(Note: If you have not read Miss Austen’s excellent novels, especially Sense and Sensibility and Mansfield Park, there will be spoilers in this review. Go read them, then come back.)

Alice McVeigh’s MARIANNE: A Sense and Sensibility Sequel will not be an uncontroversial book among Austen fans. There are plenty of readers who regret Marianne’s marriage to Colonel Brandon, wishing her a younger and more romantic husband; others who think Henry Crawford could have been reformed at the end of Mansfield Park; and plenty of other Janeites who disagree vehemently with both. McVeigh’s take will please the first two groups far more than their opponents. It is a lively and well-written book, with some charming prose and characters that run reasonably true to Austen—if a touch softened. Lord Bertram, for example, has gone from enslaver to abolitionist in the time between Mansfield Park and MARIANNE; but that isn’t completely implausible, especially with his daughter-in-law’s moral influence. There are plenty of those characters making appearances, from minor cameos (Charles Bingley, various members of the Bertram family) to more substantial roles (Frank and Jane Churchill, the future Lady Susan Vernon, and of course Marianne, Willoughby, and Henry and Mary Crawford). Elinor, Marianne’s devoted and more sensible sister, is notably missing, at home in the country with her family. That was probably a wise authorial decision, as it allows for more drama than Elinor’s management would have permitted.

The best parts of the book by far are the journals of Marianne’s younger sister Margaret, which shine with satire worthy of Austen herself. She is, of course, writing a novel of her own (in the purplest possible prose), and she is an absolute delight throughout all her various adventures. McVeigh does feel it necessary to kill off a couple of characters other than Colonel Brandon, mostly plausibly. One of her deaths, though, feels unexpected and too sudden, as though it were shoehorned into the book. But at least it’s a tender and affecting scene that may draw tears, especially from those who thought the character in question rather hard done by in the original.

The book does not quite acknowledge how completely damning Willoughby’s and Crawford’s past crimes really were at the time. But at least, when one of them tries to reform himself, he does so thoroughly. All in all, this is a book that Janeites will likely find at least worth arguing about (and with)—and that’s a substantial part of the fun of being a Janeite, after all.

Alice McVeigh’s MARIANNE: A Sense and Sensibility Sequel offers bright, lively prose and an interesting take on some of Jane Austen’s characters, with more of a focus on romance and less on satire.

~ Catherine Langrehr for IndieReader