Guest review by Sally Prue: EMMA by Jane Austen

"So all in all I have decided not to go to see the new film of Emma, delightful though it may be. It would, I’m afraid, trample on my dreams."

Sally Prue is a writer for children of all ages, from picture books up to Young Adult fiction. Her novel Cold Tom won the Branford Boase Prize and the Smarties Silver Award, and Song Hunter won the Historical Society’s Young Quills Award. Her other jobs have included being a Time and Motion clerk, an accompanist, and a piano and recorder teacher. Sally is married, has two grown up daughters, and lives on the edge of a small but very beautiful wood in Hertfordshire, England. She blogs at The Word Den. She is also to be found on her website and on Twitter: @sally_prue.

I was quite looking forward to the new film of Jane Austen’s Emma (yes, there are other Emmas: Charlotte Bronte’s, for one). 

Emma is probably the finest book I’ve read. I wouldn’t quite recommend it as a comfort read, but it’s a great book for clearing the mind of the detritus of modern life.

There’s no one like Jane Austen for resetting the moral compass.

So, anyway, I was quite looking forward to the film of Emma. But then I came across an interview with Eleanor Catton, admitting that when she accepted the commission to write the screenplay she hadn’t read the book.

Now, I’ve probably read Emma a dozen times, and I’m still discovering stuff: not just the odd joke, but really important things like, for instance, the solution to the problem of Mrs Elton. Mrs Elton, for those who have not yet had the irritation of knowing her, is one of those people who Knows Best. In this, it has to be said, she rather resembles Emma herself, and the difference between the manifestations of their pride, condescension and motives is a complex and interesting one. Anyway, Mrs Elton irritates the hell out of more or less everyone, causes a lot of grief with her meddling, and then gets off scot free … or so I thought the first seven times I read the story. But Austen actually condemns Mrs Elton to a terrible (though much-deserved) fate; and the fact that this fate won’t strike her until long after the book ends just goes to illustrate what a work of consummate genius Emma is.

Still, Eleanor Catton is a much-lauded writer, and perhaps she managed to spot all the vital subtleties first time.

But then I read an interview with the costume designer, full of joy at the sumptuousness of the costumes Emma and her friends would have worn; and then there was another interview (I think with the director) explaining that nowadays Emma would be spending her life on Instagram showing off the latest fashions. Now, in the book even the most critical of Emma’s acquaintances believes her to be not personally vain, and the general community of Highbury (and Emma is a book set very firmly in its community) is nearly all of it slightly hard-up and full of cheerful stratagems for remaining respectable. Even the cake at the wedding which opens the novel is shared around the town. As for the wedding at the end of the book, that, too, is distinguished by its lack of show:

The wedding was much like other weddings, where the parties have no taste for finery or parade; and Mrs Elton … thought it all extremely shabby, and very inferior to her own. – “Very little white satin, very few lace veils; a most pitiful business! Selina would stare when she heard of it.”

So all in all I have decided not to go to see the new film of Emma, delightful though it may be. It would, I’m afraid, trample on my dreams.

And what is so completely dreamy about Emma?

For a start, it is very funny indeed.

It’s full of interesting and believable characters, with some of whom you’ll fall in love.

The plot is mind-boggling and has been called the first detective story (though it is a detective story where the identity of the detective is itself for a large part of the book a mystery).

It employs (and quite possibly invents) two revolutionary literary devices, stream-of-consciousness and free indirect style, and it has great fun with them, while never forgetting that it is bad manners to baffle or alienate the reader.

It has a really proper ending.

Oh, and it is quite possibly the finest novel ever written. The name Austen is a version of Augustine, which means great or magnificent. Fair enough, I’d say.

And the solution to the problem of Mrs Elton?

Well, it took me about seven readings to notice it, but you might get it first time.

It’s well worth the trouble.

Have you seen the new film adaptation? What did you think? Please tell us in the comments!

See also: JANE FAIRFAX by Joan Aiken

LONGBOURN by Jo Baker

JANE FAIRFAX by Joan Aiken, reviewed by Linda Newbery

"This was an unexpected treat, and now I'm eager to see what Joan Aiken has made of Mansfield Revisited."

Linda Newbery has written for young readers of all ages, and won the Costa Children's Book Prize for her young adult novel Set in Stone. She currently has two works in progress: one for David Fickling Books to be published in July, the other an adult novel.

Recently I learned on Facebook the term 'joyreading': taking a book from a friend's shelves and becoming immersed. This was just such a find, on a recent stay with a good friend. I dipped in, was soon hooked and asked to bring the copy home when I left.

Till then I'd had no idea that the admirable Joan Aiken - famed for The Wolves of Willoughby Chase and many other highly-acclaimed children's titles - had produced a group of books based on Jane Austen novels. This one, subtitled A Novel to Complement EMMA by Jane Austen, published in 1990, fills in and elaborates on the life of the young woman described in some editions as 'the second heroine' of Emma. 

In the first and much longer of the two sections we follow Jane Fairfax through childhood and adolescence, to her prolonged stay in London with Colonel Campbell and his family, briefly to the West Indies and back, to the point where she returns to Highbury and we join the well-known events of Emma. The seeds of resentment between Emma Woodhouse and her less privileged companion are sown early: the two girls share a piano tutor who finds Jane far superior in both talent and application. Jane - dressed in hand-me-downs from Emma and her sister Isabella - becomes a favourite of Emma's mother (who soon dies in childbirth) and also of Mr Knightley. However, while Emma looks forward to a life of comfort and indulgence, Jane will be expected - as we know - to earn her living as a governess.

In Emma, Jane is often seen as frail and nervous, susceptible to sore throats and chills as well as frequent headaches (in Aiken's hands she's clearly a migraine sufferer); but here she is spirited and often outspoken during her time with the Campbells, taking a protective role towards the Colonel's anxious daughter, Rachel. In London and during an extended trip to Weymouth we meet character types familiar in Jane Austen: vapid young men, spoilt and coquettish young women, elderly grande dames and brusque military men. Less typically, Mrs Campbell is a social reformer, much preoccupied with campaigns for penal reform and against the slave trade. Like most of the authors now drawing on Austen, Joan Aiken gives a wider sense of England's social gradations and its colonial transactions than we find in the originals.

Aiken cleverly embellishes Jane Austen's details of Frank Churchill's circumstances and those of the Campbells and their Irish friends the Dixons - supplying plausible reasons for Jane's embarrassment when she returns to the limited Highbury circle and is taunted by both Emma and Frank about her association with Mr Dixon and the gift of a piano. Along the way, readers familiar with Jane Austen will appreciate echoes not only from Emma but from other novels too. Jane receives a proposal of marriage from a boorish young man convinced that he has only to ask to be instantly and gratefully accepted, recalling both Mr Elton and Pride and Prejudice's Mr Collins. Dreaming that Mr Knightley will one day notice her, Jane imagines him finding her with a sprained ankle on a hillside, like Willoughby and Marianne in Sense and Sensibility. 

When we reach Part Two, readers of Emma will feel thoroughly at home at Highbury as we move through a series of social occasions: the dance at the Crown, strawberry-picking at Donwell Abbey, the disastrous picnic at Box Hill. To Jane, Highbury and its endless gossip are dull and parochial, something the full-of-herself Emma doesn't realise. We bustle through this section rather quickly, but Aiken focuses our attention on Frank Churchill and his flirtation with Emma - is he taking deception too far, and enjoying it too much? The reticence of the formerly livelier Jane is made plausible by her dislike of concealment and her resentment of Emma, now a rival, which she tries to suppress.

I've recently read Jo Baker's Longbourn* which similarly takes a sideways look at a Jane Austen work rather than continuing the main character's story. Both are in their different ways highly enjoyable. While Jo Baker  favours a sensuous, descriptive vein more reminiscent of Charlotte Bronte, Joan Aiken imitates Jane Austen's style with considerable success. Punctuation, cadences, vocabulary and speech patterns are so skilfully emulated that for much (though not all) of the book it's possible to imagine that this really is Jane Austen. She is particularly good at the condensed, character-revealing monologues that typify Mrs Elton, Miss Bates and, here, her own invention, the snobbish Mrs Fitzroy: "So very odd to bring in a child from outside - such an atrocious mistake! - unknown origins, probably no better than they should be - Fairfax all very well, but Bates - what sort of a name was Bates? - child just what might be expected from such a mongrel background - encouraging Rachel to insubordination and all manner of foolish nonsense - music? of what importance, pray, was music?"

This was an unexpected treat, and now I'm eager to see what Joan Aiken has made of Mansfield Revisited. 

Jane Fairfax is published by Gollancz.

(Update. For our review of Longbourn,  click here.)