Plan

Spent an enjoyable afternoon in a coffee shop finalising the list of novelists and poets for my What Jane Read reading project. It may change because I don't know who is still in print but it's good to have a plan!

Maria Edgeworth

Elizabeth Inchbald

Charlotte Smith

William Cowper

Fanny Burney

Further recommendations, thoughts or advice are always welcome. The best thing about blogging (for me) is the communication with other readers.

Belinda

Well I'm supposed to be reading Wolf Hall but every time I pick it up and look at that great long list of characters and all those family trees at the front of the book my heart sinks. I couldn't resist putting it aside to start Belinda and I think I'm going to have to blag my way through book group next week.

Desperate Reader posted a great review of Belinda a few months ago which inspired me to read it. I'm only a few chapters in but already there is cross-dressing, female duels, masked balls and secret rooms!

The cover illustration features a taffeta gown made of gold coloured silk in the Polonaise style of 1774 from V&A Images. Isn't it fabulous?

Helen

I have made up my mind to like no Novels really, but Miss Edgeworth's, Yours & my own. Jane Austen, letter to Anna Austen, Wednesday 28th September 1814

Helen Stanley is a gentle heroine. Not as passive as Fanny in Mansfield Park, more like a younger version of Anne in Persuasion. Orphaned as a child and educated beyond her fortune, she is bought up by her kindly but extravagant uncle. After his sudden death she is adopted by Lady Davenant the mother of her best friend, Cecilia.

Cecilia provides a lively contrast to Helen. Spirited, confident and an incurable liar, she charms the reader and exploits Helen's naivety. Helen believes Cecilia's blatant lie that the man she loves is engaged and when Cecilia suggests that, as best friends, they always dress alike she orders jewellery way beyond her income. Of course, Cecilia's lies lead to her downfall and the plot races along to a most satisfying end which I'm not going to spoil.

Maria Edgeworth is an astute writer, politically engaged and some of her waspish lines could be lifted straight from an Austen novel:

Helen was too pretty to be invited to stay at a house where there are marriageable daughters.

She is different to Austen, too. About half way through I realised that Helen is not a love story but an exploration of female relationships. I've ordered Edgeworth's Belinda and I'm tempted to re-read Persuasion that most autumnal of Austen's novels.

What Jane Read

At last, I've embarked upon a reading project I've been planning for a long time. I want to read the women writers who inspired Jane Austen and I'm starting off with Maria Edgeworth's Helen after it caught my eye in a bookshop recently.

I should say that Austen couldn't possibly have read Helen because it was published after her death, but she certainly read Edgeworth and Belinda is one of the novels Austen refers to in her famous defence of the novel in Northanger Abbey.

Helen is a 500 page novel and it has taken me a while to settle into the rhythm and pace of it but Edgeworth is a very fine writer with an acute observation of human nature and I just can't put it down.