Six Weeks by the Sea by Paula Byrne

Six Weeks by the Sea

By Paula Byrne

Pegasus Books 2025

Paula Byrne (The Real Jane Austen: A Life in Small Things, and The Genius of Jane Austen) is steeped in the oeuvre and research minutiae of Jane Austen. Known as a biographer, Byrne has directed her novelistic eye to the six weeks of summer 1801 that the Austen family spent at the seaside town of Sidmouth. Here the biographer, like an archaeologist, digs and sifts through the remains of Austen’s life, legend, and extant letters, constructing a partial piece of fiction, a slender novel based on the idea that Jane Austen fell in love by the sea early in her young adult life (something of a legend passed down by her niece Caroline by way of her sister Cassandra).

Since so much of Austen’s life is unknown, remaining a patchwork of artifacts, fragments of letters, and her family’s later, Victorian revision, readers are introduced to a fictional Austen, as yet unpublished in 1801, and her putative experience of falling in love. Six Weeks by the Sea is lightly sketched in a random narrative method of shifting point of view and a mix of factual and imagined details. In her Afterword Byrne describes her method of unearthing a specific history of real events and people, and creating a romance specially tailored to intersect Austen family lore with actual historical figures.

Certain family members appear in supporting roles, including her parents, sister Cassandra, and Martha Lloyd. Central is a favorite naval brother, Frank, who introduces the fellow seaman Captain Parker (with a secret vice) to his sister with the hope of tempting her into marriage. But he is not the rumored love of her life, who reportedly dies soon after they meet. Rather, the man who fell in love with Jane Austen by the sea is Byrne’s imagined character (based on a real lawyer and abolitionist named Samuel Rose) who has come to Sidmouth for a restorative cure. Byrne models this paragon on the standards of the Romantic heroic age, with equal parts sympathy and tragedy.

Thus begins an immediate competition for Jane’s attention and affection: the sea captain, flawed and enigmatic, and the principled lawyer with high ideals and literary tastes modeled on Austen’s own (the poet Cowper, Maria Edgeworth, Shakespeare). In fact Samuel Rose was a friend of Cowper and William Blake, which is used to effect in his own court case presented here. His profession as a lawyer initially causes Jane to rebuff his company and conversation (much like the antipathy of Mr. Darcy and Elizabeth Bennet) as she recalls her earlier flirtation with the young Irish lawyer Tom Lefroy. Perhaps the funniest line in the novel is when Jane responds to her sister, Cassie (stoic about her own deep love loss): “Let’s kill all the lawyers” (echoing Shakespeare’s Henry VI).

This spare novel of seaside romance is a sweet concoction for sentimental readers and those who possess at least some knowledge of Austen’s life and works. Byrne paints the maritime setting of Sidmouth in recurring physical descriptions—more so than Austen would likely have provided. Although she gave Lyme Regis its due in a loving tribute in Persuasion, Austen’s novels represent the “life of the mind.” An abundance of sentences from the six novels are interspersed, alluding, paraphrasing, and quoting Austen in the text of Six Weeks by the Sea, even using the ship name of the Thrush from Mansfield Park. It is also a representation of early nineteenth-century British themes, including slavery, abolition, and interracial offspring. In Byrne’s story “a natural daughter” appears from Antigua, a subplot that is unconnected to the romance hovering around the iconic author herself but no doubt inspired by Byrne’s own biography, Belle: The Slave Daughter and the Lord Chief Justice (2014).

The release of Six Weeks by the Sea’s takes part in the 250th celebration of Austen, now in full swing in 2025. Its imaginary love plot (absent Austen’s trajectory of marriage and marrying for love) feeds on the Romantic sensibility of Sehnsucht and thwarts the happy ending because, as  readers know to expect, the finale is not conjugal bliss. But readers may indulge, temporarily, in this fantasy of Jane Austen’s one true love, their meeting and a separation by the news of death.

One truth universally acknowledged is that our much-read and loved author is renowned for a great deal more than the marriage plot—pairing well-suited lovers and tying them to the institution of marriage. Praised for her early groundbreaking narrative technique, witty dialogue, emotional intelligence, development of characters, intricate weaving of families and society, and sharp social observation, she is the enduring topic of both literary study and criticism and seemingly endless reimaginings in fan fiction.

Christina Nellas Acosta is managing editor of the academic journal 19th-Century Music, a freelance editor for Oxford University Press, and reviews novels for the Historical Novel Society.