The Lost Years of Jane Austen

As a die-hard Jane Austen and Regency reader, I'm always listening for "the voice." This gem has it. Everything about the period rings true here, and there's plenty of material for making that judgment. I loved all the excursions into the history and culture of the period (the "aughts" of the 1800s), as well as the backgrounds of both major and minor characters. A well-woven mixture of true and fictional happenings, the book has the quiet but relentless flow of this watershed period, arguably the beginning of modern life as we know it. Things happen, other things happen, always advancing the story in some way, but interesting in and of themselves. There's plenty of color here, not dramatic but lively in the same sense that Jane Austen's own stories still hold our interest today. If you're looking for a fast-paced plot with lots of fireworks, this isn't it. But I highly recommend you simmer down, make a nice pot of tea, and let this work flow gently over you. It's worth your time, whether you know the period well or are new to it.

This is a fictionalized biography of a portion of Jane's life..her mid-twenties. I enjoyed it very much and I think most JA fans will too. It is written in what seems to me a good imitiation of Jane's writing style. Highly recommended.

In this interesting book, the author, Barbara Ker Wilson, asks us to imagine that Jane Austen accompanied her aunt and uncle, Jane and James Leigh Perrot, to the Antipodes (New South Wales, later to be Australia) during the period around 1803-04--a time during which little is known about the real Jane Austen's life because of a dearth of surviving letters to her sister, Cassandra. Although the book's title implies that its focus is Jane Austen, the narrative actually centers as much on the Leigh Perrots, and other real historical individuals, as it does on Jane. One of the best parts of the book is the early chapters that detail the experience that Jane Austen's aunt, Jane Leigh Perrot, had when she was falsely accused of stealing some lace from a store in Bath (a true event), and bravely decided to weather the accusations--and spend some months in jail--rather than paying her accusers a blackmail fee. This material is historical fiction at its best, fleshing out real events in a very convincing way. Jane Leigh Perrot emerges in this part of the novel as a complex, sympathetic figure, even as she appears to others in the book--including her niece Jane--as rather proud and haughty. The novel loses some of its narrative power as it spins out its complicated tale, although the details of the long sea voyage to New South Wales (with its maritime dangers) and life in the Antipodes (with its fascinating insects and marsupials) are faithfully observed by the author, who definitely knows her Australia. There are many characters in the book, and readers looking for an intense focus on Jane Austen may be disappointed. Also, if readers are hoping for a novel about a steamy romance between Jane and a dashing fictional figure, they will not find that here. The book honors Jane's celibacy and places her in the company of many desirable men (many of whom are actual historical figures, one of whom was really named D'Arcy Wentworth!) without most of these relationships blossoming into romances. I found the book a little long and occasionally disappointing in its tendency to suddenly drop a plot line or focus on a character and move to another scene or idea just as the earlier one got interesting. (I sort of had the impression that the author sometimes lost track of what she was describing--or just lost interest in it. And always, I felt like I wanted "more Jane.") The book also has a few typographical errors and, in my opinion, too many ellipses. (I found myself wondering, Why use three dots when you can just finish the sentence?) On the whole, though, as a reader I felt great respect for the time and care with which Barbara Ker Wilson had researched the world of Jane Austen--the natural history, the wars, the other world events that were occurring during the early 1800s--and weaves them into a novel that imaginatively proposes how Jane Austen might (just might!) have spent her time during 1801 and 1804.