IN LOVE WITH GEORGE ELIOT
KATHY O’SHAUGHNESSY Scribe, 400pp, £16.99
MISS AUSTEN GILL HORNBY
Century, 392pp, £12.99
Two female giants of the canon, Jane Austen and George Eliot, have recently been the subject of biographical fictions. Kathy O’shaughnessy’s In Love with George Eliot weaves real documentary material – letters and diaries – through imagined scenes of the novelist’s life, beginning with her arrival in London in 1851 and ending with her death in 1880 a few months after her marriage to the much younger Johnnie Cross. O’shaughnessy does not so much depart from the biographical version as animate it. The relationship with George Henry Lewes is as sustaining as the facts suggest, that with Johnnie as odd and uneasy. The ghostly figure of Edith Simcox, Eliot’s feminist stalker, also trips through the story, which is framed by a modern love triangle involving three North London Eliot scholars.
Lucy Lethbridge in the Financial Times wrote that the novelist herself remains ‘oracular but essentially unknowable: she has an inner life
that is intellectually rich but emotionally fragile. She is thinskinned, agonisingly self-conscious... and enjoys moments of unedifying triumph over friends who can’t keep up intellectually.’ Sophie Ratcliffe in the Telegraph was grateful to O’shaughnessy for ‘reminding us what an underrated erotic writer Eliot is. One of her gifts is that she can capture other people’s bodies.’ The modern story pleased Ratcliffe less – the ‘academics seem stuck in a bad Eighties theoretical time warp’. But Violet Hudson in the Literary Review, while praising the novel as astute and skilful, wanted more of the North London academics, feeling they brought the plot into ‘what feels like glorious technicolour after the unremittingly bleak Victorian scenes’.
Gill Hornby’s Miss Austen takes an opposite approach. Instead of animating the life with the evidence we have, she has written a fictional account of Cassandra Austen’s destruction of correspondence by and about Jane. Much of the action is set in a rectory in Berkshire where Hornby now lives and where Cassandra Austen’s short-lived fiancé Tom Fowles was born. Hornby imagines Cassandra returning to Kintbury Rectory in her 60s, ostensibly to comfort the bereaved daughter of the recently deceased rector, but in fact to retrieve an important cache of letters. Reading the letters leads Cassandra to recall lost scenes of her youth, and a not quite familiar picture emerges of an intermittently depressive Jane and a Cassandra who has chosen her spinsterhood rather than have it thrust upon her.
Paula Bryne in the Times pointed out that ‘Jane Austen was one of the first novelists to depict pairs of sisters as heroines: Elinor and Marianne Dashwood, Elizabeth and Jane Bennet. Undoubtedly, Jane’s most important relationship was with her sister.’ She praised Hornby’s invention of ‘a new romantic twist, which ought to be equally satisfying to those readers who know their Austen family history and those who don’t’. Stephanie Merritt in the Guardian wrote that it was ‘testament to Hornby’s skill... that I had to turn to the author’s note at the back to check how many of the letters included here were invented’. But while most reviewers were agreed in thinking Hornby had written a sympathetic character in Cassandra Austen, Brian Martin in the Spectator appeared to have read a different novel in which the resourceful and autonomous Cassandra emerges as ‘an obsessed, manipulative old woman... a figure to be pitied for her lot in life’.
‘The novelist does not so much depart from the biographical version as animate it’