Throwback Thursday with Diana Birchall

Illustration by Juliet McMaster from first edition of In Defense of Mrs. Elton

This is a true timeslip tale, because I am going to take you back to the days before terms such as Jane Austen Fan Fiction, Jane Austen sequels, the Austenesque, and Austen Variations were known – because they did not yet exist. It is almost as much of a time and mind stretch as remembering the days before the internet or computers – which only people of a certain age can do!  But, many years ago, before the internet, take it from me, children, there was no Jane Austen writing market.

Until I came along (she said modestly!) – and oh yes, a few other brave pioneer souls!  This is my part of that story.

Way back then, when we typed on IBM Selectric typewriters (no, I am NOT old enough to have typed fiction on a manual machine!), I was already a lifelong fan of Jane Austen, having first read her in my early twenties. This was also before the Jane Austen movie adaptations; I think the only one that had been generally heard of then was the old Laurence Olivier/Greer Garson 1940 film with the anachronistic period frippery costumes. I do not mean to say that there had never been a sequel published, because there were a few; Jane Austen herself gave some hints of what might happen to her characters in future, and two of her nieces wrote continuations. But progress of the genre was slow…sequels seemed to be written at the rate of one or two a century. Seemingly the first piece of actual “fan fic” was a pastiche novel called Old Friends and New Fancies, which was a hodgepodge of characters from all the novels, published in 1913.  After that, the most recent one, and the first sequel to Pride and Prejudice, was Pemberley Shades, written in 1949.  It was high time for another.

Illustration by Juliet McMaster from In Defense of Mrs. Elton

Despite the sad absence of internet life, Janeites did exist and we were connected to each other. People did not discover Jane Austen through movies then; instead, Janeites read the novels again and again (maybe because there was not much else to do before we had computers). And we joined the Jane Austen Society. JASNA, the Jane Austen Society of North America, was founded in 1979, I joined soon after, and this resulted in making a fabulous network of friends of the great and the good in the Jane Austen world in those early days. At our meetings, we felt a naively excited delighted discovery that there were other people like us, who loved what we loved!

It was in 1985 that Persuasions, the journal of JASNA, held a contest for the person who could best imitate Jane Austen’s style. Since her style was what I had studied so intensely in my hundreds of rereadings, I decided to give it a try, wrote a little sketch of the chatter of Miss Bates – and won!  Nothing could have been more exciting and encouraging to me as a young and still unpublished writer. I delighted to churn out Jane Austen pastiche (as I termed it, not knowing what else to call it), and in the early 1990s wrote my first novel, Mrs. Darcy’s Dilemma.  This featured Mr. and Mrs. Darcy in middle age, and was set right around the time Queen Victoria came to the throne, in 1837. It was a transitional age, when the railroad was coming into being, and attitudes were changing. The novel visited the lives of the Darcys and their children (one was a bad girl who became an actress), and was quite a refreshing story, being so new.

But I couldn’t get it published. I did get a New York literary agent, who was very excited about it, called it a “gem,” and assured me there would be a bidding war. And then we read that two other authors had had the exact same idea (talk about the zeitgeist!) and were coming out with sequels to Pride and Prejudice. They were Emma Tennant with Pemberley and Julia Barrett with Presumption. Both were well established authors, while I was new.  Reading an interview with Tennant who said they were “hurrying publication to get ahead of the other sequels,” I lay down on the floor of the bohemian coffeehouse where I did my work, and howled piteously. My agent persisted, but every publisher he took it to said the book was “wonderful, but there is no room for a third Jane Austen sequel.”

Read that sentence again!  Yes, it really happened – and now, 25 years later, there are literally thousands of sequels, a whole industry!  But it is not always a good thing to be ahead of one’s time.  “I don’t know what happened,” my agent said, “but put it aside, and ten years from now it will sell.” He was right, for Mrs. Darcy’s Dilemma actually sold to a small English company in 2004, but it was in in 2008 that Sourcebooks picked it up and gave it national publication in America.

Sourcebook edition, published 2008

Meanwhile, in addition to writing a scholarly biography of my grandmother, the first Asian American novelist, I never stopped amusing myself with my Austen pastiche.  My slant was usually humorous, concentrated on style, and with a peculiar penchant for Jane Austen’s villains and grotesques, whom I loved. With the start of the internet and the early Yahoo literary groups, I wrote a serial story defending Mrs. Elton (of Emma fame) and this being the first internet Jane Austen serial, was an exciting ground breaking adventure for me. Each week all my new online friends would question and analyze and discuss and ask me what was going to happen next – it felt like when ships from Britain reached America in Dickens’ day, and people on the dock shouted “What happened next to Little Nell?”  My In Defense of Mrs. Elton was published by JASNA as a conference gift in 1999, and also published in England and Australia. Copies are rare, but JASNA put the story online (it is illustrated by Juliet McMaster) and you can read it for free here:

http://www.jasna.org/publications/defense/index.htm

Sourcebooks also published my next book, Mrs. Elton in America, which takes the Elton family to, you guessed it, America, where Mr. Elton is a clergyman. They visit the South in the days of slavery, fail as reformers, go out West for rousing adventures there, and then return to England, with much to tell (or in Mrs. Elton’s case, brag about).

First edition of Mrs. Elton in America

Sourcebooks Edition

With these books I was also an early practitioner of the blog tour, which had just been invented, and did many interviews for the literary blogs then becoming popular. Of course I kept on writing what was now being called the Austenesque, and have literally hundreds of stories in the genre, some of which have been in anthologies, and also plays which have been widely performed in the Austen world.  I have certainly enough material to publish several more books, but the changes in publishing, where the author seems to have to do it all herself, have been daunting to me, and I haven’t attempted it. Perhaps I will, now that I’m retired from my job (I worked at Warner Bros as a story analyst). In the meantime, I am so glad to have found a happy, productive and congenial home here at Austen Variations!

To celebrate my career in Jane Austen, I will give away a copy of Mrs. Darcy’s Dilemma.  Leave a comment and you will be eligible.  And thanks for listening to my fireside tales about Days of Old!

Illustration by Juliet McMaster from In Defense of Mrs. Elton