Parson Austen's Daughter

by Helen Ashton

A novel, based on the letters written by Jane Austen.

Genres: Jane Austen

352 pages, Hardcover

First published February 28, 1982

About the author

Helen Ashton was the daughter of the Arthur J. Ashton, K.C. Encouraged by her father, the author of a delightful book of legal reminiscences, she wrote three juvenile novels, then her literary work was interrupted by WWI and she took up nursing. In 1916 she began studying medicine, working at Great Ormond Street Hospital until her marriage to Arthur Jordan, a barrister twenty years older than herself, in 1927.

Over the next thirty years Ashton published 25 novels: Doctor Serocold (1930), her most successful, was about a day in the life of an English country doctor; Bricks and Mortar (1932) is about the life of an architect over forty years; and from 1941-7 she published an excellent quartet of novels about contemporary village life.

Reviews

[Ali · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is the fourth Helen Ashton novel that I have read, and I have to start by explaining that my feelings about Parson Austen’s Daughter are a little mixed. Firstly, those other Helen Ashton novels concerned houses, architecture and the life of a hospital, all of which Ashton does appear to have been particularly good at writing about. Parson Austen’s Daughter is a fictional account of the life of Jane Austen – although much of the focus of the novel is on the lives of her siblings. Ashton does manage to inject some lovely architectural details into the stories of the places the Austen family live. She sets her novel firmly within the historical context of the times, and so we experience the French Terror and long Napoleonic wars though the eyes of her characters. I think one of the slight problems with this novel is that we already think we know Jane Austen – only our knowledge is from biographies and letters, so somehow even though Ashton is a very good writer – the Jane who emerges from this novel is just a little too flat. Still I don’t want to rubbish the book, it may not be her best novel, it is very readable and engaging, well written and compelling.

full review: https://heavenali.wordpress.com/2016/...

[Kirk · Rating 5 out of 5]

4.25-4.5

[Franziska Self Fisken · Rating 4 out of 5]

Helen expounds some theories about Jane Austen that most biographers of Jane Austen reject. She feels that virtually every character in each book is loosely based on people in Jane Austen's life. I agree largely with Helen's ideas and it makes me feel that the character and personality of Jane Austen come rather more alive in her biography than in every other Jane Austen biography I have read.