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

LONGBOURN by Jo Baker, reviewed by Linda Newbery

"Jo Baker writes with complete assurance, bringing her characters and settings vividly off the page."

Photograph by Chris Normandale

Linda Newbery edits Writers Review. Having published widely for young readers, she is now working on a new adult novel. 

Jane Austen season is upon us again, with the lavish Andrew Davies dramatisation - and completion - of Sanditon for ITV currently gathering mixed reviews. When I read Sanditon and reached its abrupt end, I felt a pang for the novelist who'd been unable to see her vision through to completion - but what would Jane Austen have made of the nude bathing on a public beach, close-partnered waltzing and modern mannerisms in this screen version?

For a different, sideways look at Jane Austen, I recommend Longbourn, subtitled Pride and Prejudice - the servants' story.  Jo Baker takes us behind the scenes of Jane Austen's world to the toilsome routines that allow the Bennet family to live in leisure and comfort. To housekeeper Mrs Hall, the arrival of Mr Bingley at Netherfield Park, which gives Pride and Prejudice its famous opening sentence, "meant a flurry of giggly activity above stairs; it meant outings, entertainments, and a barrowload of extra work for everyone below." The smooth running of the household depends on housemaids being up before first light to fetch water and light fires, their chilblained fingers flaring with pain. For an evening party at a neighbour's, footman James must wait outside in icy weather ready to drive home, with horses to tend into the early hours while the young ladies go straight to their beds.

If you read this hoping for romantic encounters between Elizabeth and Mr Darcy, you'll be disappointed; Jane Austen's key players are in minor roles here. Mr Darcy barely appears in person, and he certainly isn't Colin Firth or Matthew Macfadyen. We see the Bennets' acquaintances only as they affect the servants: Mr and Mrs Hall, Sarah, and the younger, pre-pubescent girl, Polly. When Mr Collins arrives in search of a wife, we're made aware of the insecurity of the servants' livelihoods, for it will be in his power to dismiss them all, should he wish, when he takes ownership. Mrs Hall is relieved when he settles for the homely Charlotte Lucas. A servant like Sarah - an orphan taken in by the stern but kindly Mrs Hall - has nothing to call her own beyond the wooden box in which she keeps her few possessions; not even space, as she shares a room and a bed with Polly. Rare moments of privacy are snatched between chores, so that when Sarah and Mr Bingley's footman are mutually attracted she's astonished by "the dawning revelation that pleasure was possible for her."

The plot hinges on the arrival and later disappearance of the young manservant, James Smith, whose secrets are revealed partly through the machinations of George Wickham, the predatory charmer. Jo Baker picks up on the small detail in Pride and Prejudice that a soldier of the visiting militia has been flogged; here Sarah witnesses the brutal act while on an errand to Meryton, later connecting it with James's story. A middle section takes us back to his army service during the Napoleonic wars, and into territory which ranges far from Longbourn and middle-class Hertfordshire. Mrs Hill, too, has a back-story which throws an intriguing - and plausible - new light on the Bennets' marriage.

While this is a compelling story in its own right, it closely parallels the events of Pride and Prejudice with the fairly safe assumption that readers will be familiar either with the novel or with one of the many adaptations. But there's no attempt to imitate Jane Austen's style. In fact readers may find more similarities to Charlotte or Emily Bronte in Sarah's passionate love for James, her fierce loyalty, and in particular in the descriptions of landscape and weather. Here is James, alone on a beach: "He slipped away to the shore, and walked across the low headland; it fell away into a spit of sand, the grasses thin and fine as old men's hair, the sand drifting and scattering and settling; and white shells and then bleached bones, and then a sheep's skull, picked white, which made him catch his step a moment, not at what it was but at what he thought it might have been. Then skipping sand-fleas, and trails of dried seaweed, and he was out to the edge of the world." You'll never find anything like this in a Jane Austen novel, where landscape is seen only as evidence of status, taste and good management.

Jo Baker writes with complete assurance, bringing her characters and settings vividly off the page. Her story isn't unique in being a spin-off from Pride and Prejudice - Emma Tennant, in Pemberley, and P D James, in Death Comes to Pemberley, have also drawn on this much-loved classic. But in my view Longbourn, with its shift of focus, outshines both.

Longbourn is published by Transworld.

See also: Jane Fairfax by Joan Aiken, reviewed here.

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.)

FIRST ANNIVERSARY - reading pile roundup: Linda Newbery

A side-effect of hosting WRITERS REVIEW is that my to-be-read pile (both virtual and actual) is out of control, with new additions almost every week. I have two overcrowded shelves of books-in-waiting: charity shop bargains rubbing shoulders with overdue library books, loans from friends, occasional advance proofs, impulse buys and the next choice for Reading Group. Inevitably, some books wait there for a very long time, as others jump the queue - and that's without including the titles lined up on my Kindle. At least I shall never be short of a good read. 

One that will go straight to the front is Alan Hollinghurst's The Sparsholt Affair, due in October. I particularly enjoyed his most recent novel, The Stranger's Child, and this one - beginning in Oxford in the Blitz and following three generations to the present-day - promises everything Hollinghurst is known for: elegance of style, insights into social mores and changing times, a focus on art and architecture. 

Time Will Darken It, by William Maxwell, is the book I've chosen for my Reading Group. I have yet to read anything by Maxwell, but his reputation gives me high expectations. Tom Cox, of the New York Times, listed it as an underrated classic of American literature, a "quiet, mid-career masterpiece". ("Quiet" is the kiss of death to marketing departments these days, making me wonder if the novel would even find a publisher today.) Nicholas Lezard, whose Paperback of the Week feature in the Guardian has sadly come to an end but was such a reliable source of books otherwise at risk of being overlooked, said of it: "This is such a good novel that I'm still shaking thinking about it ... A novel not to be recommended to people but to be pressed on them, urgently." So I am pressing it on my Reading Group, for September.

Longbourn, by Jo Baker, unaccountably had a long wait on the shelf before I started it this week. Such a clever idea: Pride and Prejudice from the viewpoint of the family servants - a sort of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead set in Jane Austen's world, or at least the long hours and repetitive toil behind the scenes which allow her main players to lead their lives of comfort and leisure. Of course the servants have their own secrets and desires, and in one case a background that takes us far beyond the confines of Longbourn. I'm already hooked, by the writing as well as by the premise. Jo Baker is certainly a striking talent; far from imitating Jane Austen she has found a distinctive style of her own, and a sense of wild landscape in some of the scenes which is more reminiscent of Charlotte Bronte. 

There's usually some nature writing on my waiting pile. Currently heading that section is The Seabird's Cry  by Adam Nicholson, from which I expect eloquent writing on marine ecosystems, the lives of birds and how we're casually destroying the environment.

I enjoyed Rachel Joyce's The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry,  was even more impressed by The Love Song of Miss Queenie Hennessy, and am looking forward to her new novel, The Music Shop. She has a wonderful way of combining simplicity and profundity in writing about unexceptional lives. For a taster, catch it on Radio 4's Book at Bedtime last week and this.


What are you looking forward to reading? Please tell us in the comments!