Wow, Jane! Just how long has this been going on?

I refer to the plethora of sequels to Jane Austen's six published novels. Jane Austen (1775-1817) was a wonderful English novelist, respected in her own day and adored in our own. In the past fifteen years, many writers (talented and not so talented) have felt inspired, one might almost say compelled, to revisit the pages of her novels and to come up with their own homages to her fiction. In many cases, authors have written continuations or sequels to the existing stories, clearly wanting to imaginatively explore further into the lives of Austen's characters.

I confess to my own continuing fascination in Austen's work (which I re-read often) and in the work it inspires. It delights and fascinates me that this gifted writer, who admittedly worked on a very small canvas, continues to have such universal appeal. I like thinking about why.

So I've read a fair number (perhaps by now a dozen?) of such sequels. A few of them are fairly good. Most of them are awful, but it's always interesting to see why they fail. I usually can classify the failures fairly easily. Some try too hard to sound like Austen. It's nigh unto impossible to match her prose style or her sharp wit, and most attempts look flabby by comparison. Other authors have the opposite problem. They like Austen's characters and plots, but they're determined to move them wholesale into contemporary time and place, not realizing what a difficult leap that is and what sorts of plausibility problems it will create. Not to mention how strange some of the "givens" of Austen's world (hierarchies, formalities, social structures and customs, clear-cut morals) can look when translated into a messy and often amoral postmodern context.

I really thought the whole phenomenon of Austen-inspired fiction started in the 1990s. If pressed, I might have speculated that some very creative author with a lot of foresight had written an Austen-inspired story or novel in the 1970s or 80s. So I was completely floored to find, while flipping through a recent book catalog, a novel written in 1913 and entitled Old Friends and New Fancies: An Imaginary Sequel to the Novels of Jane Austen.

1913! The author, Sybil G. Brinton, penned her audacious and creative book a mere 100 years after the original publication of Pride and Prejudice. To make things even more interesting, she wasn't content (as most current-day authors are) to attempt a sequel or a re-vamping of one Austen novel. Oh no. Brinton decided to completely go for it. She brings together characters from all six of Austen's novels, mixing and matching major and minor characters with gusto. Kudos to her for having that much panache. If you're going to be the first to do something like this, you may as well be daring.

And the fun thing is...it works. For the most part, that is. No, Brinton is not Austen (I think I've made it clear that no one can be) but she clearly loved Austen's books and it's obvious she imaginatively inhabited them for a long time before she ever put pen to paper. That's a real pleasure considering many of the current Austen-inspired writers jumping on the Austen-fiction bandwagon seem to have spent more time watching BBC adaptations than actually immersing themselves in Austen's elegant prose.

I'm particularly impressed by Brinton's ability to capture character voices. As Peter Leithart says of Jane Austen's books: "syntax is character." That's so true; we often feel we know an Austen character thoroughly based on how she or he talks, what a character says and doesn't say. Brinton does a terrific job of catching certain cadences in character's voices. Just to give two prominent examples: her Mrs. Jennings is spot on, and even her Elizabeth Bennet (so well-known and so hard to recapture) feels amazingly true to voice.

Anyone who has not read Austen's previous six novels might feel a bit lost on initially diving into this story. Since Brinton delights in introducing readers to "old friends," the novel (which runs nearly 400 pages) can feel a bit cluttered. There's a helpful page in the front that provides a list of which Austen characters appear, and what novels they come from. Avid Austen reader that I am, I still found myself needing to refer to this list from time to time, to refresh my memory on the characters from the two Austen novels I don't re-read very often (Northanger Abbey and Mansfield Park).

Rejoice, however, that many of these characters have only slim roles -- and in a few cases, brief cameos. Brinton wisely focuses her creative energies on the stories of two secondary characters from Pride and Prejudice (the best-known and perhaps most accessible of Austen's novels): Georgiana Darcy and Colonel Fitzwilliam, the sister and cousin of the famous Mr. Darcy. Georgiana's story is really the heart of the book, and I think Brinton does a remarkable job of keeping her in character and of providing an Austenesque journey of the heart for her story arc. You might expect that Georgiana and Fitzwilliam are destined to be together (I'm pretty sure more than one Austen-ator has aspired to that pairing) but Brinton dispenses with that conventional idea quickly and gets both characters on the bumpy road to romantic and marital happiness with other people. Both Fitzwilliam and Georgiana get caught up with characters from Mansfield Park. At one point both Georgiana and Kitty Bennet have feelings for William Price, brother of Fanny Price from that novel. Since I haven't read it in a while, I can't recall enough about William's character to know how truly he's portrayed, but I like him. He reminds me of a younger version of Captain Wentworth from Persuasion.

The actual Wentworth and his lovely wife Anne are present for the denouement, having taken Georgiana under their wing for a while. It's a lovely thought, having quiet Georgiana mentored by Anne (Elliot) Wentworth, while flighty and easily molded Kitty Bennet (sister of Elizabeth) falls under the sway of the still not very adept matchmaking of Emma (Woodhouse) Knightley. Pretty much everyone you really love from the previous books is here, along with a few of the folks you loved to hate. Lucy (Steele) Ferrars and her sister Anne from Sense and Sensibility, for instance, are still their sniping, gossipy selves, and Brinton uses their malicious tongues to wreak potential havoc with Fitzwilliam's romance with Mary Crawford.

Although Old Friends and New Fancies gets off to a slow start plot-wise, it bears sticking with the story. I slogged through the first fifty pages and then found the whole thing taking off, sort of like a lumbering bird that looks awkward on land and then unexpectedly graceful in the sky. Brinton is a good writer, managing complex sentence structures that remind one a lot of Austen's prose style, and keeping dialogue real and lively. While neither as emotionally moving or as wittily biting as the real Austen, Brinton still delivers a much better novel than any contemporary Austen-inspired writer I've read. It's a lot of fun to read and a lovely homage to Austen, who apparently has inspired more generations of writers than I ever realized!

~befus, 2008

Old Friends and New Fancies: An Imaginary Sequel to the Novels of Jane Austen
Sybil G. Brinton
Sourcebooks, Inc., 2007.
To quote the copyright page: "This is a reprint of the first edition, written in 1913 and originally published in 1914 by Holden & Hardingham, London."

Other "Austen-inspired" books I've reviewed:
Suspense and Sensibility or First Impressions Revisited by Carrie Bebris
Flirting With Pride and Prejudice A collection of essays and short fiction edited by Jennifer Crusie
Pride, Prejudice and Jasmin Field by Melissa Nathan
Enthusiasm a terrific young adult novel by Polly Shulman
Pemberley: Or, Pride and Prejudice Continued by Emma Tennant


Recommended: Yes