Q&A with Natalie Jenner

 

Photo by Sarah Sims

 

 

Natalie Jenner is the author of the new novel Austen at Sea. Her other books include The Jane Austen Society. She lives in Oakville, Ontario.

 

Q: What inspired you to write Austen at Sea, and why did you decide to set most of the novel in the mid-1860s?

 

A: As someone who regularly reads books by and about Jane Austen, I had known for many years about an 1850s correspondence between Jane Austen’s last surviving sibling, Admiral Sir Francis Austen, and Eliza Quincy of Boston, who wrote him seeking information on his famous sister.

 

She also boldly asked for a clipping of Jane’s signature, and her married sister would even end up visiting Sir Francis in Portsmouth years later.

 

When I first learned all this, I remember thinking that the Quincy sisters were like the original “groupies” and knew that one day I would write this book.

 

I chose the 1860s partly because I wanted the narrative to include Sir Francis’s death in real life (August 1865) for various reasons of the plot.

 

I am also most attracted to writing about finding hope and meaning after loss, rather than depicting the experience of trauma itself, so it was another easy decision to situate my story in the months following the US Civil War.

 

But it was learning that Louisa May Alcott had sailed to England that very same year that sealed the deal.

 

Q: The writer Helen Simonson called the book “a comedy of manners in the true Austen tradition.” What do you think of that description, and were you channeling Jane Austen herself as you wrote the novel?

 

A: I love the first part of that description, which is now on the front of the finished hardcover edition.

 

I write first and foremost to amuse myself—my family often tease me for how I sit by the fire, typing away and laughing out loud at my own efforts—and hopefully to amuse readers as well. I wasn’t intentionally channelling Austen as I wrote, but only because I wouldn’t dare to.

 

However, because creative writing for me is a very impulsive and subconscious process, I am sure the decades of rereading Austen have positively affected the rhythm of my own prose, any moments of aspirational wit and irony, and the front-end-loaded setup and symmetry to my plots.

 

Q: What do you think your female characters say about the role of women in the 1860s, both in the US and in England?

 

A: During my research for this book, this former lawyer was fascinated by how each country’s approach to both abolition and women’s rights remained out of step with the other for most of the 19th century.

 

As with our two world wars, the 1860s marked a time of tremendous social unrest and rapid change—whether from civil division or industrialization—that expanded women’s roles but not their legal status.

 

I wanted my female characters to illuminate how much power the government and the courts continued to hold over their agency in contrast to the reality of their lives: How being part of the Western expansion often meant greater freedom to divorce. How marriage in one jurisdiction might mean the loss of rights enjoyed in another. How a woman could find herself stripped of property, home, and even children due to not being equal to men before the law.

Q: Can you say more about why you decided to include Louisa May Alcott in the book?

 

A: I knew my book would take place in Boston in homage to the real-life Quincy sisters, whose father was a president of Harvard.

 

I also knew that Massachusetts in the mid-1800s was a time of unprecedented connection between various social, creative, and intellectual circles—a time that writer Susan Cheever coined “American Bloomsbury” after the famous early-20th-century London group.

 

As a lifelong fan of Louisa May Alcott as well as Jane Austen, it seemed feasible to me that Alcott could pop up in the story when the time was right. I will never forget the moment when she did, which always takes this writer by surprise: standing alone in the moonlight on the deck of a ship, little corn cob pipe and notebook in hand.

 

When I started writing Austen at Sea, I happened to be recovering from surgery by taking long walks and listening to Little Women and various Alcott biographies on audiobook.

 

I will never forget the day I learned that Alcott sailed to England as an invalid’s companion in July of 1865 and even spent a day in London visiting all the famous haunts mentioned in her beloved Dickens.

 

I knew right away that my runaway sister heroines would end up on the same mail steamship, the S. S. China, that Alcott herself took—and that somehow Dickens would also figure in the plot!

 

Q: What are you working on now?

 

A: 2025 is the 250th anniversary of the year of Jane Austen’s birth, and the last significant milestone anniversary that I will be lucky enough to celebrate alongside “Janeites” throughout the world.

 

I am very fortunate to have loved Austen’s books since childhood and to have the opportunity to now share that love with others as a published author myself, so I always have an Austen-adjacent book idea—or two!—simmering in my head.

 

--Interview with Deborah Kalb. Here's a previous Q&A with Natalie Jenner.