Book Review: The Jane Austen Project, by Kathleen Flynn
Time Travelers go back in time to meet Jane Austen.
Harper Perennial, 2017, 384 pages
Perfect for fans of Jane Austen, this engrossing debut novel offers an unusual twist on the legacy of one of the world's most celebrated and beloved authors: Two researchers from the future are sent back in time to meet Jane and recover a suspected unpublished novel.
London, 1815: Two travelers - Rachel Katzman and Liam Finucane - arrive in a field in rural England, disheveled and weighed down with hidden money. Turned away at a nearby inn, they are forced to travel by coach all night to London. They are not what they seem but rather colleagues who have come back in time from a technologically advanced future, posing as wealthy West Indies planters - a doctor and his spinster sister. While Rachel and Liam aren't the first team from the future to "go back", their mission is by far the most audacious: meet, befriend, and steal from Jane Austen herself.
Carefully selected and rigorously trained by The Royal Institute for Special Topics in Physics, disaster-relief doctor Rachel and actor-turned-scholar Liam have little in common besides the extraordinary circumstances they find themselves in. Circumstances that call for Rachel to stifle her independent nature and let Liam take the lead as they infiltrate Austen's circle via her favorite brother, Henry.
But diagnosing Jane's fatal illness and obtaining an unpublished novel hinted at in her letters pose enough of a challenge without the continuous convolutions of living a lie. While her friendship with Jane deepens and her relationship with Liam grows complicated, Rachel fights to reconcile the woman she is with the proper lady 19th-century society expects her to be. As their portal to the future prepares to close, Rachel and Liam struggle with their directive to leave history intact and exactly as they found it...however heartbreaking that may prove.
Jane Austen time travel stories are not exactly an unexplored genre. There's a whole category of them. There was also the amusing (if crass and fan-servicing) 2008 Lost in Austen miniseries.
Most of these stories involve time travelers going back to meet Austen's characters, though, while The Austen Project is about time travelers going back in time to meet Jane Austen herself.
Kathleen Flynn is obviously a huge fan of Jane Austen. So am I, which is why I indulged myself in this debut novel. It's well-researched, and Flynn takes pains to get the historical details right (as far as I could tell). The justification for this time travel journey seemed a bit thin, though.
In the future, following a "Great Die-Off," Britain reemerged as a great world power, and advances in supercomputing allow for things like time travel. So they send researchers back in time on carefully planned missions with strict rules of engagement to avoid changing history.
So they know it's possible to change history with butterfly effects, yet the reason for sending a couple of time travelers back to the 19th century is to recover a lost Jane Austen novel? I mean, those must be some Austen fans in the future!
Rachel Katzman (Jewish) and Liam Finucane (Irish) seem unlikely choices to be sent back to 1815 to pretend to be wealthy English gentry, but they have studied for their roles and mostly they pull it off. Pretending to be Doctor Liam Ravenswood and his spinster sister Mary, they soon insinuate themselves into the Austens' social circle, and against the odds, Rachel/Mary manages to befriend Jane herself.
What follows are some obvious shoutouts to Austen novels, as Jane's brother Henry woos Rachel/Mary, while Rachel falls in love with Liam.
So imagine an Austen novel, except with time travel and sex scenes, and less humor and wit. Flynn is a decent writer but I never really liked either Rachel or Liam much, and I didn't care about their (literally) timeless love. These well-practiced time travelers forgetting to act like their roles were also annoying. To the author's credit, Rachel doesn't try to introduce feminism to the early 1800s, but she does keep "forgetting herself" (i.e., speaking up in ways that she knows a woman in this era would not). These mistakes made Rachel seem emotional and unprofessional. Of course, so did fucking her engaged colleague who's playing the part of her brother.
The most interesting parts were the interactions with the locals, and especially, of course, Jane herself. Flynn writes a very believable Jane - intelligent and perceptive, and witty in the dry Austen style, but also reserved and a woman of her time, making things very difficult for Rachel and Liam as Jane is too smart not to figure out that something isn't quite right about them.
The ending combines the climax of a romance with a science fictional time travel twist, and mostly pulls it off. I appreciated the self-contained nature of this book, though the author does leave room for a visit to the Brontës...
My complete list of book reviews.
Harper Perennial, 2017, 384 pages
Perfect for fans of Jane Austen, this engrossing debut novel offers an unusual twist on the legacy of one of the world's most celebrated and beloved authors: Two researchers from the future are sent back in time to meet Jane and recover a suspected unpublished novel.
London, 1815: Two travelers - Rachel Katzman and Liam Finucane - arrive in a field in rural England, disheveled and weighed down with hidden money. Turned away at a nearby inn, they are forced to travel by coach all night to London. They are not what they seem but rather colleagues who have come back in time from a technologically advanced future, posing as wealthy West Indies planters - a doctor and his spinster sister. While Rachel and Liam aren't the first team from the future to "go back", their mission is by far the most audacious: meet, befriend, and steal from Jane Austen herself.
Carefully selected and rigorously trained by The Royal Institute for Special Topics in Physics, disaster-relief doctor Rachel and actor-turned-scholar Liam have little in common besides the extraordinary circumstances they find themselves in. Circumstances that call for Rachel to stifle her independent nature and let Liam take the lead as they infiltrate Austen's circle via her favorite brother, Henry.
But diagnosing Jane's fatal illness and obtaining an unpublished novel hinted at in her letters pose enough of a challenge without the continuous convolutions of living a lie. While her friendship with Jane deepens and her relationship with Liam grows complicated, Rachel fights to reconcile the woman she is with the proper lady 19th-century society expects her to be. As their portal to the future prepares to close, Rachel and Liam struggle with their directive to leave history intact and exactly as they found it...however heartbreaking that may prove.
Jane Austen time travel stories are not exactly an unexplored genre. There's a whole category of them. There was also the amusing (if crass and fan-servicing) 2008 Lost in Austen miniseries.
Most of these stories involve time travelers going back to meet Austen's characters, though, while The Austen Project is about time travelers going back in time to meet Jane Austen herself.
Kathleen Flynn is obviously a huge fan of Jane Austen. So am I, which is why I indulged myself in this debut novel. It's well-researched, and Flynn takes pains to get the historical details right (as far as I could tell). The justification for this time travel journey seemed a bit thin, though.
In the future, following a "Great Die-Off," Britain reemerged as a great world power, and advances in supercomputing allow for things like time travel. So they send researchers back in time on carefully planned missions with strict rules of engagement to avoid changing history.
So they know it's possible to change history with butterfly effects, yet the reason for sending a couple of time travelers back to the 19th century is to recover a lost Jane Austen novel? I mean, those must be some Austen fans in the future!
Rachel Katzman (Jewish) and Liam Finucane (Irish) seem unlikely choices to be sent back to 1815 to pretend to be wealthy English gentry, but they have studied for their roles and mostly they pull it off. Pretending to be Doctor Liam Ravenswood and his spinster sister Mary, they soon insinuate themselves into the Austens' social circle, and against the odds, Rachel/Mary manages to befriend Jane herself.
What follows are some obvious shoutouts to Austen novels, as Jane's brother Henry woos Rachel/Mary, while Rachel falls in love with Liam.
So imagine an Austen novel, except with time travel and sex scenes, and less humor and wit. Flynn is a decent writer but I never really liked either Rachel or Liam much, and I didn't care about their (literally) timeless love. These well-practiced time travelers forgetting to act like their roles were also annoying. To the author's credit, Rachel doesn't try to introduce feminism to the early 1800s, but she does keep "forgetting herself" (i.e., speaking up in ways that she knows a woman in this era would not). These mistakes made Rachel seem emotional and unprofessional. Of course, so did fucking her engaged colleague who's playing the part of her brother.
The most interesting parts were the interactions with the locals, and especially, of course, Jane herself. Flynn writes a very believable Jane - intelligent and perceptive, and witty in the dry Austen style, but also reserved and a woman of her time, making things very difficult for Rachel and Liam as Jane is too smart not to figure out that something isn't quite right about them.
The ending combines the climax of a romance with a science fictional time travel twist, and mostly pulls it off. I appreciated the self-contained nature of this book, though the author does leave room for a visit to the Brontës...
My complete list of book reviews.