I was initially interested in reading this book, however my tastes have shifted and I do not think I will be able to get to it now. Many thanks to the publisher for sending me a digital copy!

I can't review this book since I found myself unable to finish it. Although I was very interested in the book initially, I didn’t enjoy it as much as I was expecting. I have given it a three star average here but will not be writing reviews elsewhere since I did not finish it and my opinions would therefore maybe be inaccurate or misleading to other readers. However, I will recommend it to readers who I know are also interested in Jane Austen. My apologies but thank you for the opportunity to read this book.

Paula Byrne's  The Real Jane Austen: A Life in Small Things was a truly innovative biography in how it told the story of Austen's life through the objects which remain from her life-time.  With this book, Byrne is expanding on her earlier book Jane Austen and the Theatre which was first released in 2002.  It does rather beg the question whether this re-release and re-brand is little more than an attempt to cash in on the various bicentennials which Miss Austen has been enjoying over the past few years and the fact that she is shortly to star in a very ugly and inaccurate bank note.  However, once I started the book, I was so caught up that any misgivings were set aside.  Paula Byrne is an incredibly engaging writer and her enthusiasm for her subject is obvious and engaging.  Due to the ill-starred amateur dramatics in Mansfield Park, there has been a long-held tradition that the strait-laced Miss Austen disapproved of the stage, but here Byrne argues not only that this was far from the case but also that Austen's knowledge of and passion for the theatre was in fact at the core of her writing.

On the surface, the question of whether Jane Austen liked watching plays may seem trivial but in piecing together the context in which her novels were written, Byrne helps us towards an entirely fresh understanding of Austen's work.  Byrne goes through Austen's correspondence and shows that whenever she had the opportunity, Jane Austen went to the theatre around two or three times a week.  Even when she was not able to, she maintained a keen interest in the careers of the celebrity stage performers of the day.  She expressed dissatisfaction when one actor who had been a fixture in Bath theatres transferred to London.  She wondered whether one particularly emotive player would be too much for her young nieces.  At one point she says she felt like swearing when she heard that Sarah Siddons would not be appearing in King John that evening.

It hardly seems convincing that Austen disliked the theatre.  Indeed, Byrne even puts forward the controversial theory that Austen's infamous long creative silence while she was living in Bath was less the sign of a depressed mind and more perhaps that she was going out a lot, seeing a lot of plays and maybe just not having the time to sit down and write.  Byrne also points out the tradition of Austen family putting on amateur productions in their own home and that even when she got to the grand old age of thirty-five, Austen played Mrs Candour in Richard Sheridan's School for Scandal.  Not so disapproving of home dramatics either then.

Indeed, setting aside the Lovers' Vows episode in Mansfield Park, many of the characters express admiration for the theatre.   Byrne tracks how in Sense and Sensibility, Willoughby and the Dashwoods read Hamlet together.  Emma Woodhouse is hardly literary - her penchant for drawing up reading lists rather than actually going through them is a plot point - but even she can quote from Romeo and Juliet.  So clearly, plays are not even always bad within her books.  More interestingly, Byrne analyses how certain theatrical traditions are echoed in the characters that Austen has created.  Northanger's Catherine Moreland is the stereotypical naive country girl so popular in Regency drama.  Pride and Prejudice's Mr Collins is an ignorant hypocrite along the lines of Moliere's Tartuffe.  Even Elizabeth is another example of the sprightly heroine which also dominated Regency dramas, able to to defeat the high-ranking aristocrats despite her inferior connections.  Byrne explains how in many popular Regency plays, there was the conflict between country and town, with the naive ingenue arriving in London from the country and having all of their illusions shattered.  The battle lines are drawn.  Pride and Prejudice inverts this since Mr Bingley and Mr Darcy bring the town to the country, with Mrs Bennet loudly defending her territory against the rude incomer.  Austen was at heart a satirist, right from the beginning with the burlesques of Love and Freindship and although she sheathed her claws for the majority of her novels, she never quite abandoned her roots.

Particularly compelling was Byrne's analysis of Sense and Sensibility.  She points out that the themes of Sheridan's play The Rivals echo the battle between sense and sensibility and in particular 'the errors of an ill-directed imagination', something which also overshadows much of Northanger Abbey.  Yet it is also undeniable how many theatrical devices are at play in the action of Sense and Sensibility - Marianne leaps up and believes she  sees Willoughby, but no, it is Edward Ferrars.  Later she thinks Willoughby will be at the door, but it is Colonel Brandon.  Edward expects to find Elinor, but there is Lucy Steele as well.  The characters are constantly mistaking people for each other.  Later Mrs Jennings and Elinor are at cross purposes over whether a proposal has taken place.  The dialogue between Elinor and Lucy Steele is charged with what each of them are not saying - they both know that the other one knows they know they know.  There is true absurdity that Edward Ferrars is giving up his inheritance to marry a poor fortune-less girl who he does not love.  All of these are examples of the kind of mis-direction which was a classic feature of Regency comedy and puts the whole novel in a different light.  Is it because Austen was such an avid follower of theatre that her dialogue remains quite so fresh?

Still, although an ex-English-literature student, Byrne helped me to see how my own textual ignorance had allowed me to misunderstand much of the action of Mansfield Park.  Having had no idea of the significance of the play Lovers' Vows (I had had a vague notion that it was not actually a real play), it seems that I was missing a good deal of crucial context.  Indeed, according to Byrne, the novel's first volume 'is only partially intelligible without knowledge of Lovers' Vows'.  Small wonder then that it's the book which people tend to like the least.  Byrne explains that the play signals 'Austen's engagement with the subject of prohibited relationships and with a long-standing debate about women's autonomy in courtship'.  An intriguing choice for a book which sees one woman commit adultery, another elope and another flat out refuse to marry a man she dislikes.  Famously, in Northanger Abbey, Austen mocked Samuel Richardson's assumption that no woman should fall in love before the man in question had proposed, so this should not be so surprising, but here something quite different is happening.

Lovers' Vows features a fallen woman (played by Maria Bertram) reunited with her son (played by Henry Crawford) while a vivacious young woman (played by Mary Crawford) propositions her tutor and clergyman (played by Edmund Bertram).  The parallels are painfully obvious once you have some idea of the story, but given that most people read Mansfield Park in ignorance of all of this, we are missing out on a lot.  Mr Yates plays the wicked Baron, but he too has a parallel when Sir Thomas comes home unexpectedly and the whole production has to cease.  Yet there is even more going on here, Byrne explains how the play that Tom Bertram had wanted to pick was one where the apparent heir to an estate is inadequate and a more noble replacement is found.  Then when they settle on Lovers' Vows, Tom decides to play the butler.  All of this is Austen highlighting Tom's inadequacies and unsuitability to inherit Mansfield Park.  Then there is the conflict between how Henry Crawford wants to speak his lines and how Mr Yates wishes to bellow them - this is Austen poking fun at a contemporary debate about new fashions in acting.  We have missed all of this but Austen's contemporary readers would have got it all.

The Genius of Jane Austen explains why Austen never really seemed to consider becoming a dramatist herself - her use of the free indirect voice was revolutionary in the way that it took her both inside and outside of her characters but it also gave her far more control over her cast and how they behaved than a playwright or director would have ever had.  That this is such a key part of her work is, Byrne postulates, the reason why 'film and television adaptations - brilliantly as they may render the surface of Jane Austen's comic world - can never fully satisfy the serious reader of the novels themselves.  Screenwriters find it almost impossible to render the ironic third-person authorial voice that is so important to Austen's narrative method'.  This explains why many of us heard the news that ITV plans to put together a new production of Pride and Prejudice with more of a sigh than a cheer.

With varying degrees of enthusiasm, Byrne tracks through the various adaptations which have graced stages and screens both big and small.  She notes the boom in Austen-mania since the mid 1990s, but also notes the much earlier depictions such as AA Milne's Elizabeth Bennet and the fluffy and frivolous 1940 MGM production.  I did find myself wondering whether Byrne's antipathy for Gwyneth Paltrow as Emma was influenced by Ms Paltrow's current popularity status, but I agreed wholeheartedly that Alicia Silverstone better embodies Emma Woodhouse's mixture of altruism and spoiled self-centredness.  Byrne also notes how ubiquitous Austen spin-offs truly are in the modern day, pondering whether there will soon be 'a TV channel entirely devoted to Austen'.

We misunderstand Austen in so very many, many ways.  We think of her as a romance novelist, we believe her family when they say that she preferred to stay at home even though we can see in her letters that she travelled.  We believe them when they say that she never had a cross word to say about anyone even though her letters are full of digs at the neighbours and her novels are packed with mockery.  Byrne states firmly that this 'twentieth century assumption' that Austen was 'deeply suspicious of urban pleasures' is false - Jane Austen was a clever woman.  Byrne's novel is far more academic in its style than The Real Jane Austen but it makes the intelligence behind Austen's work inescapable, despite it being something so long denied even by those close to her - and just in case there was any risk of her point being missed, Byrne has even updated her book's title to make it more clear.  Jane Austen.  Genius.  Read all about it here.

My background in English Literature, both as student and teacher, means that I'm always interested in new takes on writers that I've studied or taught. However, I should declare at this point that I'm not a 'Janeite' - I quite like some of Austen's novels, but I'm far from being a fervent fan. I was interested in this book because I've read Paula Byrne's excellent book on Evelyn Waugh and also followed the recent 'debate' in the newspapers about Lucy Worsley's alleged appropriation of Byrne's work on Austen (so I wanted to see what the fuss was about!)

What I really loved about this book is that it reveals a side of Austen that hasn't (as far as I know) been explored elsewhere (although this is an updated and expanded version of an earlier book by Byrne): Jane Austen's love of theatre and inclusion of theatrical devices in her novels and early work. Byrne's knowledge of Austen's influences is impressive and she takes the reader in detail through some of the plays that Jane Austen would have seen and which influenced her own work. This is really interesting, but very detailed for a casual reader (Byrne is an academic and this is evident in the depth of her analysis and the complexity of her arguments). The final chapter on how Austen's novels have been adapted for stage and cinema is especially engaging; I loved Byrne's views on why 'Clueless' is such a successful screen adaptation of 'Emma'.

Throughout, it's easy to be swept along in Byrne's clear enthusiasm for her subject and her writing style is engaging. The whole book is excellently supported with references and further reading; indeed, the notes at the end make up over a quarter of the whole book. My only niggle was the conclusion of each chapter; it was useful to synthesise the complex arguments, but it seemed a bit repetitive and drawn out in places.

Overall, this is interesting if you want to understand the theatrical influences on Jane Austen's writing, as this makes up the bulk of the book. You don't have to be a 'Janeite' to appreciate the depth and detail of analysis here, even if you don't fully agree with Byrne that 'Mansfield Park' (notoriously Austen's 'problem' novel) is a work of genius!

Triple Austin

Lucy Worsley Jane Austen at Home Hodder and Soughton Published 02 June 2017 (Given to me by the publisher in exchange for an honest review)
Paula Byrne The Genius of Jane Austen Harper Collins Published (given to me by the publisher in exchange an honest review)
2017 marks the 200th anniversary of the death of Jane Austen. So, expect Jane Austen to be at the forefront of cultural attention. But, when is she not? You see her face on many tee-towels, mugs, etc, etc. Her books are continually turned into; films, theatre productions and TV shows. Her face appears on a bank note. But, how much do we really know about Jane Austen? In this new crop of books, concerning different aspects of Austen life, Worsley and Byrne attempt to cast a new light on the life of this well-known author.

Lucy Worsley, traces Jane Austen’s life through the houses she lived in and her domestic life. Worsley takes on a trip around the various locations that make up Austen’s world, examining her life through every day documents, such as; diaries, recipes, budgets, and personal letters. She goes from Steventon, where Jane was born and lived for the first years if her life, to Chawton, and Winchester, where Austen spent her final years. Worsley looks at the struggles that Jane faced simply to survive, and prosper, on a limited budget.

Lucy Worsley mentions that the Austen’s often preformed plays. She points out that Jane Austen herself wrote theatrical works. Paula Byrne expounds upon this theme. Byrne contextualises Austen’s work with an analysis of the theatrical tradition that existed during Austen’s life and analyses the productions that the Austen’s, and their circle, performed. Byrne argues that the theatre played a large role in Jane Austen’s; life, education, and literary works. Before, examining how Austen’s work has inspired Hollywood, exploring the adaptions that have been made of Austen’s novels.
These two books are both interesting reads. If you want an overview of Austen’s domestic life then the Worsley is the one you should pick up. If you require an exploration of the work, and the works that inspired them, then the Byrne is for you. It would be great to read these books together. It would be great to read these two books in conjunction with Austen’s own works. Both books would make great reading for your Austen summer.

I was not aware that this was an updated version of a precious book but that made no difference as I had not read the original. Themes related to the theatre run through all of Austen's writing and what Byrne does in this book is examine where those influences have come from and how Austen's writings relate to them. In a world of transient media it is easy to forget that the written and performed word were all that families had for entertainment two hundred years ago. I particularly liked the way that Byrne examined each of Austen's works to show progression in terms of writing style alongside the development of theatre in England. The update section looks at TV and film adaptations of Austen's works and Byrne shows how Austen is not that easy to translate to screen.

Jane Austen is one of those authors whose works are familiar to a large proportion of the population. They come up on many an English Literature curriculum, are widely read for pleasure and, interestingly, are often adapted for film and tv. I've even managed to get my husband to watch some of these adaptations (although he does refer to Sense and Sensibility as 'the one where she sobs into her harpsichord...') which is a bit of an achievement. These adaptations are the focus of the latter part of Paula Byrne's book (itself an expanded reissue of an earlier, 2003, book on Austen and theatre) and I was reminded of both books and the films themselves. Not just the BBC series or the Hollywood films but also the homages - to be honest it has been a few years since I read Emma but I reckon I watched Clueless sometime in the last six months...

The main part of the book looks at Austen's relationship with the theatre - one I'd sum up as both knowledgable and warm. Because I have never had to study any of the books (not since my English 'O' level in 1981) I wasn't aware of a school of critical thought which assumed that Austen disapproved of theatre - I was actually surprised to hear this since, like Byrne, my reading of the books themselves always suggested that she enjoyed this form of entertainment. The additional research done by Byrne, an Austen scholar, backs up her opinion - letters are full of mention of trips to theatres in London, Bath and other towns. I avoided reading critical works when possible at University - if they'd all been this readable and convincing I would probably have read more!

The Genius of Jane Austen is a fascinating book about Jane Austen’s connection to and interest in the theatre and how her reworking of comedic drama and farce in her novels is comparable to the reworking of her novels into film and television in the modern day. The majority of the book is part biographical and historical account of Austen’s theatrical interest and part close reading of her works in relation to major drama and other comedic work of her time. This is a reissue of Byrne’s earlier book Jane Austen and the Theatre in time for the bicentenary of Austen’s death this year, but with a new look at Austen in Hollywood and on TV to close the book.

From the introduction, Byrne sets out to show the importance of specifically English stage comedy to Austen’s work, but also to the influence of drama in her life and her novels. The first section focuses on Austen’s experience of the theatre, giving details about private performances and about professional theatre at the time. It is an interesting introduction to the theatre of the period through the lens of a famous novelist. References to other works bring in a sense of the literary scene of the late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century, from how Northanger Abbey uses theatre references to parody Burney’s Evelina to pointing out that Austen saw (and greatly enjoyed) the pantomime of Don Juan that Byron famously mentions at the start of his poem.

The second part of the book is about the theatre and Austen’s novels, with a straightforward structure of chapters focusing on certain novels and then interrogating both theatrical sources and theatrical techniques within these works. Casual fans of Austen and students working on certain texts may skim past to their favourite novels, but as a whole it provides an illuminating if rather detailed explanation of many interesting elements of Austen’s novels and how they relate to other texts and to dramatic conventions and stock figures.

The final chapter—the one which allows the word ‘Hollywood’ to be so prominent in the book—is possibly its most enticing part, a fairly critical look at Austen adaptations that argues that the best adaptations actively ‘adapt’ Austen, keeping the spirit of her comedy, but making it work in a different format. Byrne highlights key flaws in many Austen adaptations and gives an extended discussion of the film Clueless and how it adapts Emma more successfully than most straight adaptations of Emma that is fascinating to read. At the end, this seemingly unrelated chapter is brought together by comparing these less traditional adaptations of Austen with her own transformations of dramatic comedy of the eighteenth century, albeit briefly.

Byrne’s book is a great read for Austen fans, with enough depth and footnotes for further information, but without being an unapproachable book of literary criticism. Instead, it serves as an illuminating account of the early nineteenth-century theatre, an interesting take on various parts of Austen’s novels, and a ‘state of the nation’ type look at film and TV adaptations up to the present day. Even those with more of an interest in the general period and its literature than Austen in particular can find good material from the first section in particular, and the final chapter has interesting points that can be related to other overly adapted writers as well, such as Shakespeare who Byrne compares Austen to from the start.

Byrne's enthusiasm shines through this but her thesis that Jane Austen was influenced by theatre is broad, unspecific, and hardly as novel as she claims. There's lots of interesting material in the first part which mines an array of primary material to explore the Austen family's engagements with public theatre, private theatricals and dramatised readings aloud. The final chapter, too, on Hollywood's receptions of Austen collects together material on the familiar and less familiar film adaptations.

The section in the middle, though, Byrne's 'readings' of the theatrical aspects of the novels is repetitive, unfocused and frequently states the obvious. Byrne isn't a good literary scholar: she skims the surface, re-tells plots, reiterates what we already know about, rather than uncovering new aspects of interpreting the books. There are certainly some interesting intertextual connections being made with theatre, comedy drama and other novels (the later rather undermining the thesis being proposed here) but do they re-open, change or illuminate Austen's novels themselves? No, not really.

The book, overall, seems to be arguing for a premise (that Austen was influenced by theatrical comedy) that no scholar would realistically doubt. A book, then, then may well delight Austen fans and undergraduates.