Hmmm. Maybe I should start with a disclaimer. While I quite enjoy Jane Austen I wouldn’t class myself as her biggest fan, though I read a lot around the period. Bearing that in mind I approached Cass Grafton and Ada Bright’s The Particular Charm of Miss Jane Austen with an open mind.
It’s a time-slip novel, cleverly plotted (perhaps too cleverly as there were a few places where I got confused) and engagingly written. The story is one in which Austen fan Rose, participating in a Jane Austen festival in her home town of Bath, meets a stranger who turns out to be Jane Austen herself, trapped in the present day. Rose’s task is to get Jane back so that the world won’t be deprived of the books she will one day write.
I enjoyed a lot about this book but for me there was fundamental weakness and that was the utter desperation with which Rose felt she had to return Jane to her own time so that she could write all those books. The authors set this up as if they were Saving The World but to me that felt slightly silly as (gulp) I can’t help feeling we would all have survived without Miss Austen’s existing six novels, just as we’ve survived without all the ones she might have written if she hadn’t died young.
In theory not being a huge fan shouldn’t be a problem as one would expect a book to have a wider appeal than just the die-hard fans. (I’m not a great Charles Dickens fan either, for example, but I’ve recently enjoyed books which feature him as a character). The problem was that I felt rather as if I was on the outside looking in, invited to a party where I know a few people but they all know everyone else better and want to talk in detail about mutual (to them) acquaintances whose names I barely know. I feel a bit churlish saying this but I did feel the significance of some of the plot passed me by.
A lot of it was very clever, though. I loved the parallel worlds, with and without Jane, in which Rose is confronted with the person she would have been if her interest in the Austen novels and their author hadn’t existed. Her online friendship with American girl Morgan, over in Bath for the festival, would never have existed and in particular I was taken with the dilemma in the romance which was failing for Rose’s in the world with Jane’s writing blossomed in the world without it — a clever touch which genuinely had me struggling to see who it would be resolved.
I did enjoy this book, as I say, and any Austen fan will surely love it. It’s not the authors’ fault it didn’t quite touch my heart in the way I would have liked.
Thanks to Netgalley and Canelo for a copy of this book in return for an honest review.
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