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Eliza's Daughter
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by Joan Aiken
Sales Rank : 1221461
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Hardcover: 316 pages
Publisher: St Martins Pr May 1994
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0312109725
ISBN-13: 978-0312109721
Product Dimensions:
8.5 x 5.8 x 1 inches
Shipping Weight: 1 pounds
From Publishers Weekly
Others may try, but nobody comes close to Aiken ( Jane Fairfax ) in writing sequels to Jane Austen. Here she follows characters met in and suggested by Sense and Sensibility , spinning an absorbing tale rich in characterization and diverse settings. Raised with other "by-blows" (illegitimate children) by a disreputable foster mother, and uncertain of her parentage, Liz Williams regularly receives money and admonitions from a Colonel Brandon, who never visits her. (Brandon, of course, married Marianne Dashwood in the Austen novel.) Determined to discover the mystery of her parentage, Liz takes shelter with the Ferrars (nee Elinor Dashwood), who send her to school in Bath, where, through no fault of her own, she loses her reputation and her position and is forced to flee to London to make her way in the world. This she does--with a vengeance-- meanwhile discovering sobering truths about her parents and herself. Spirited Liz is an 18th-century feminist of the first order. Whether consorting with poets or fighting off brigands in Portugal, she holds her own with bravado and good cheer. Aiken's sense of time and place is impeccable, and her wit is employed to good effect. Her vision of the later lives of Marianne and Elinor embraces Austen's irony; while they did not achieve the happiness we would have wished for them, here they find fulfillment in unexpected ways.
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From Library Journal
This sequel to Austen's Sense and Sensibility is less successful than Jane Fairfax (LJ 4/15/91), Aiken's companion to Emma, for it fails to capture Austen's idioms. The style owes more to Dickens than to Austen, as does the plot: The illegitimate daughter of Colonel Brandon's sister is raised by brutish foster parents, shuttled from one lukewarm relative to another, discovers her parentage, and at last claims her birthright. Read on its own merits as a distinct novel, Eliza's Daughter has something to offer, but those hoping for reading that captures as much Austen as last year's sequels to Pride and Prejudice (Presumption, LJ 9/15/93, and Pemberly, LJ 11/1/93) will be disappointed.
Cynthia Johnson, Cary Memorial Lib., Lexington, Mass.
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.
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