Sybil G. Brinton, "Old Friends and New Fancies"

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"Old Friends and New Fancies", by Sybil G. Brinton, called "the ancestor of all sequels", of all Austenian spin-offs and derivatives, was written a hundred years after "Pride and Prejudice" (1813).

Two hundred years separate us, therefore, from the original by Jane Austen and one hundred from this sequel by Brinton, of whom little is known, except that she had a short life and never enjoyed good health. The author was a passionate janeite, with what both positive and negative the term implies. Janitism developed after 1870, with the publication of "A Memoir of Jane Austen" by J.E. Austen - Leigh. Even Rudyard Kypling wrote a story, entitled "The Janeites", about a group of soldiers of the First World War passionate about the novels of the Austen

This sequel is based on the six canonical novels, namely "Pride and prejudice", "Mansfield Park", "Northanger Abbey", "Sense and Sensibility", "Persuasion", "Emma". Brinton intersects the protagonists, finding, in fact, "old acquaintances" and favouring new sentimental intertwining, compensating the always a little too abrupt ends of "dear Aunt Jane", basing herself on indications given by the author herself regarding possible developments, creating a sort of summary and compendium of all six novels. Although present, the main characters remain in the background, in favour of minor figures, such as Georgiana Darcy, Kitty Bennet, Colonel Fitzwilliam and Mrs Crawford, of whom new adventures and new loves are narrated.

"In this modest attempt to represent the sequel to the adventures of some of Jane Austen's characters," Brinton tells us in the preface, "I made use of the references made to them by the author herself, recorded in the Memory of Mr. Austen- Leigh ".

The text has value for what it represents culturally, for its being the progenitor of all the subsequent fanfiction, not so much for the content or the style. It certainly responds to that need that arises, overbearing, at the end of a beloved book, when we clasp it to the chest feeling orphaned, asking ourselves what the protagonists will do now that the last page has been read and abandoned.

But maybe it's because the main actors are not the ones that concerned us so much - read Elisabeth and Darcy, now transformed, in just two years of married life, into country lords without allure, absorbed by their role as parents as Jo and the Professor Baher in "Little Men", a role from which Elisabeth stands apart only to take on a match maker activity borrowed from Emma Woodhouse - if the initiative succeeds only to a certain extent.

The story of Georgiana, her disturbances, her blushes, her act as a timid paranymph between her ex-promised cousin Firzwilliam and a Miss Crawford completely distorted by the Austenian original, her love for William Price longed for by her friend Kitty, don't take us too much, nor do we get excited about the technique which, in an attempt to imitate the "conversational" one of Austen, does not escape some involuntary clumsiness and dilutes witticism in monotony. It remembera, if anything, the flatter style of almost contemporary - and rival of Jane Austen - Maria Edgeworth. The cutting irony is missing, the study of an entire social class is missing and perhaps it is no coincidence that this "Old friends and new Fancies" seems to have remained the only proof of Brinton.

"Even the best of derivatives", Giuseppe Ierolli confirms in the introduction of the Italian translation "remain far from everything that has made Jane Austen one of the most loved and studied authors of world literature. The perfection of her dialogues, the irony and parody that pervade her writings, sometimes concealed in very short parenthesis that often elude the distracted reader, the finesse of what she herself called "the little piece of ivory (two inches wide) on which I work with a brush so fine that it produces a minimal effect after so much effort ", the naturalness with which she accompanies us in the events of hers characters, the parsimony with which she describes them, letting their characters emerge much more from what they say and they do that from what the narrator says, they are overall, inimitable, and only a few flashes sometimes emerge in the works inspired by her. "