5/18/2023 0 Comments Lady's Maid by Margaret Forster![]() ![]() Aiken disastrously fails to recognise that these are incompatible aims. It wants to be both like Jane Austen (to substitute for the real thing) and to revise Jane Austen (to be a real thing itself). Instead it has an unappealing, mixed-up wrongness of flavour. ![]() I have only ever read one such work, the continuation of Sanditon by ‘a Lady’ published some years ago the bitter taste still lingers on, and I have a grudging sense that Jane Fairfax may not be quite as thin a dish of gruel as that. Joan Aiken (their names are horribly homophonic – could this have given her the idea?) is the author of Mansfield Revisited, which seems to have been successful enough to persuade her to try the market again. But Jane Austen is, in fact, notoriously hard to ‘do’ convincingly. Jane Austen’s work seems, at first, hospitable to that literary parasite, pastiche: there isn’t much of it, so ersatz continuations or alternative narratives must satisfy the hunger for more at the same time, the passionate familiarity which many Jane Austen readers have with her novels (demonstrated in Kipling’s wonderful story ‘The Janeites’) ensures a ready frame of reference for the imitator. ![]()
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