Godmersham Park: A Novel of the Austen Family
by Gill Hornby
Pegasus Books, 2022

Each of Jane Austen’s novels is a variation on the theme of securing a husband, the right husband, and a marriage based on love. In Gill Hornby’s latest novel, Godmersham Park, Anne Sharp is a “bluestocking” with no desire to marry. Nothing is known of Anne Sharp’s early life, allowing license to this fiction of the governess to Fanny Austen Knight, Jane Austen’s niece and a correspondent among the surviving Austen letters. Both Fanny and her governess lived long lives, but spent only a few years together at the Godmersham estate. What happens in those few years makes up Anne’s story as spinster, new governess, and amateur writer who meets Jane Austen, who in turn brings change to Anne’s life, through friendship, sisterhood, and as a kindred spirit.

This fictional Anne was raised in a mostly absent parental home, suggesting a mystery—her family’s secret hovers but is easily guessed at. For an intelligent woman such as Anne’s character, that secret surprisingly eludes her. When it is revealed, nothing shifts in Anne’s story, due to the privileges of men, in this case her father. All the more reason for Anne to dislike and resent the male sex.

Contemplating the lot of women, especially in marriages of multiple pregnancies, Anne “marvelled that the curious species of the eager young bride was still not yet extinct. Will they not learn? Surely, financial insecurity was a small price to pay.” The class distinctions portrayed by Gill Hornby between the lower servant class and an impoverished but educated daughter-turned governess set Anne apart in her household position at Godmersham, a particular division within a class structure that Austen rarely defined. Austen, as countrywoman, instead stressed distinctions between the wealthy landed gentry and the less wealthy or spendthrift landowners, while also drawing fine sketches from the early nineteenth-century British Navy and even funnier ones from the clergy.

Gill Hornby is an elegant writer with attention to domestic detail and a disinclination for ironic humor. There is little debt to “one of the most consistent satirists in the whole of literature,” as Virginia Woolf described Austen. That is to say except for the mining of Austen family history including Fanny’s actual diaries, which provide the basis of Anne Sharp’s life on Edward Austen’s Godmersham Park estate. Jane Austen’s wealthy brother Edward (who owned and inherited two estates but not from the Austens) and his prodigious family employ Anne after she is inexplicably turned out of her father’s home following her mother’s death. The forced role of governess constricts her opportunities and inhibits her spirit until she lifts her eyes from her beloved books onto the beauty of the Kent countryside, and into the gaze of Henry Austen, the charming handsome (married) rogue of a brother, who leaps on and off the stage, looming at first dangerous in his masculinity, later as threat to the already threadbare grip Anne struggles to hold for her security and livelihood.

Godmersham Park is dramatized with the pathos of a Bronte sensibility rather than Austen’s narrative style and tone, irony and wit. This novel owes more in spirit to the character of Jane Eyre, probably the most famous governess in literature who suffers many deprivations and falls in love with a married man. Austen would have downplayed the details of Anne’s suffering and poverty-stricken circumstances of governess as main heroine, preferring to effect her quintessential voice through mockery, irony, and humor to illustrate society’s limits. Yet with Jane Fairfax (Emma) and Mrs. Smith (Persuasion) Austen cast her inventive mind on their poverty and stations in life, creating rounded secondary characters that shaped the interrelationships of the society depicted and in effect turning the wheels of plot within those novels.

Gill Hornby has embroidered a microcosm from Anne’s limited society at Godmersham. Compare the broader compass of professions and characters living inside Austen’s novelistic worlds: communities greater in scope than the much-quoted three or four families in a country village, when examined with a close eye. Anne is imprisoned by her profession in many ways, in an attic and no bedroom of her own, nearly starved at one point, and so fearful of being dismissed by her employer that she is ill from headaches. But in reading Fanny’s correspondences with and in meeting Miss Jane Austen, she is awakened from dungeon-like darkness. When our famous novelist enters, a bit late in the story, the year is 1805, before Jane Austen was published, although of course she was writing. Once Jane Austen the woman and writer creates a transformation in Anne Sharp, the novel itself transforms into something a bit brighter and more sparkling. The isolated governess eventually is dismissed from Godmersham, and the final chapter leaves the reader wondering where she goes next. The Author’s Note fills in what is known of Miss Sharp’s later professional life and ties with Jane Austen, who clearly valued the governess and gifted her with a first edition of Emma, in which Austen kindly created Mr. Weston for “poor” Miss Taylor the governess.

Christina Nellas Acosta is managing editor of the journal 19th-Century Music (University of California Press) and a freelance editor for Oxford University Press. She has written book reviews for the Copperfield Quarterly Review and the Historical Novels Review.