This is the third novel Gill Hornby has written based on the lives of members of Jane Austen’s extended family. I loved Miss Austen and Godmersham Park, so I was looking forward to reading The Elopement, which focuses on Jane’s niece, Fanny Knight, and Fanny’s stepdaughter, Mary Dorothea Knatchbull.

Fanny’s father is Jane’s brother Edward, who was made the legal heir of their wealthy Knight relatives and inherited three estates at Steventon, Chawton and Godmersham (Fanny appears as a secondary character in Godmersham Park). For a long time it seems likely that Fanny is going to remain a spinster until, in 1820, she marries Sir Edward Knatchbull of Mersham-le-Hatch at the age of twenty-eight. She doesn’t love him and he doesn’t love her, but Fanny has always been a practical person and decides that it could still be a marriage that works well for both of them.

Sir Edward has five children from his previous marriage and Fanny is sure she can be a good stepmother to them. However, there’s tension between Fanny and the only daughter, Mary Dorothea, from the beginning. Fanny is not a naturally loving or compassionate person and Mary finds it impossible to warm to her, viewing her as aloof and distant. Things come to a head when Mary falls in love with a man her father considers unsuitable. She knows she can expect no empathy or understanding from Fanny, so is forced to do something drastic.

It took me a while to get into this book. The pacing is uneven, with the first half being very slow and the second much more gripping. The title is maybe slightly misleading, as the elopement doesn’t happen until late in the book and doesn’t really play a big part in the story, although the buildup and consequences do. I think I would have preferred not to have known there was going to be an elopement so I wouldn’t have spent most of the book wondering when it was going to happen.

Hornby focuses less on Mary Dorothea’s romance and more on the relationship between stepmother and stepdaughter, which gets off to a bad start and worsens throughout the book. I went from feeling sympathetic towards Fanny to disliking her more and more as she tries to align herself with her husband’s views and closes her mind to Mary’s feelings. Still, the portrayal of Fanny and Sir Edward’s marriage illustrates the limited options available to 19th century women who would often marry out of duty, necessity or to meet society’s expectations. Mary is trying to do something different and marry for love.

In her author’s note at the end of the book, Hornby explains that she has based the novel on Fanny Knight’s own diaries which she kept from 1804 to 1872. I haven’t read the diaries so I don’t know how the personality of the real Fanny compares to the fictional one, but I was sorry not to have liked her more considering that Jane Austen apparently described her as her “favourite niece”.

I’ve learned that following the recent TV adaptation of Miss Austen which was shown earlier this year, The Elopement is also going to be adapted under the title Miss Austen Returns (I’m not sure why they’ve missed out Godmersham Park). Cassandra Austen, the star of Miss Austen, only appears once or twice in this book so I imagine she’s going to be given a much bigger role in the new adaptation. I’ll be interested to see what Gill Hornby’s next book will be about; I’m sure there’s still more she could write about the Austen family and there seems to be a never-ending appetite for it by readers and TV viewers!

Thanks to Random House UK, Cornerstone for providing a copy of this book for review via NetGalley.