Fiction Experience Drives Austen Analysis
My new book on Jane Austen’s development as a writer descends directly from my historical fiction trilogy based on Austen’s life. That series, published successively in 2015, 2016, and 2017, imagines a plausible life for Austen during her mid-twenties to early thirties, a period of which we know virtually nothing. The Marriage of Miss Jane Austen puts the heroine through personal and historical incidents that challenge her courage and values.
The nonfiction book, Jane Austen and the Creation of Modern Fiction: Six Novels in a “Style Entirely New,” explores the author’s creative process. It shows what she learned about writing novels with each book and how she applied the lessons in future works. Available now from Jane Austen Books at a special price, it will be formally launched later this year.
Each chapter shows how Austen pivoted the novel from the superficial and often absurd adventures of faint-prone damsels in far-off castles toward serious studies of the psychology of real women in ordinary life.
In writing the fiction trilogy, I began with a woman’s experience in the early 1800s, when everything—biology, society, the law and politics—was against her. The voice I heard was familiar. Before long, I realized it was Austen’s. I reviewing her biographies, I realized that I could build the story around the unknown years of her life while not changing her career as a fiction writer.
Author enjoys a cuppa at Spring Tea of the Oregon-Southwest Washington JASNA region, where new book Jane Austen and the Creation of Modern Fiction was auctioned off to benefit the region.
Actors say that, when portraying historical figures, they do not try to imitate the person but inhabit them. I took the same approach in fiction, letting the personality and voice emerge in the unfolding of the story. I wanted to tell a story about how a woman as intelligent and passionate as Austen would respond to all that Regency life could throw at her. I wanted to tell the story as if Austen were writing it, free of the restraints that limited the seriousness of woman’s fiction in her time.
In writing these three books over four years, I ended up carefully studying Austen’s works. I did not try to imitate any of her storylines. I had my own narrative. But I was telling a love story set in the same era involving characters using similar language, wearing similar clothes, living in similar houses, and having similar life experiences. I would need to parallel many elements in her novels without replicating the material. Nearly nine hundred pages later, I had produced only one scene that resembled an important scene in one of Austen’s six novels. Given how I had set up the conflicts (independently of any of Austen’s), I could not avoid that one scene.
Everything that I learned about Austen’s art in the process of writing the historical fiction ended up in page after page of notes on structure, plot, character development, and interior life. These became the bones of the literary criticism in the new work. I wrote the book as I learned it, in pragmatic terms as a novelist solves practical problems on the page. Another four years later, and Jane Austen and the Creation of Modern Fiction: Six Novels in a “Style Entirely New” is done.
The book is available at a discounted price between now and the Jane Austen Society of North America (JASNA) annual general meeting in October.
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The Marriage of Miss Jane Austen is also available from Jane Austen Books and Amazon. The trilogy traces love from a charming courtship through the richness and complexity of marriage and concludes with a test of the heroine’s courage and moral convictions.