I'll just start with the obvious - I am one of those people who if confronted with the 3 books on a desert island question would without a moment's hesitation name my Collected Works of Jane Austen and Collected Works of Shakespeare as two of the three. I go back and forth about the third book I would take. I wonder if it shouldn't be some sort of encyclopedia about engineering or mechanics or some such thing, since as has been pointed out to me by a few well-meaning friends and loved ones, if the advancement of civilization had depended on a species filled with Phoebe Loosinhouses, we would only now be tumbling onto how a wheel might make things nicer. I expect we would have discovered papyrus and ink and the need for stories around the campfire, though.
This diary will not be a Jane Austen diary. This diary is about what does one do when you've read every Austen multiple times and simply have to give it a rest? Yet, you've grown addicted to the beautifully wrought sentences filled with subtle humor and the books filled with supporting characters just as finely drawn and well thought out as the major players. In my experience, the more one searches for Austen substitutes, the greater appreciation one develops for Austen herself.
See what's happening? I clearly don't want to write about Jane Austen, and yet here she is again and again, intruding herself into this diary, which is designed to be the first in a series about novels and writers that people who love Jane Austen might consider as filling the breech when they find themselves staring pensively out the window on a rainy day with nothing conveniently Austenish at hand.
The major focus of the "Empty Austen Cupboard" diaries will be to spotlight lesser known 19th century writers who also took as their topics the mores of society, the roles of women, courtship and marriage rituals, the divide between the classes, and any other part of the oeuvre of Austen subject matter. For the purpose of this series, I'm just going to assume that most Austen fans have already moved along and consumed all the Bontes and Gaskells.
Today's spotlight will be on Frances Trollope and her wonderful novel in three volumes
Widow Barnaby (note, there is some confusion about the title, the three volumes are listed on Amazon as The Widow Barnaby)
Frances Trollope is the mother of the better known Anthony Trollope. Like a number of women authors of her time, she wrote not for own amusement, but in order to help support herself and her family. She was a prolific writer and wrote over 100 volumes covering a wide range of subjects, some fiction and some non-fiction. The sheer amount of her output may have contributed to her being overlooked by academia even though she wrote one of the first ant-slavery novels and one of the initial factory novels. Much of her work also had a religious bent.
At any rate, I personally stumbled onto Frances Trollope and Widow Barnaby in the most commonplace fashion possible, simply by finding the complete, fat novel buried deep in a shelf of the Barnes and Noble. I opened it and in the first pages my eyes happened to fall upon this sentence:
For many years Miss Betsy looked forward with hope to one or two greatly desired events. That most coveted was the death of her sister-in-law; the other, and for many years the most probable was, the birth of a male heir to her brother
How is it possible to not by a book with that sentence? And the novel fulfilled the promise of that sentence. The titular character, the Widow Barnaby is a pretentious, vain harridan, who takes charge of her angelic niece Agnes and subjects her to any number of ill-conceived social machinations and endless awful advice upon her entry to society.
For Austen fans, I would liken it to a synthesis of Mansfield Park and Persuasion , although the niece Agnes is not as sickening as Fanny Price. Aunt Barnaby is somewhat in the vein of the vain and foolish father in Persuasion. This is not to say that Widow Barnaby is a conscious Austen imitation, it is an original, delightful,engrossing and occasionally cringe inducing read all on it's own. It's original publication date was 1839.
Good news for Kindle readers is that right now all three volumes of The Widow Barnaby are available for free download as public domain. So put on that pot of tea, get out the crumpets or scones, and spend the rest of the day in a 19th century watering hole.
Books In My Life is a diary published most Friday mornings about books that have had a particular resonance in ones life for some personal reason. If you would like to write a diary in this series please contact Phoebe Loosinhouse by Kosmail to schedule a date