​​     Many of Jane Austen’s devoted readers feel surprise and consternation over the passages in Persuasion about "troublesome, hopeless" Dick, the deceased son of the Musgrove family, along with the mocking depiction of his sorrowful mother. Austen doesn’t pull her punches in describing Dick as “stupid and unmanageable" and as someone who "had been very little cared for at any time by his family, though quite as much as he deserved.” His death far from home was “scarcely at all regretted.”
​   Some scholars have surmised that, had Austen not been in the throes of her final illness, she would have revised her callous descriptions or excised them altogether. Others have speculated about why Austen inserted these harsh passages in a novel famous for its gentle heroine and its wistful tone.
   Could it be that these strongly-worded passages hint at something Austen felt strongly about? Her seemingly out-of-place attack on the Musgroves is intended to catch the reader’s attention, to provoke them to pause and probe beyond the liminal space of the Musgrove's drawing room and to confront the costs of empire which supports their way of life. Indeed, we were mistaken in taking these passages at face value.
​    Dick Musgrove may well have been a satiric, inverted portrait of a real-life Richard who served in the Navy—Richard Parker, infamous in Austen’s time but forgotten today.

  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:

    Very often, when reading old novels, I come across some striking passage when the author or authoress, or one of their characters, delivers their strong views about something, such as slavery or empire or women's rights.  I've long since realized that Jane Austen was not outspoken about any of these issues, compared to her peers. I conclude that people who think she was outspoken or radical have not read enough of the popular literature of the time to have a basis for comparison. 
    But if I bang on that drum every time I review an old novel, I'll sound like a broken record. (ooh, mixed metaphors).  So I've  excerpted these three examples about feminism from novels I've recently read, to present them together. The first two are examples of feminists--okay, tragic, doomed, feminists, but they are given the chance to have their say. The third is a speech from a "mixed character," someone presented as flawed, but essentially good.
    The feminist message is delivered not by the heroine, but by a side character. Then it is made clear to us that this side character may be sympathetic, but is not entirely admirable.
​     The word "subversive" is widely used in academia these days, often when arguing that the author has a message which she barely hints at, but i think introducing feminism in this way is truly subversive...