The Sons of the Viscount and the Daughters of the Earl came out at the same time as Pride and Prejudice but Austen's fresh, witty masterwork feels like it comes from a different era.
​   Selina Davenport's novel is a four-volume paean to traditional themes (filial obedience/filial tyranny), conventional heroine behaviour (fainting and weeping), metaphor-laden prose (“smile of expectation” and “the sigh of parental anxiety”) and trite descriptions ("odoriferous shrubs," "umbrageous trees"). But it never received a review when it came out, which must have been disappointing for the author, and I thought I could blog as I read and post my predictions, to see if I was right about where the story was going. With a title like the Sons of the Viscount and the Daughters of the Earl (hereinafter SofVatDofE), I imagine we have a story that was marketed to the gentry and the working classes, all about "the dissipations of the fashionable world," so here we go with volume one...
    The main characters are two teenage sisters, the lively and vain Lady Elvira and the sweet and pensive Lady Angeline, daughters of the late Earl Fortescue. They live on one side of the lake. On the other side of the lake is the dwelling of Viscount De Courci, who has two sons, the lively and impulsive Reginald and the intelligent and thoughtful Henry, plus one daughter, the lovely young Cecil. Cecil is named after her deceased aunt, who was the victim of a tragedy that led to an exceedingly bitter family feud, which I'll get back to. To assist you with following along with the plot, I have created a family tree of the main characters beneath the break....​

    ​During the French Revolution in the 1790s, when Jane Austen was a young woman, the British establishment was terrified that the revolution would spread to Britain’s shores. A strong pushback movement, the Anti-Jacobins, took up their pens to defend the monarchy and the British way of life. They were not just worried about the overthrow of the monarchy, they were worried about the “New Philosophy," personified by William Godwin and his wife Mary Wollstonecraft, allied to atheism, the end of class distinctions, and the overthrow of the strict legal, ecclesiastical, and social restrictions surrounding  marriage.
    One way people showed their support for traditional values was to crowdfund (as we would say to today) appropriate literature, such as Sir Samuel Egerton Leigh’s Munster Abbey. 
​    Despite its title, Munster Abbey is not a gothic novel. Like Mr. Knightley’s Donwell Abbey, Munster Abbey is a fine old British home that’s been in the family for generations, possibly since the dissolution of the monasteries. The novel depicts an ideal governing class ruling over a harmonious England with a picture of perfection heroine: “Aurelia was, in person, dress, and manner, everything that was elegant and engaging: --For she had been taught, from early life, by her amiable and accomplished mother, those soft and attractive virtues that command the esteem, and irresistibly captivate the affections of men of sense.” (His italics, not mine but Janeites will recognize what this reminds me of).

  Austenesque adaptions--fan fiction, variations, cartoons, movies, mini-series, YouTube series--have increasingly been a subject of academic study in recent years. Two dozen writers and scholars have contributed essays to this anthology and Drs. Powley and Van Camp got it all organized and saw it to completion. Natalie Vandenberg looks at the 2022 version of Persuasion that kicked up such a kerfuffle in Austen circles, and Damianne Candace Scott, aka "Black Girl Loves Jane," looks at the pushback against diversity in Austen interpretations.
  My essay looks under the hood at the popular Austenesque book, Captain Wentworth's Diary (2007) and explores how author Amanda Grange refashioned Jane Austen's Persuasion, transforming it from a book told mostly from the consciousness of Anne Elliot the heroine to the POV of Captain Wentworth. 
     It was a pleasure working with Tammy on this project and it's wonderful to finally see it out in print! The book is priced for the academic market, so your best bet might be to recommend it for purchase to your local university, college, or municipal library.
     For space reasons, an accompanying book review of Captain Wentworth's Diary was not included in the anthology, so I am posting the book review below:

     I've read a lot of novels of the long eighteenth century (click on Authoresses or Book Reviews at right) and I'm fascinated by the similarities to, and differences from, Austen. 
​    In some earlier posts, I talked about the similarities between some 18th century novels and some characters and plot devices in Austen's novels. There will be more to come, so stay tuned! But in the meantime, let's look at the contrast between Austen and her contemporaries. She said "pictures of perfection" made her "sick and wicked," that is, she didn't like the too-good-to-be-true heroines who populated sentimental novels. She laughed at wildly improbable incidents, and she noticed when characters were given nothing to do: of one novel, she said, "there are many characters introduced, apparently merely to be delineated." 
    She avoided the incredibly improbable coincidence, the ridiculously improbable misunderstanding, and her heroines were all rational creatures--not helpless, mewling crybabies.
​     Below, just for fun, are some of the novelistic tropes that Jane Austen avoided: