Miss Austen by Gill Hornby; The Other Bennet Sister by Janice Hadlow – review
The Jane Austen industry is the gift that keeps on giving. Just when you think every possible avenue for adaptation, interpretation, sequels, prequels, rewrites, biographies and spin-offs must have been exhausted, there comes news of another: our appetite for all things Austen is as indefatigable, it seems, as Lydia Bennet’s for attention.
Perhaps there would be less scope for speculation about Jane’s own romantic adventures if more detail of her private thoughts had survived, and for that we must partially blame her devoted sister, Cassandra. Twenty-three years after Jane’s death, and shortly before her own, Cassandra burned a significant portion of her correspondence with her sister. Literary historians and Jane fans have never quite forgiven Cassandra for this desecration and Gill Hornby’s Miss Austen attempts to solve the mystery with a fictional interpretation of Cassandra’s motives and a tantalising suggestion of what those lost letters might have contained.
The novel opens in 1840 with Cassandra, now in her late 60s, making an impulsive journey from her home in Hampshire to the village of Kintbury in Berkshire, ostensibly to pay her respects to a family friend, Isabella Fowle, on the death of her father. But Cassandra’s real purpose is more devious; Isabella’s mother, Eliza, was a dear friend of her sister and since Isabella is now to be turfed out of the rectory, Cassandra fears that Jane’s letters to Eliza might fall into unscrupulous hands. The Austen industry is already sufficiently advanced that Cassandra feels bound to protect Jane’s privacy by making sure whatever intimate details her sister may have confided to her friend do not become public knowledge.
But the letters, naturally, plunge Cassy into often painful memories of their youth, so that the narrative is divided between past and present, with the Austen sisters’ changing fortunes offering all the drama of financial insecurity and romantic hope and disappointment that will be familiar to Austen devotees.
The great joy of Miss Austen is that the reader feels immersed in a world that is convincingly Jane’s from the first page. Austen’s style is superficially easy to pastiche, but deceptively hard to do well (as ITV’s recent tone-deaf Sanditon attests); many have tried, but few have managed anything approaching her lightness of touch and swift, caustic wit.
It’s testament to Hornby’s skill, then, that I had to turn to the author’s note at the back to check how many of the letters included here were invented. It’s also extremely funny; figures in Jane’s life who might well have provided models for some of her more bumptious, self-important characters are fleshed out here with a comic relish that feels entirely Austenian. Hornby’s Cassandra, concerned as she is with the written word and ideas of representation, can’t help but be aware that she herself might become the future subject of outrageously inaccurate invention, as is already happening to Jane, but the novel wears this postmodern knowingness lightly. Considering a fossil at the seaside, Cassandra “felt rather sorry for it. She would hate to be dug up and pored over some time in the future.”
Miss Austen is a novel of great kindness, often unexpectedly moving, with much to say about the status of “invisible” older women. Above all, it’s concerned with the triumph of small acts of goodness; you can’t help feeling that Jane would have approved.
At one point, Hornby’s Cassandra worries that Jane will offend their plain and sententious sister-in-law, Mary Austen, by calling the unlikably plain and sententious Bennet sister in Pride and Prejudice “Mary”. Janice Hadlow evidently also felt that Mary Bennet was given a rough deal by her author and in The Other Bennet Sister sets out to redress the balance, by retelling the events of Pride and Prejudice and their aftermath from Mary’s perspective.
Her Mary is a sensitive, well-meaning young woman, who strives for the affection of her remote, sardonic father and beloved older sister, Lizzie. Hadlow invents for Mary an inner life that Austen denied her, complete with romantic yearnings that she tries to dampen.
The difficulty with trying to rewrite one of the best-loved novels in the English language is that the original is always there as the gold standard. So it is in the second part of the novel, which takes place two years after the events of Pride and Prejudice, when Hadlow’s version really takes on a life of its own. Away from her family, Mary has the chance to free herself from their (and the reader’s) narrow view of her.
The Other Bennet Sister reads as an enjoyable kind of fanfic and if it feels a little pedestrian by comparison, the fact that the appeal of these characters endures in hands less deft than their original creator’s is testament to how vividly they were first drawn and the place they have established in readers’ affections.
• Miss Austen by Gill Hornby is published by Century (£12.99). To order a copy go to guardianbookshop.com. Free UK p&p over £15
• The Other Bennet Sister by Janice Hadlow is published by Mantle (£16.99). To order a copy go to guardianbookshop.com. Free UK p&p over £15
