Austen at SeaReview posted September 5, 2025.
St. Martin's Press, 2025. 304 pages.
Review written August 25, 2025, from a library book.
Starred Review
Like the author's wonderful earlier book, The Jane Austen Society, this book wasn't so much a retelling of one of Jane Austen's classics as it was a story about her legacy. In both books, something I loved was the characters discussing the fine points of Jane Austen's novels as true aficionados. Other Janeites will enjoy that part as much as I did.
And we've also got Louisa May Alcott as a character in this book! That was a nice surprise. Here's the set-up: In 1865, two sisters from Boston and two brothers from Philadelphia are on a ship crossing the ocean to visit the elderly Admiral Frank Austen, Jane Austen's surviving brother. The two parties hadn't known about each other, but both had written to the admiral about their love of Jane's writings. And the admiral got some match-making ideas.
And another person traveling on the ship from Boston is Louisa May Alcott, accompanying an elderly friend to Europe to regain her health after the Civil War (as she in fact did). On the ship, the ladies decide to put on a theatrical production as a benefit to charity, with Lu in charge - as she had often done with her sisters, and as the characters do in Mansfield Park.
I was honestly a little disappointed that, although there is plenty of romance in this book, the admiral's schemes don't bear fruit. The book ends up being very much about women's rights - and how women lost them when they married. Though it turns out that the laws were different on opposite sides of the Atlantic. But I'd never thought about what it meant that a woman marrying no longer had property rights.
So - I enjoyed the story, loved the characters (especially Louisa May Alcott!), delighted in the discussions of Jane Austen's books and the visits to the places she lived, and learned things as well. This is definitely another good one for Jane Austen fans like me. (And do check out my Austenalia page while you're at it!)