A Fine Brush on Ivory: An Appreciation of Jane Austen
by Richard Jenkyns
OUP, £12.99, pp. 200, ISBN 0199276617
‘Each of us has a private Austen’ is the first line of Karen Joy Fowler’s readable and ingenious novel. This sentence, and her title, encapsulate her theme. The West Coast book club in question consists of five women, all steeped in the Austen oeuvre, and a single man with long eyelashes called Grigg who has never read any Jane Austen at all. Their ages range from the mid-sixties to the late twenties. In their discussions, as we gradually realise, they project on to Jane Austen’s plots and characters their own experiences and preoccupations; for between meetings we learn about their childhoods, love lives, and the scratchily close relationships which bind and divide them. One of the group is the narrator, but it is purposefully unclear which one.
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