Parson Austen’s Daughter by Helen Ashton – #1949Club

The cynical part of me wonders whether Helen Ashton had embarked on writing a biography of Jane Austen when she decided it would be easier to make it a novel instead. That’s probably unfair, since she turned her hand to a number of biographical novels for a range of figures – but I’ll admit that I couldn’t quite get the thought out of my head throughout my whole time reading Parson Austen’s Daughter. The ‘novel’ (more on those inverted commas later) follows Jane Austen from before her birth through to her death. Along the way, the majority of the focus is on her personal and romantic life, with a few interventions about her writing – though rather less than I’d have liked. The positives? I think Ashton does a great job of capturing Jane Austen’s character. You can see where this version of Jane would have found the humour and spiritedness of the people she creates in her novels. She is funny and flippant, often to the chagrin of her more considered, reserved sister Cassandra. “Oh! I…