Austen romance imagined

“A LOT of people think Jane Austen was gay,” said Gill Hornby in reply to interviewer Ayisha Malik’s question about the famous novelist who inspired her novel Godmersham Park.

“And there was plenty of sexual free thinking during the Georgian period but not in Hampshire.”

Hornby then described her detailed research into the Austen family as she hunted down a plot for her latest book.

The unpublished diary of Austen’s teenage niece provided her with a protagonist, Anne Sharp, the governess.

Filling in blank spaces between the known facts, Hornby imagined a dramatic story for Anne centring on a secret romance with Austen’s dashing brother, Henry.

Anne’s friendship with Jane was, in fact, very real, as proved by their intense letters. The last thing Austen ever wrote was a deathbed letter to Anne.

Jane’s sister was clearly jealous of this “ardent” friendship and this has caused some modern commentators to wonder about her sexuality.

Intense female relationships are at the heart of Hornby’s storytelling in Godmersham Park and she explained the many perils facing women in Georgian England.

A spinster falling on hard times would be at the mercy of her male relatives. If you had no family, as Anne Sharp finds out, the only possible job for a genteel single woman was as a
governess.

But the real Anne managed to carve out a successful single life. Hornby followed the historical trail to her will and discovered that after being sacked by the Austen family for a murky misdemeanour, Anne set up a girls’ boarding school in Liverpool.

She died in her seventies, leaving the astonishing sum of £1,500 to a large number of friends.

Godmersham Park was written during lockdown and Hornby said this helped her better understand the Georgians’ constant fear of illness and disaster.

Like her husband, Robert Harris, she usually manages to get a whole novel written in six months.

“I’d get bored if it took much longer,” she said.

She is already working on another book about the Austen family focusing on a long marriage, so fans of Godmersham Park shouldn’t have long to wait for the follow-up.

Carolyn Kirby