation.
My romantic soul longed for a more palpitating dénouement, without the detour into a poorly constructed alternative relationship. (view spoiler)[Couldn’t Mr. Firmin have arrived in Florence instead of Edward? (hide spoiler)] Margaret gets to where she needs to be in the end, but does some harm (not fully acknowledged by the narrative) in the process.
This is a hefty book and well worth the reading, despite my quibbles with certain aspects. For readers who want a wider view of European life during the Regency and aftermath, it is a rich narrative; and Zomparelli’s Margaret makes for an enlivening companion throughout....more
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