Godmersham Park, novel by Gill Hornby (review)

 This is the second novel I have read this year about Jane Austen. The other one was Stephanie Barron's Jane and the Year Without a Summer, which I reviewed previously, and it is tempting to compare the two books, but I am not going to say that one is better than the other. They are very different, and both are excellent in many ways. 

    

    While Jane and the Year Without a Summer is a murder-mystery, set in 1816, Godmersham Park is set in 1804, when Jane Austen was aged only twenty-nine, and is concerned with less sensational events. The story is closely based on truth, the details being taken from the diary of Jane's niece Fanny Austen-Knight, daughter of Jane's brother Edward who owned the handsome estate of Godmersham Park in Kent. Fanny records how in January 1804, when she was aged thirteen, she got a new governess called Miss Anne Sharp. She rapidly became very fond of Miss Sharp, and when her Aunt Jane arrived to stay, she too soon became friends with the governess. Miss Sharp was clever and took her duties of improving Fanny's mind very seriously. Unfortunately Anne suffered from migraines - something Gill Hornby describes with vivid, intense detail - and her employer, Mrs Austen, did all she could to find a cure. Anne was sent to London to see a doctor, then she was taken to Worthing in Sussex with the Austen family in 1805, to try sea-bathing. 

    This cured her for a time, but the migraines returned, and Fanny's mother then summoned a doctor who claimed to be able to cure the condition with an operation. Terrified of losing her post if she refused, Miss Sharp allowed herself to be subjected to an appalling procedure of having a long needle inserted into her skull. Not surprisingly, it brought no improvement, and in early 1806, two years after she had arrived, Miss Sharp was suddenly dismissed. She remained a friend and correspondent of Jane Austen for the rest of Jane's life, and treasured the copies of Jane's books that were sent to her on publication.

    Gill Hornby has taken this framework - previously researched by scholars - and turned it into a novel of mystery, that gradually unfolds the circumstances that obliged a young woman of such good breeding and education to take the role of a governess. What had led to her predicament? She imagines Anne's childhood, her upbringing in London and friendship with other girls alongside whom she was educated. We are told of her parents, and how her father mysteriously disappeared as soon as her mother died, leaving Anne only a pittance and no clue to his whereabouts. Eventually we discover his perfidy, and it confirms everything Anne had already suspected about the untrustworthiness of men and humiliating dependency of women. She longs for an opportunity to do something with her brains and talent, something that will enable her to escape from the pressure most females are under to marry anybody who makes them a tolerable offer.

    All this is gradually disclosed in between episodes of Anne's life at Godmersham, where she is at first lonely and treated in a mortifying manner. Nevertheless, an affection grows up between her and her pupil, the spoilt and high-spirited Fanny, who is the eldest of nine children. Anne, who is proud and sensitive, is allowed more and more to enter into the life of this privileged and enviable family, with their varied amusements and wide circle of friends. When Fanny's Aunt Jane arrives to stay, along with her own mother and sister, she and Jane soon recognize that they are kindred spirits. Jane is a poor relation, which gives her something in common with the governess, in her precarious and peripheral position in the household. They share a love of literature, and a belief that a really good education could help women to start to challenge their subservient role in society. 

    More disturbingly, there are the visits of Jane's brother, Henry Austen, a banker from London. He has all the Austen intelligence, charm and wit, together with the greater confidence and assurance of being a man, and a successful man at that. Anne dislikes him in many ways, and she has good reason to distrust men, but eventually she has to admit that she finds him attractive. Despite the fact that he is married, he sees nothing wrong with flirting with her and other women.

    The fictional and historical parts of the book are joined together convincingly and the result is well worth the time of any Jane Austen fan in reading. Anne Sharp deserves to be better known. If she was such a valued friend of Jane Austen, she must have been a remarkable person. It is pleasant to learn from the epilogue that she went on later to run her own, successful, school for girls. 

    I am reminded of another remarkable Georgian governess, Anne-Marie Fauques de Vaucluse, who came to teach the daughters of Elizabeth Craven at Benham Place, and became a close and lasting friend of the author. Like Miss Sharp and Miss Austen, they were both imbued with a strong belief that women's education was a noble cause that would lead one day to emancipation.

    The blurb of the book quotes the opinion of Helena Kelly that it is "a masterly piece of storytelling". In one way that is true, because the book is well-structured. It introduces us to Anne first, and arouses our curiosity about her past, her family, and the mystery of her parentage. Elements of the mystery are then disclosed, a bit at a time, as they are tracked down by the sleuthing of Anne's former nurse Agnes, who has remained in London. Hornby has the knack of creating lively, conversational voices. So in the respect of holding the reader's attention, the story is well told. However, it is also strewn throughout with grammatical errors, infelicities and malapropisms. I found some to niggle at in Jane and the Year Without a Summer, but there are even more here.

    I will not, of course, list all of them in the text. That would be tedious and nobody would want to read through them. I will merely express my wonderment that such a highly intelligent and talented woman as Gill Hornby, who obviously has a love of literature and a great enthusiasm for Jane Austen, can nevertheless write such bad prose. Where on earth did she get the idea that "spectating" is a verb or that "coze" is a noun? Even in the Urban Dictionary the latter is listed as a verb, which is bad enough. How could she think that "disinterest" means being uninterested or that "a higher plane" is spelt "plain"? How could she use "down to" for "due to"?

    Looking at her photograph on the blurb, which shows an attractive young woman, I suspect that she belongs to the generation of girls who, whatever their brains, never encountered a good English teacher or had to study what used to be called "parsing". And it is lamentable that today's publishers spend a lot of money on quality dust-jacket design but not nearly enough on finding a competent proof-reader or text editor, which is what this needs  - and deserves. A good book deserves to be well-written in every respect and in every detail.

    In conclusion, Godmersham Park is a fine achievement and a gripping novel, that every Jane Austen fan should read. In a market where Jane-Austen spin-offs proliferate, this stands well above the crowd, being motivated by a real enthusiasm for the subject-matter and insight into the lives of women in the Georgian world. For readers who are not, like me, grammatical purists, and paid-up card-carrying supporters of the Pedants' Revolt, it will be an unalloyed pleasure and altogether, I congratulate Gill Hornby for writing it.

Godmersham Park by Gill Hornby is published by Century Books.