Recent Reads {Jane Fairfax}

Jane Fairfax by Joan Aiken - This novel takes the secondary heroine of Austen's Emma, and gives her a backstory. Aiken writes in a style meant to imitate Austen, and succeeds tolerably well. She imagines Jane's childhood and relationship with Emma, and tells us all the background of Jane's upbringing and education with the Campbell family and how she came to meet Frank Churchill. While the novel provides motivation and storyline for Jane and Churchill, and retells many of the events of the original story as they may have been seen from a different viewpoint, it didn't keep my interest and I didn't feel any emotional connection to Jane. The character of Emma is presented very negatively through the majority of the book, which put me off considerably. Certainly the character of Jane, especially as a young child, may have seen Emma's actions and behavior as selfish, petty, and mean-spirited; but as a reader who viewed Emma with a little more charity, this tended to annoy me more than anything. I did enjoy the love story aspect of the relationship between Jane and Churchill, their secret engagement, and their actions and attitudes from Jane's vantage point.