bookshop owner. She was born in England and raised in Oakville, Ontario, where she lives with her family.
Here the author dreamcasts an adaptation of her new novel, Austen at Sea:
I had the idea for my new novel Austen at Sea for many years, ever since learning of two Boston women in 1852 fangirling over Jane Austen to the point of writing to her last surviving sibling, Admiral Sir Francis Austen, and asking for her signature--which seemed to me a pretty bold gesture at any time in history!Visit Natalie Jenner's website.
When I eventually sat down to write a very fictional version of this anecdote, I immediately pictured the two female protagonists as the older Dashwood sisters in a 2008 BBC adaptation of Austen’s novel Sense and Sensibility. British actress Hattie Morahan had the angular looks I imagined for Henrietta Stevenson, the older, more restrained sister in my book—and Charity Wakefield the blonde, blue-eyed ones of younger sister Charlotte (which doubly came in handy when she takes part in a shipboard performance of A Tale of Two Cities as Charles Dickens’s Victorian angel, Lucie Manette).
A lot of movies inspired my book as well, especially Somewhere in Time with its famous opening scene line of “Come back to me". I reconfigured this in my own story as “May we come to you?" from the sisters’ second letter to Sir Francis, a line which will constantly refrain in his lonely ninety-one-year-old’s head. I even named my theatre impresario character Richard Fawcett Robinson in reference to Christopher Plummer’s theatre character of the same surname in that film, imagining the latter as a possible descendant of my own. The bedroom set design of The Ghost and Mrs. Muir was another huge inspiration, leading not only to the bow window study of the admiral but also the large brass telescope on a stand, which turned out to become an even bigger plot point than this "pantser" knew setting out.
Finally, the romantic lead in Austen at Sea is the youngest member of the Massachusetts state supreme court, Justice Thomas Nash, who finds himself a most reluctant chaperone on board ship to my two female leads, daughters of his colleague Justice William Stevenson. I had only one actor in mind the entire time I wrote: Johnny Flynn from the 2020 Autumn de Wilde adaptation of Austen’s novel Emma. I spent the first few weeks of the pandemic in March 2020 watching this movie on repeat as a huge source of comfort while waiting for, and worrying over, the imminent release of my debut novel The Jane Austen Society at a time when bookstores everywhere were closed. I had been initially—and stupidly—resistant to the idea of Flynn’s casting in that film when it was first announced; since then, I have learned to trust the movie-making gods a bit better. In a way, using Flynn's performance in that film as inspiration for my romantic lead in Austen at Sea was my very whimsical and writerly attempt at atonement!
Q&A with Natalie Jenner.
My Book, The Movie: The Jane Austen Society.
My Book, The Movie: Bloomsbury Girls.
--Marshal Zeringue
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