Jane Austen July

So, as I mentioned in my previous post, it's Jane Austen July on Booktube. And, although I'm not someone who has a Booktube (it's a corner of Youtube) channel, I do enjoy watching bookish videos and just thought I might read along for the ride. I'm not doing the prompts, just picking up a few Austen themed books to read this month. 

The first book I read was Miss Austen by Gill Hornby.

So one would automatically assume that the 'Miss' referred to in Miss Austen is 'Jane'? Not so, it's Cassandra, Jane's older sister. There was about 2 years between the sisters and it's no exaggeration to say that they were devoted to one another. Which is why we find, in this novel, Cassandra Austen arriving at a relative's house to clandestinely find the letters her sister wrote to the mother of the family. They were huge letter writers in those days (the book is set in 1840) and people put all sorts of sensitive information or opinions in said letters. Cassandra feels the need to check and remove anything that might cast her sister, Jane, in a bad light. She eventually finds them but of course they evoke memories and feelings she thought long buried. I know this is fiction based on loose fact but my goodness it reads just like an excellent memoir. It is 'delightful'. You meet members of the Austen family, various relatives and friends, families they were close to and so on. I get did a bit a confused about who was related to whom, but there's an excellent guide at the beginning to refer back to and I was glad I own an actual hardback as it's not so easy to do that on a Kindle. What this book made me realise is that I don't know enough about Jane Austen's life and it made me hungry for more. It also underlined the plight of unmarried women back in those days, how reliant they were on the charity of relatives and how they sometimes had to manipulate said relatives into helping them. It felt heartbreaking to me and reminded me of the plight of Mary Bennet in The Other Bennet Sister by Janice Hadlow. I'm interested and involved now and although it's Jane Austen 'July' I plan to carry this on into August, September etc. I have a long list of books to look into, both non-fiction and fiction and even 'crime' fiction! 

So there are a couple of Austen books I've never read and one of them is Mansfield Park. I have seen one of the TV dramas but it couldn't have sunk in because I didn't remember an awful lot about it. 

So this is the story of Fanny Price. At the tender age of nine Fanny is removed from her large, unruly family in Portsmouth to go and live with relatives, the Bertrams, in Mansfield Park which, if memory serves, was in Berkshire, though I could stand to be corrected on that. She is understandably knocked for six by this, her being a small, reserved little girl. The immediate family, aunt and uncle, two male cousins and two female, basically ignore her, although they're not exactly cruel. Edmund, the second son, is always kind to her though and thus, as she grows, Fanny falls in love with him. The novel revolves around events that evolve when Fanny is eighteen. The overbearing uncle goes off to the West Indies leaving the house in the charge of his indolent wife and her rather spiteful, self-absorbed sister. A brother and sister come to stay in the local vicarage, Henry and Mary Crawford, and these two people have a massive influence on subsequent events, in particular, Fanny's rather narrow life but also three of the Bertram brothers and sisters. So I finished this almost a week ago and it's still in my head. You might deduce from that that I loved it? I didn't, in fact. I was fascinated by it, very involved in the lives of the characters, always glad to get back to the book, but there were things I didn't like. I thought it was far too rambly, diatribes on this and that, usually from Edmund on the imperfections of other people's characters. For the life of me I couldn't understand why both Fanny and Mary Crawford wanted him so much. I think the reason it's still in my head is that Austen made these people so 'real'. The vicious Aunt Norris was truly awful, especially to Fanny, the indolent Aunt Bertam 'so' annoyingly uninvolved in anything but her own comfort, Henry and Mary Crawford, so close to being decent people but you just know there's something not quite right about them. As regards Fanny, I wished constantly that she had a bit more go in her, I found her ever so slightly prissy if I'm honest. And Edmund, like I said, I couldn't quite work out why Fanny and Mary worshipped him. Each to his own I suppose. I gave Mansfield Park a four on Goodreads but it's possible in months to come I may wish I'd given it a five because it really is quite a powerful novel and the fact that I'm so ambivilent and thoughtful about it probably means it hit its mark with me. It's a 4.5 really.

As I said, I've a huge list of off-shoot novels or non-fiction I now want to read and have just started this non-fiction book by Amy Elizabeth Smith.

 

This is a travel memoir where the author travels around Latin America setting up book clubs to discuss Jane Austen books. She wants to know whether the phenomenon that exists in Europe, the USA, Australia etc. whereby people adore Austen's characters will transfer to Spanish speaking America.

Someone commented on Youtube that no other classic author has inspired so much off-shoot fiction and non-fiction as Jane Austen and when I thought about it I realised it was true. How interesting is that? And fun?