Haven't we had enough Jane Austen already? Books based on the early 19th century British novelist's characters have become a cottage industry. Some authors have adapted her stories to the 21st century, while others have chosen to look at Austen's own life through a fictional lens.
Syrie James' "The Lost Memoirs of Jane Austen" is a novel based on the premise that Austen penned a journal detailing a secret love affair, a communion of mind and heart that promises such delightful and romantic possibilities until -- as readers who know anything about Austen's life will surmise -- ending forlornly. This novel begins with a foreword by a fictional Oxford University scholar who is publishing the first of Austen's supposedly discovered memoirs, leaving open the possibility, one supposes, for any number of potential future novels adhering to the same format.
To write for a contemporary audience in Austen's vernacular and frame of mind is tricky. Hard-core aficionados may be quick burrow into this narrative, to soak up any bits of the writer's life. For the more skeptical among us, James has set herself quite a task. How are we to accept as true that something written with anachronistic language and plot details has anything to say to us today?
The first two dozen or so pages produced groans in this reader's throat as characters quote poetry to each other and swoon and faint at inopportune moments. The narrator pens such lines as: " 'Indeed,' said I, struggling to contain my tears. 'I think he was quite insensible of his own state.' "
But something happens about 30 pages in. It's not a change in the plot, a character detail or even a shift in voice. Through humor, Jane comes alive. In a scene in which her mother bemoans Jane's spinster state and reiterates that it would be helpful financially -- to Jane, her sister Cassandra and their mother -- if were Jane to marry. "All is not lost," her mother tells her, reminding her that she still has her beauty, lovely hazel eyes and fine complexion.
"And all my teeth," Jane replies. "Why, at market I might fetch as high a price as one of [brother] Edward's best horses."
