An Austen revival

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Jane Austen

Jane Austen festival ball, Bath 2009

One of the books I most enjoyed reading during the Christmas holiday was PD James’ “Death comes to Pemberley.” It’s in some ways a sequel to Jane Austen’s Pride and prejudice, and revives many of the characters from Pride and prejudice and other Austen novels, but given the fact that it’s written by PD James, also involves a corpse. So imagine my surprise when I returned to work in January and the first book I picked up to catalogue was another Jane Austen revival – Old friends and new fancies: an imaginary sequel to the novels of Jane Austen by Sybil G. Brinton, published in 1913.

Sybil G. obviously enjoyed herself hugely while writing this book. In a brief note she says that she wrote the book with her friend Edith Barran “for those who, like ourselves, owe to Jane Austen some of the happiest hours of their lives. ” In the opening chapters she gathers up (nearly) all of Jane Austen’s characters and throws them together into the dizzy social whirl of the Bath season. It’s as if she’s involved in a literary game of Consequences: if Elizabeth and Darcy met Lucy Steele and Mary Crawford, in the Assembly rooms at Bath, whatever would happen?  Have the characters changed after their novel experiences? Has Lucy Steele  seen the error of her ways? Has Mary Crawford been softened and humanized by suffering? Some people haven’t changed a bit: Lady Catherine de Bourgh moves like a tank through the Pump room, destructive as ever. Emma (Woodhouse-that-was) has persuaded her Mr Knightley to go into Parliament and has established herself in town, organizing social circles in London just as she did those in Hartfield.

The great thing about using someone’s else’s characters is that you can re-arrange their fate to suit your own preferences. Colonel Brandon was clearly not a favourite with Sybil Brinton, he has been killed off  before the story begins.  I haven’t yet finished reading this story so I can’t spoil the ending for you, but I can highly recommend it to all the Jane Austen fans. Although I thought I knew Austen’s books pretty well, I was made giddy by the speed with which so many characters appear or are referred to, and luckily there’s an index of characters listed by their original Austen novel.

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Two fauns and an ogre

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Arthur Ransome

Everybody knows Arthur Ransome wrote Swallows and Amazons; that wonderful adventure tale of children messing around with boats, which awakened a love of sailing in so many of its readers.  Most people also know he wrote another eleven books in the series, set not only in the Lakes, but also in East Anglia and around the world.

 These are books that I have read time and again, but (probably like many others) I must confess I’ve never read any of the rest of his writings.  I vaguely know he wrote books on fishing, edited a collection of Russian fairy tales and was a political correspondent for the Manchester Guardian, but I’d never heard of a small volume entitled “The hoofmarks of the faun” [1911.6.1209].

 This is a collection of some very early works and, to be honest, they are not terribly good on the whole.  Written over twenty years before Swallows and Amazons, he seems to be struggling to find his style.  The publisher lost £25 on it (a fair amount of money in 1911) and needless to say, it didn’t make Ransome’s name or fortune either.

 The title piece features a faun from the south, who falls in love with an elf-girl from the north but, although his feelings are reciprocated, they cannot do more than sense each other’s presence.  One day they see each other’s footsteps, but she thinks his are made by some “horrible thing.”  Learning of this from a gossipy starling, the faun sadly leaves to return to his own kind.  Not a feel-good story, then.

 Neither is the closing story, “The ageing faun,” which is another tale of lost love.  In between these two are a rather odd, slightly philosophical, piece on love and dreams and a rather better story, called “The little silver snakes,” which touches on the occult, but suffers from a slightly anti-climatic ending.  Then there is a rather puzzling literary criticism on a chap called Peter Swainson, who allegedly had one book published a few days after his death.  I can find no trace of this book and no trace of this Peter Swainson in birth records of the time.  Did he really exist, or is this some kind of fantasy criticism?

 “Rolf Sigurdson” is perhaps the best work in this collection, with echoes of Norse mythology, a reasonably strong storyline and a happy ending.  This one I read and enjoyed, without needing to wince at flowery prose or wonder quite what Ransome was on about.

 So much for that.  My interest awakened, I dug out another early book of his, entitled “The imp and the elf and the ogre” [1911.6.590].  I expected this to be more twee fairy tales, but no, it is in fact a rather charming and informative children’s book about nature.  Ransome could write for children – that is so very apparent from this book.  In fact, if you’ll just excuse me, I think I’m going to slip away and curl up in a corner with it…

How to write saleable fiction (Edwardian style)

 

We have been cataloguing masses of fiction lately, so I was amused to find this slim volume of advice, for would-be authors written by a London literary agent, George Magnus.

According to Magnus, literary merit was no guarantee of success – in fact, quite the opposite. “The better the novel, the smaller the royalty … the sale of a really clever novel, that is neither sensational nor offensive, frequently is not sufficient to pay in royalties for the typing of it”. Action, incident and exciting situations are “more requisite than polish and intimate character drawing”.

The book gives details of how much money new authors could expect for their work – a 10% royalty on a 6s (30p) novel, or £1 per 1,000 words for a serial publication,  earning around £60 for an average-length novel selling 2,000 copies.  It doesn’t sound very much, but you could buy a house for under £150.

Magnus recommended writing stories for boys – they should be “full of life and action”. A love interest was by no means essential, and “when introduced should be of the type labelled milk and water”. He also states that there was a big demand  for “religious fiction”. Authors are advised not to mention particular  denominations, but to “write a sweet, highly moral story in which true religion enters into daily life, unlabelled”.  Other recommended subjects include original incidents in the ball-room, naval and military love stories, airship and aeroplane racing, dramatic mining stories, and stories of adventure in fictitious foreign states.

Every book needs an attractive or mysterious title. Magnus advises his readers to include words like kiss, fan, waltz and wooed – and to have a double meaning in their title. I wonder what he would have made of my all time favourite title from the Tower – One frail woman and four queer men by Edgecumbe Staley (1902).

As well as dispensing advice, George also tried his hand at writing fiction. So did he follow his own rules?  We have a copy of his novel “Two in the dark” (1908), the story of an author and critic, and his pursuit of a young lady who writes serial stories for popular magazines.  While neither sensational nor offensive, it is quite racy for the time. Sadly it was not a great success, and he doesn’t seem to have published any more. In contrast, How to write saleable fiction ran to at least 14 editions, and remained in print until the 1920s.