Reviewed by: Jane Austen's Transatlantic Sister: The Life and Letters of Fanny Palmer Austen by Sheila Johnson Kindred Lisa Surridge Sheila Johnson Kindred. Jane Austen's Transatlantic Sister: The Life and Letters of Fanny Palmer Austen. McGill-Queen's up, 2017. 291 pp. $34.95. 1805. St George's, Bermuda. The fifteen-year-old Fanny Palmer, daughter of Bermuda's attorney general, has just met a twenty-six-year-old British naval officer, Charles John Austen, whose eighteen-gun sloop, hms Indian, is being equipped for service in the harbour. The pair will marry in 1807. Meanwhile, in Britain, Charles's "brilliant, and yet-to-be published" (29) sister Jane has written much of Northanger Abbey and laid the ground-work [End Page 227] of Sense and Sensibility, which will, in 1811, become her first published novel. Her knowledge of the navy, so important to her later novels Mansfield Park (1814) and Persuasion (1817), is about to be expanded: in Fanny, she will acquire a new sister-in-law whose "diverse and challenging" (7) experiences of naval life, together with her cheerful pragmatism, will inform Jane's sense of female possibility. Such is the thesis of Sheila Johnson Kindred's Jane Austen's Transatlantic Sister, the first full-length biography of Fanny Palmer Austen—a woman whom Jane called sister, as was the custom at the time. Transatlantic Sister is a feat of scholarly transatlanticism, detailing the female kinship bonds that linked Jane Austen to Fanny and, through her, to the navy's Atlantic stations: Bermuda, Halifax, Portsmouth, and the Nore. Kindred's biography is necessarily focused on the social and cultural contexts of Fanny's life. There remains limited primary evidence of Fanny's life: her twelve letters, dating from 1810 to her death in 1814 (passed down in the Austen family and published here for the first time); her red morocco diary for 1814 (partially erased by an unknown hand); her portrait (painted in 1810 by Halifax-based artist Robert Field); and her silhouette (created in London by Miers and Field between 1812 and 1814). This evidence, substantiated by mentions of Fanny by Jane, Charles, and Cassandra Austen, as well as by her friend Esther Esten, forms the basis of Transatlantic Sister. Kindred's lovingly assembled biography reaches beyond Fanny's correspondence and diary, then, to place her in the fascinating contexts of her short and varied life: St George's, Halifax, the Nore, and the Austen circle. She locates Fanny as part of a well-off and educated slave-owning family in the "close-knit colonial community" of St George's. Her marriage to Charles at seventeen exposed her to an exciting but hazardous naval life, bringing the peril of shipwreck and risk of battle, as well as the financial vicissitudes of prize agents and Admiralty Courts. To these hazards of her husband's profession, Fanny joined those of wife and mother: she gave birth to her first child, Cassandra, in Bermuda but when pregnant with her second, Harriet, set out with Charles on the Indian to Halifax, the British navy's base in the North Atlantic, where Harriet would be born. Kindred provides a vivid picture of Halifax in 1809, from the parties of the in-crowd to the efficiency of the naval yard, which restored the Indian's copper bottom. Indeed, Kindred's fascination with Fanny is clearly sparked by Fanny and Charles's presence in her home city, where the author formerly taught Philosophy at St Mary's University. Kindred's biography follows Fanny on five voyages between Halifax and Bermuda and then across the Atlantic in hms Cleopatra in 1811. Crossing [End Page 228] the Atlantic in a fighting vessel, Fanny risked both weather and battle; Kindred highlights her intrepidity in undertaking the voyage with two small children. However, Fanny had incentive to reach England, where she was reunited with her beloved sister as well as with her parents, who had earlier left Bermuda for Bloomsbury. The family's time in England also allowed Fanny to meet sister-in-law Jane just as her writing career blossomed with the publication of Sense and Sensibility. When Charles was commissioned as flag captain to...
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Feb 27, 2024
A Fauzan + 2
Open Access
