GODMERSHAM PARK

GILL HORNBY

Century, 432pp, £14.99

In her 2020 bestselling novel Miss Austen, Gill Hornby examined the world of Jane Austen through the voice of her sister Cassandra. Now in her latest novel she turns to Austen again and makes her central figure Jane’s great friend Anne Sharpe, a governess in the household of her brother Edward Knight at Godmersham Park.

Alexander Larman in the Observer was delighted by Godmersham Park which he thought ‘generous-spirited’ and ‘thoroughly enjoyable’. It succeeds, thought Larman, ‘as a page-turning romp on its own terms, but also manages once again to give agency and interest to a minor figure in Austen’s life who has otherwise been ignored by biographers and scholars’.

Anne Sharpe, forced by straitened circumstances into taking up work as a governess to young Fanny Knight, is a classic Austen heroine, a protagonist, said John Mullan in the Times, ‘usually only glimpsed among the busy minutiae of some of Austen’s surviving letters’. Professor Mullan, an Austen expert, said Hornby’s ‘research is impeccable’. He wrote: ‘Most of the crucial scenes in the novel are imagined directly from entries in Fanny’s diary.’

In , Claire Allfree, in her review of an ‘invigorating riff’, particularly enjoyed Hornby’s acute ear for Austenian language. ‘The plot is readable enough but it’s Hornby’s clever way with homage that keeps the reader entertained, be it her tongue-in-cheek aping of the conventions of the genre or her tone-perfect encapsulation of the author’s own amused view