Dear Jane by Allie Cresswell
The
final instalment of the Highbury trilogy, Dear Jane recounts events
hinted at but never actually described in Jane Austen’s Emma; the
formative childhood years of Jane Fairfax and Frank Churchill, their
meeting in Weymouth and the agony of their secret
engagement.
Orphaned Jane seems likely to be brought up in parochial Highbury until adoption by her papa’s old friend Colonel Campbell opens to her all the excitement and opportunities of London. Frank Weston is also transplanted from Highbury, adopted as heir to the wealthy Churchills and taken to their drear and inhospitable Yorkshire estate. Readers of Emma will be familiar with the conclusion of Jane and Frank’s story, but Dear Jane pulls back the veil which Jane Austen drew over its remainder.
Orphaned Jane seems likely to be brought up in parochial Highbury until adoption by her papa’s old friend Colonel Campbell opens to her all the excitement and opportunities of London. Frank Weston is also transplanted from Highbury, adopted as heir to the wealthy Churchills and taken to their drear and inhospitable Yorkshire estate. Readers of Emma will be familiar with the conclusion of Jane and Frank’s story, but Dear Jane pulls back the veil which Jane Austen drew over its remainder.
In
writing Dear
Jane I
have scratched an itch which has been bothering me since I first read
Emma
over
forty years ago. Why would a clever and upright girl like Jane
Fairfax have engaged herself, in
secret to
an unreliable fellow like Frank Churchill? That she would have
suffered agonies of conscience is unarguable - indeed, she tells Mrs
Weston she has had ‘no tranquil hour’ since she agreed to it. The
levels of deceit and invention they would both have had to stoop to
hardly bear contemplation. But I did contemplate them and, at last,
found I could not leave the story unwritten.
In
doing so I had to immerse myself in the world Jane Austen created for
Emma Woodhouse and the inhabitants of Highbury. All writers of
historical fiction immerse themselves in their chosen period and
become familiar with its prominent personalities. I had to do the
same, but my chosen world was Highbury and my subjects were the
characters Jane Austen had created. To be absolutely sure of getting
it right I went back thirty years, reconstructing them, their world
and mine stone by stone into one cohesive whole. Mrs
Bates of Highbury and
The
Other Miss Bates
were the result, my training ground for Dear
Jane.
Highbury’s
geography is not minutely detailed in ‘Emma’. We know there is a
village street with an inn called the Crown and shops, including a
post office and the famous Ford’s Haberdashery. The Bates’s
apartment is above one of these stores - accessed by a notoriously
tricky stair - with sight of the Crown from its windows. There is a
church with an adjacent vicarage. Hartfield - the Woodhouses’
mansion - lies about a mile from Donwell and half a mile from
Randalls. The first thing I did was to map out my idea of the layout
of the village so that I could picture the practicalities of the
comings and goings of the Highbury folk.
I
read and re-read Emma,
getting to know the characters, their relationships to one another,
their modes of speech, their funny little mannerisms. I put a different spin on some of them - this is my
book,
after all. Most of all I placed myself in the shoes of Jane and
Frank, asking how, in their early experiences of bereavement, in
their transplantation into the homes of strangers, in their
upbringing as perpetual guests, they had become the people we meet in
Emma.
In
addition to working with what Miss Austen had provided I had to
expand into areas she had not described. Indeed, that was my whole
purpose in writing Dear
Jane, to
write the story which she had hinted at but left unwritten. For some
of this task I had a clean canvas. We are told only the barest
details of Jane and Frank’s childhoods, but enough for me to be
able to use as a foundation for the story which emerges in Dear
Jane. What
a delight it was to picture Jane’s life in London with the
Campbells, to expose her to culture and society that poor
Highbury-bound Miss Woodhouse could only dream of! How awful could I
make Frank’s life with Mrs Churchill - so dreadful that he would
risk everything to enter into a secret engagement? Characters that
Jane Austen had created but not developed were mine to play with; Mr
and Mrs Churchill, Colonel and Mrs Campbell, the Dixons.
Jane
Austen tells us nothing of Jane and Frank’s meeting in Weymouth,
their romance is unexplored. But not by me. Oh what joy to introduce
them on the sunny promenade and watch their mutual attraction - and
mutual need - unfurl!
Having
formed the characters I ventured forward into the precincts of Emma.
Plot
and character together had to meld into a flip-side novel but one
which was faithful in every respect to the one Jane Austen had
already provided. In Emma,
Jane Austen creates opportunities for Jane and Frank to meet one
another which she quite deliberately does not exploit; these dictated
my scenes. For example, we know that, after meeting Emma for the
first time at Hartfield, Frank goes off to pay a duty call to Jane
Fairfax because, he says, ‘there was that degree of acquaintance in
Weymouth’ which required it. It seems innocent enough until you
find out what’s been going on behind the scenes. Of course, for my
story, it was an encounter I couldn’t wait to write into existence.
Again, after Mrs Cole’s dinner party, Frank contrives to be alone
with Jane while Miss Bates and Mrs Weston fetch Miss Woodhouse. Old
Mrs Bates, rather deaf and, conveniently, without her spectacles,
serves as no very effective chaperone. What did they discuss? Would
they have been flagrant enough, with the old lady snoozing in her
chair, to exchange a kiss? And later, as Mrs Elton’s harrying and
Frank’s continued procrastination begin to take their toll on
Jane’s health, how would these pressures have erupted in the row
the couple undoubtedly had on the Donwell Road on the day of the
strawberry picking?
These
scenes have been calling to me since I first read Emma.
Whether I have done them justice, whether I have effectively
explained the conundrum of Jane and Frank’s engagement, I leave it
to the reader to decide
Allie Cresswell
was born in Stockport, UK and began writing fiction as soon as she
could hold a pencil.
She did a BA in
English Literature at Birmingham University and an MA at Queen Mary
College, London.
She has been a
print-buyer, a pub landlady, a book-keeper, run a B & B and a
group of boutique holiday cottages. Nowadays Allie writes full time
having retired from teaching literature to lifelong learners.
She has two
grown-up children, two granddaughters, two grandsons and two
cockapoos but just one husband – Tim. They live in Cumbria, NW
England.
Dear Jane
is her ninth novel.
