The Youngest Miss Ward: A Jane Austen Entertainment by Joan Aiken

The Youngest Miss Ward (A Jane Austen entertainment) by Joan Aiken is a spikey offshoot of Mansfield Park. The plot envisages a younger sister to the three Miss Wards (Lady Bertram, Mrs Norris and Mrs Price), Harriet. Harriet is quirky combination of sensitive and practical, alternately ignored or actively disliked by her sisters and father. She is shipped off to relatives in Portsmouth as a young teen and experiences a Fanny Price like existence in the house of her uncle and becomes very close to one of her cousins (like Fanny) whilst in tandem becoming close to the charismatic utopian Lord Camber (oddly more like Jane Eyre). The denouement, when it comes, is unexpected in both its contrast with previous emotional sway of the book and one's prejudices of how a plot should run; it is no less satisfying for that however.

Hatty's trials are as many and varied as the literary references as at times we seem to be channelling Wild Sargasso Sea, or Jane Eyre with a misty, twisty quality of fairy tale. Like Fanny (and Jane) unfairness and indignity awaits Hatty in bucket loads, but also like Jane Eyre it is the fate of other female characters that is truly shocking. The locking-up of mad women, emotional and practical abandonment of children, the embittered spinsters and fallen wives who are cast off in disgrace are many and varied.

The emotional landscape of The Youngest Miss Ward (A Jane Austen entertainment) is wild and untamed and in that it is far more the gothic offshoot of a Bronte novel than an Austen one, until the end when things right themselves with an engaging neo-classical neatness, leaving one feeling that perhaps one had been reading a mock-gothic novel more akin to Northanger Abbey or Nightmare Abbey after all. Utterly bizarre but well worth your time, and far and away the best Austen sequel I have come across.