Old Friends and New Lovesa

Since 2009, the literary agency Jo March has been involved in “bringing to light distant fiction, in time or space, wrongly forgotten or never translated into Italian”. The translation and reprint of “Old Friends and New Fancies”, by Sybil G. Brinton, defined as “the ancestor of all sequels”, of all Austenian spin-offs and derivatives, written a hundred years after “Pride and Prejudice” (1813) and translated in Italian one hundred years after its publication (1913), satisfies precisely this criterion.

Two hundred years separate us, therefore, from Jane Austen’s original and one hundred from this sequel by Brinton, of which little is known, except that she had a short life and never enjoyed good health. The author was a janeite, with the positive and negative aspects of the term. Janeitism developed after 1870, with the publication of “A Memoir of Jane Austen” by J.E. Austen — Leigh. Rudyard Kypling even wrote a short story, entitled “The Janeites”, about a group of WWI soldiers who were passionate about Austen’s novels.

This sequel is based on the six canonical novels, namely “Pride and Prejudice”, “Mansfield Park”, “Northanger Abbey”, “Sense and Sensibility”, “Persuasion”, “Emma”. Brinton intersects the protagonists, finding, in fact, “old acquaintances” and favoring new sentimental intertwining, compensating for the always a little too abrupt endings of “dear aunt Jane”, based on indications given by the author herself regarding possible developments, creating a sort of summary and compendium of all six novels. Although present, the main characters remain in the background, in favor of minor figures, such as Georgiana Darcy, Kitty Bennet, Colonel Fitzwilliam and Mrs Crawford, of whom new adventures and new loves are told.

“In this modest attempt to represent the sequel to the adventures of some of Jane Austen’s characters,” Brinton tells us in the preface, “I made use of references made to them by the author herself, recorded in Mr. Austen’s Memory. “

The text has value for what it represents culturally, for its being the progenitor of all subsequent fanfiction, not so much for the content or style. She certainly responds to that need that imposes on oneself, overbearing, at the end of a beloved book, when we hold it to our chest feeling orphans, asking ourselves what the protagonists will do now that the last page has been read and abandoned.

But maybe it’s because the main actors aren’t the ones who got us so involved — read Elisabeth and Darcy, now transformed, in just two years of married life, into unattractive country squires, as much in their role as parents as Jo and the Professor Baher in “Little Men”, a role from which Elisabeth departs only to take on a match maker business borrowed from Emma Woodhouse — if the initiative only succeeds to a certain extent.

The story of Georgiana, her upsets, her blushes, her timid paranymphatic act between her cousin Firzwilliam, her ex-boyfriend, and a Miss Crawford completely upset by the original Austenian, her love for William Price coveted by her friend Kitty, they do not take us too much, nor do we get excited about the technique which, in an attempt to imitate Austen’s “conversational” one, does not escape some involuntary clumsiness and dilutes the witticism into monotony. It is reminiscent, if anything, of the flatter style of the near-contemporary — and Jane Austen’s rival — Maria Edgeworth. There is no sharp irony, there is no study of an entire social class and perhaps it is no coincidence that this “Old friends and new Fancies” seems to have remained the only proof of Brinton.

“Even the best of derivatives”, Giuseppe Ierolli confirms in the introduction, “remain very far from everything that has made Jane Austen one of the most loved and studied authors in world literature. The perfection of her dialogues, the irony and parody that pervade her writings, sometimes hidden in very short engravings that often escape the distracted reader, the refinement of what she herself called “the small piece of ivory (two inches wide) on the which work with a brush so fine that it produces a minimal effect after so much effort “, the naturalness with which she accompanies us in the stories of her characters, the parsimony with which she describes them, letting their characters emerge much more from what they say and do than from what the narrator says, they are as a whole, inimitable, and only a few glimpses sometimes emerge in the works that are inspired by her."