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My Dearest Miss Fairfax
- What Jane Austen's Emma didn't know
- Narrated by: Stevie Zimmerman
- Length: 8 hrs and 52 mins
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My Dearest Miss Fairfax
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Summary
From Jeanette Watts, a new Regency-set historical fiction novel following a lesser-known character from one of history’s favorite female authors.
Miss Jane Fairfax has spent her life—though poor and expecting the eventuality of a governess position—by the side of a colonel’s daughter, living beyond the means she was born into. When she meets the enigmatic and handsome Frank Churchill in Weymouth, she can’t help but fall for him.
Mr. Frank Churchill, the heir to his aunt’s fortune and dependent on her goodwill, knows that he cannot marry without Mrs. Churchill’s permission. Desperate to marry Jane, he proposes not only marriage but a plan to hide their engagement until his aunt approves of the match. The couple travel separately to their same small hometown of Highbury, where Jane’s ridiculous aunt and the notorious Emma Woodhouse threaten the understanding between them, and as the months pass by, Jane worries that they will be secretly engaged forever, with no happy ending in sight.
As their lies and deceits pile up, can their love survive the social pressures that threaten to tear them apart?
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What listeners say about My Dearest Miss Fairfax
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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Overall4 out of 5 stars
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Performance5 out of 5 stars
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Story4 out of 5 stars
- Mo Bass
- 04-12-22
Deception is painful
Emma is not my favourite Jane Austen but this spin off is quite entertaining. Jane really sacrificed for Frank; suffering the prying questions and gossip of village life. Living with Miss Bates must have been akin to purgatory.
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Overall1 out of 5 stars
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Performance3 out of 5 stars
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Story1 out of 5 stars
- Hello Hello
- 04-08-23
Dreary and the story no longer makes sense
I am a great fan of Jane Austen and of Emma and therefore rearranging the facts and key characters so that the original story makes little sense made it an irritating listen. The other big take away is that there's none of the lightness of touch nor wit of Austen; no funny moments, no irony. It just plods on tediously. I did stick to the bitter end, hoping to find out what happens afterwards only to find this story ends at the exact same point as the original Emma.
In the original, Emma is arrogant rich and arrogant but goes through a story arc to become a kinder person at the end and with the man she truly loves and who has always loved her. Here Emma is portrayed as a not very bright gossip and Mr Knightley, didn’t actually want Emma but stalks Jane Fairfax through the story and is described as ‘settling’ for Emma Woodhouse. Mr Knightly judges harshly of Frank Churchill in the original because of his jealousy of what seems to him the relationship between Emma and Frank. So why would he be jealous and hostile to Frank if he were not in love with Emma? The big dramatic romantic scenes and the end of the original book and its film adaptations are ruined if Mr Knightley is in fact lying to Emma that he has always loved her. It’s awful for Emma herself, if after going through her self-realisation to become a kindler, nicer person she has ended up with a man who didn’t really love or want her. Jane Austen liked her character and gave us happy endings; this is a very unsatisfying ending.
Jane Fairfax and Frank Churchill are very different too. Here the previously controlled, well-mannered Jane Fairfax is very snooty, continually sneering at the small-town values and outlook of her friends and family the village of Highbury, pointing out their faults compared to London high society. Unlike Emma Woodhouse she does not go through any awakening but remains arrogant and unlikeable to the end; so no story arc. Frank Churchill still humiliates Jane Fairfax in order to score points with Emma Woodhouse and yet is still presented as a gentleman in comparison to Mr Knightley. No, he’s not.
The author really loves to drop in the names and facts about of poets, composers, historical battles and other random facts and padding. They add nothing to the story and slow it down. It feels like the author is that know-all kid at school who wants to show off how clever they are compared to the rests of us. Jane Austen wrote in a very tight and disciplined manner, where information was added to move the story on, though, as in the case of Emma, it might not have made sense till the very end. Here the extra information is superfluous, it’s padding. In particular, I did feel for the narrator, who has to reel-off a lengthy paragraph in perfect Italian for a scene where Jane Fairfax is showing off her perfect fluency of the language in comparison to Mrs Elton’s few words, to make the latter look small. That kind of gosh behaviour isas ill-mannered then and now, not at all consistent with well-mannered values the original Jane Fairfax. It would have been considered very crass. It’s also rather ill manned to the reader/listener too – we hear this lengthy speech and are none the wiser – is it intended we too should feel inferior to the author from this unexplained paragraph? In reality I suspect the author can cut and paste a chink of text using Google translate - wow…
Dropping the proposition ‘to’ before verbs was a continual Americanism: “she wrote him” rather than “she wrote to him. That crops up a lot as much of the story is via correspondence. Americans tend not to use ‘to’ in that context, British people generally do. Hearing it dropped by a native English narrator is a jarring hybrid, taking me out of the story at least.
The absence of any of Jane Austen’s wit and irony is so disappointing. There is of course a great unintended irony. The original book was funny, breezy, with a nice happy ending and was a free offering. This book was boring, had unlikeable characters and the pleasing ending of the original Emma torn apart. Yet it cost an Audible credit…
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