Book Review: Austen at Sea by Natalie Jenner

A two-and-a-half-star review.

photo by author

“It was a quick succession of busy nothings.”
—Mansfield Park by Jane Austen

I hesitated to write this review in the way that I feel compelled to write it. I am embarking on a new undertaking of reviewing new books, and I am very grateful to the publisher of Austen at Sea for sending me an advance copy of the novel. (It is available now wherever books are sold.) But despite the way the book’s description seemed tailor-made for me—literary journeys! Letter-writing! Jane Austen’s worldwide legacy! America in the aftermath of the Civil War!—I was, for the most part, disappointed in this book, as I was in The Jane Austen Society (Jenner’s first bestselling novel).

As a reader who wants to be a good literary citizen, thoughtful and truthful in what she reads and shares, I hope this review is sincere without being unkind. The enormous amount of work and research that was poured into this book is unmistakable. The author’s love for my own favorite writer is also unmistakable. Do not mistake my critique for a personal attack on a fellow Janeite of such obvious intelligence and consideration. But do not assume that my hesitance to be too harsh will prevent me from honestly examining why this book simply did not land (har har) for me. I owe it to my fellow readers to be frank.

Disclaimers given, let us proceed. I shall try to avoid too many spoilers, but will warn you now that I cannot be as withholding as the book jacket attempts to do.

From Goodreads, a quick summary:

In Boston, 1865, Charlotte and Henrietta Stevenson, daughters of a Massachusetts Supreme Court Justice, have accomplished as much as women are allowed in those days. Chafing against those restrictions and inspired by the works of Jane Austen, they start a secret correspondence with Sir Francis Austen, her last surviving brother, now in his nineties. He sends them an original letter from his sister and invites them to come visit him in England.

In Philadelphia, Nicholas & Haslett Nelson—bachelor brothers, veterans of the recent Civil War, and rare book dealers—are also in correspondence with Sir Francis Austen, who lures them, too, to England, with the promise of a never-before-seen, rare Austen artifact to be evaluated.

The Stevenson sisters sneak away without a chaperone to sail to England. On their ship are the Nelson brothers, writer Louisa May Alcott, Sara-Beth Gleason—wealthy daughter of a Pennsylvania state senator with her eye on the Nelsons—and, a would-be last-minute chaperone to the Stevenson sisters, Justice Thomas Nash.

It's a voyage and trip that will dramatically change each of their lives in ways that are unforeseen, with the transformative spirit of the love of literature and that of Jane Austen herself.

Packed with literary references, literary analysis, historical information about the Massachusetts Supreme Court and the careers of Austen, Charles Dickens, Walt Whitman, and the suffrage movement in both England and the United States, this book is simply trying to do far too much in 320 pages—which, ironically, is quite the reverse of Austen’s famously limited and precise scope.

The reader travels with the Stevenson sisters across the Atlantic along with a party of five other adults who are all crossed and double-crossed in love, longing, and literary argument. While at sea, they put on a production of A Tale of Two Cities for the other passengers, a choice that seems to echo the ill-fated play in Mansfield Park but which brings up unfinished threads (the Louisa May Alcott subplot?!), an excess of unresolved romantic tension (to the point that it became difficult to keep track of who was attracted to whom) and on the whole an undertaking that seemed historically dubious for a gaggle of upper class people so keen on propriety. (Although the propriety decidedly fizzles out in the last quarter of the book. Closed-door, but… still.)

Meanwhile, Sir Francis Austen is at odds with his shrewish daughter Fanny-Sophia, a character I longed to know more of and yet who was relegated to the shadows for 90% of the book as an inscrutable villain. For a novel so razor-focused on women’s rights and on the nineteenth-century perception of women as a threat to men’s hierarchy and authority, I was disappointed in how Fanny was passed over. I would have loved far more about her story, her background, her inner demons, than the endless returning to the boring Justice William Stevenson and his two-dimensional, textbook-proto-feminist paramour.

(That was way harsh, Tai.)
(Sorry.)

The narrative jumps from Massachusetts to Chawton and back again, then to London and back to Massachusetts, with a few letters bridging the gap but mostly a feeling of frenetic disorganization and zooming forward to maintain suspense (why are we suddenly in court? Who is getting divorced and why?) but with no shocking plot twists to pay off the contrived aura of mystery. Meanwhile, characters whom I had hoped to like and find relatable (Henrietta, most notably) keep making choices that seem unfounded and bewildering. They later reflect on their unfounded and bewildering choices, but any character growth happens offstage, so to speak, and is drowned (last one, I promise) in page after page of telling, not showing. And it’s not telling in a fun way.

Jenner is writing for Janeites, without a doubt. The scenes which take place in the literary society of the Massachusetts Supreme Court (and which seem to be derived from actual historical data, which is quite fun) are a thinly veiled excuse for the author to present literary criticism about each of Austen’s major novels without needing to have actual plot to back up the conversations. I can’t judge this too harshly— I did enjoy reading the debates! But they have no bearing on the story as a whole, since the reader unfamiliar with Austen would have been lost long ago (and will not get enough of a background in these scenes to stay afloat—sorry, I will stop with the sea puns), and the reader who is already well-acquainted with the novels does not need them to understand the characters’ dubious motivations.

Though the style of Austen herself is to take on the role of a godlike omniscient narrator who can see inside every character’s head, I felt dissatisfied with this approach here. There were simply too many characters at play, and nearly all of them had a moment or two on thew stage (except the ones whose motivations I most wanted to know, interestingly enough) yet the narrator stands apart and detached from any real emotional connection with any of them.

Many writers have skillfully imitated Austen’s free indirect discourse, and many others have approximated the barbed wit and sly, contradictory clauses of her narrative. Jenner seems to want to do the former, and does not attempt the latter— I wish she had reversed the two. The book would have been greatly lightened by a bit more humor. There was a great deal of opportunity for humor! Instead, I felt as if the narrative was trying to do a dozen things at once: to preach at the reader, provoke the reader’s curiosity, tell three love stories and two family tragedies, ask questions about what responsibility descendants have to a family legacy, relate historical fact about the interactions of British and American judicial workings, and insert… baseless insinuations about a supposed long-lost confession of Jane Austen’s that does Cassandra dirty and raises more questions than it answers? (That one did not sit well with me.)

In all, there is much to like about this novel. The historical setting is rich, the themes of family duty and a responsibility to the larger world, the questions of privilege versus freedom are interesting and rich for the mining. My biggest problem is, I think, that what I liked was passed over all too quickly, and what I found slow or insipid was repeated and delved into without much merit. I am sorry to speak so plainly, but so it is.

My choice to give this book two and a half stars out of five may seem nitpicky. I debated three stars, but felt I simply had too many criticisms to merit an above-halfway rating, and two stars did not allow for the creativity and research that were obviously a large part of this book’s development. And the fascinating discussion on Mansfield Park in chapter eleven of book three (anachronistic as some of the language, and indeed some of the concepts, do seem for a bunch of stodgy middle-aged white men in the 1860s) left me with much to ponder.

I’d love to see Natalie Jenner explore her obvious knowledge of Austen and her knack for writing a good argument in the nonfiction world. I’d read a treatise from her on the way the perceptions of the six major novels have shifted since their foray into popular literary culture any day. But for historical fiction? This offering does not, I fear, display “the greatest powers of the mind… in which the most thorough knowledge of human nature, the happiest delineation of its varieties, the liveliest effusions of wit and humour, are conveyed to the world in the best-chosen language.”¹

Then again, can any of us ever hope to rival Jane?

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I would like to thank St. Martin’s Press for this book, provided to me free of charge, and the opportunity to write an honest review which was in no way required to be favorable. Please do not take my critique of this book as a mark against my continued interest in new historical fiction.

1. Northanger Abbey, chapter 5