Jane Austen Shares Her Thwarted Love Story in The Lost Memoirs of Jane Austen

Over the past couple of decades, Jane Austen’s popularity has soared, sparking a whole sub-genre of books incorporating her life and characters. Knowing my fondness for this literary giant, a friend of mine recently lent me her collection of Austen-inspired books. I kicked off my reading marathon with The Lost Memoirs of Jane Austen, a novel by Syrie James that purports to be a long-missing manuscript explaining a gap in the author’s writing life.

The voice that James adopts as Jane feels authentic to the period, albeit more conciliatory than I would imagine. Austen is known for her razor-sharp wit, and she could be quite merciless with her descriptions and dialogue. Here, she seems more like Pride and Prejudice’s Jane Bennett, generally seeking to believe the best in people and making excuses for any shortcomings that arise. Hence, she comes across as more charitable but less funny than expected.

Additionally, at a few points, James so closely mirrors scenes from Austen’s books that it seems a discredit to her creativity, as the implication is that she simply lifted events from her own life and planted them on the pages of her novels. While most of the footnotes are informative and shed light on Austen’s background and the general historical period, I found myself annoyed by the ones that said, in reference to an invented conversation mirroring one of the novels, “This is likely the inspiration for…” It’s cheesy, and I think the book would have been stronger if readers had been left to recognize those parallels on their own.

On the whole, however, I found it an enjoyable read, with the close relationship between Jane and her sister Cassandra especially well-drawn. Reading this book, I got the sense that this was a woman who very well could have vanished into obscurity without ever having been published, and what a loss that would have been! Reading of her attempts at writing at a time when she thought it folly was heartening for this struggling storyteller.

It has puzzled many Austen fans that some of the most enduring romance in English literature could have been crafted by a spinster who had never experienced it herself. While I simply credit Austen’s vivid imagination, the romance James invents here feels plausible, and it was easy to get caught up in it even though I knew that it ultimately would not work out. That still left plenty of room to speculate about how and why it concluded. Was it a matter of economics? Mistaken impressions? A fear that marrying would deny her the time she needed to write? These questions helped the ending retain an element of surprise despite having it spelled out at the beginning.

I was never quite able to forget that this was a novel, but even if the artifice didn’t entirely convince me, The Lost Memoirs of Jane Austen is an engaging read for those who enjoy Austen’s work.