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GOSSIPS STORY LEGEND 2VL
Reprint of the 1797 ed. printed for T. N. Longman, London.
Hardcover
First published January 1, 1796
About the author
Jane West
65 books3 followersJane^^^^West (1758-1852), who published as Prudentia Homespun and Mrs. West, was an English novelist, poet, playwright, and writer of conduct literature and educational tracts.
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Displaying 1 - 9 of 9 reviews
October 17, 2024
Today we all know Jane Austen, but few have heard of her contemporary, Jane West. Yet in their lifetimes, Jane West was by far the better known and more popular novelist. So when I read that A Gossip’s Story was considered the inspiration for Austen’s Sense and Sensibility, I was eager to check it out. Some ambivalent remarks Austen made in her letters about West clinched the deal. Those remarks are generally interpreted as disdain, but I read them more as ambivalence, a rueful appreciation for a talented competitor.
A Gossip’s Story unfolds within a loose and sporadic frame tale narrated by an elderly gossip in the village of Danbury. The gossip is a fairly entertaining personage in her own right, but her connection to the main story is tenuous at best. That main story is about a family that moves into one of the grand houses in the neighborhood—a widower, Mr. Dudley; his sensible elder daughter, Louisa; and his prettier younger daughter, Marianne, who was raised by an aunt to value high emotion over commonsense. The family falls on hard financial times, there are good and bad suitors, and time spent living in a cottage—all features also found in Sense and Sensibility.
That said, the parallels aren’t all that close, but at the same time it’s clear that Austen read this book and found it stimulated her creative juices. From the youthful start of her writing career, Austen wrote derivatively, her fiction defined by the deficiencies she found mockworthy in the efforts of her contemporaries. She taught herself how to write by making fun of how others did. Something of that process is visible in echoes of A Gossip’s Story that can be heard in both Sense and Sensibility and Pride and Prejudice. There are the two Mariannes, with their passion for poetry and nature and their floods of tears, as well as their apparently perfect lovers who rescue them from physical danger the first time they meet. But West’s Marianne and her fate is consistent with the author’s moralizing aims. Austen makes her Marianne more of a person with an arc of development, and allows her to move forward from the errors of her youth. West has an arrogant Darcyesque hero propose offensively propose to Louisa, in a scene from which Austen steals whole phrases for the scene in which Darcy proposes to Elizabeth—but there is no learning curve for Louisa, no painful process of self-revelation by which she learns to see him in a different light. His desire to marry her is merely a temporary peril Louisa shakes off after an artificial plot twist that reveals him to be a wicked user.
West was writing with didactic intent, and the last third of the book becomes a tedious sequence of moral lessons intended to teach young women to shape themselves into compliant wives. The first two-thirds of the book, however, are skillfully written and interesting, often clever and shrewd. Reading Austen’s first three novels, one can easily see how she took West’s book apart, identifying what worked and what didn’t and figuring out how to develop a similar story in a more effective way. It’s no accident that two of Austen’s early novels, Pride and Prejudice and Northanger Abbey, end with explicit mockery of high-sounding moral endings: she recognized that there was nothing so deflating to a clever novel as manhandling the characters into embodiments of moral precepts.
I took great pleasure in the first two-thirds of A Gossip’s Story and wish the talented Jane West had been able to free herself from the shackles of defensiveness enough to let her characters be real people and not models of proper or misguided behavior. The last third made me grateful for Jane Austen’s unerring bulls*** meter.
A Gossip’s Story unfolds within a loose and sporadic frame tale narrated by an elderly gossip in the village of Danbury. The gossip is a fairly entertaining personage in her own right, but her connection to the main story is tenuous at best. That main story is about a family that moves into one of the grand houses in the neighborhood—a widower, Mr. Dudley; his sensible elder daughter, Louisa; and his prettier younger daughter, Marianne, who was raised by an aunt to value high emotion over commonsense. The family falls on hard financial times, there are good and bad suitors, and time spent living in a cottage—all features also found in Sense and Sensibility.
That said, the parallels aren’t all that close, but at the same time it’s clear that Austen read this book and found it stimulated her creative juices. From the youthful start of her writing career, Austen wrote derivatively, her fiction defined by the deficiencies she found mockworthy in the efforts of her contemporaries. She taught herself how to write by making fun of how others did. Something of that process is visible in echoes of A Gossip’s Story that can be heard in both Sense and Sensibility and Pride and Prejudice. There are the two Mariannes, with their passion for poetry and nature and their floods of tears, as well as their apparently perfect lovers who rescue them from physical danger the first time they meet. But West’s Marianne and her fate is consistent with the author’s moralizing aims. Austen makes her Marianne more of a person with an arc of development, and allows her to move forward from the errors of her youth. West has an arrogant Darcyesque hero propose offensively propose to Louisa, in a scene from which Austen steals whole phrases for the scene in which Darcy proposes to Elizabeth—but there is no learning curve for Louisa, no painful process of self-revelation by which she learns to see him in a different light. His desire to marry her is merely a temporary peril Louisa shakes off after an artificial plot twist that reveals him to be a wicked user.
West was writing with didactic intent, and the last third of the book becomes a tedious sequence of moral lessons intended to teach young women to shape themselves into compliant wives. The first two-thirds of the book, however, are skillfully written and interesting, often clever and shrewd. Reading Austen’s first three novels, one can easily see how she took West’s book apart, identifying what worked and what didn’t and figuring out how to develop a similar story in a more effective way. It’s no accident that two of Austen’s early novels, Pride and Prejudice and Northanger Abbey, end with explicit mockery of high-sounding moral endings: she recognized that there was nothing so deflating to a clever novel as manhandling the characters into embodiments of moral precepts.
I took great pleasure in the first two-thirds of A Gossip’s Story and wish the talented Jane West had been able to free herself from the shackles of defensiveness enough to let her characters be real people and not models of proper or misguided behavior. The last third made me grateful for Jane Austen’s unerring bulls*** meter.
July 28, 2025
Similar themes and plots to Sense and Sensibility, but a very different story. Very different narrative style as well, more overtly Christian. It wasn't and amazing book but I enjoyed it and would like to try more by this author.
June 2, 2013
About the only thing this novel remains known for today is that it inspired Jane Austen's Sense and Sensibility. The parts Austen took inspiration from--it's the story of two sisters, Elinor and Marianne. One sister the model of propriety and sense, with the other wild and full of sensibility. There's also a life-threatening "brain fever" and a slightly older man changed by heartbreak who initially loves the wilder sister. But frankly West's novel is rightly forgotten in favor of Austen's which is far far superior. West's characters are insipid and poorly drawn, it's too didactic (going so far as to punish a woman who steps out of line with insanity, for merely flirting with a man who wasn't her husband and liking city life over country), and it's rather a chore to get through.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
May 30, 2021
This is an interesting Romantic Era novel, which deals with the terms sense and sensibility. It is is told through the amiable gossip Ms. Prudentia Homspun, the spinster and recounts Marianne and Louisa Dudly's lives as they grow up and find their ways in life with a lot of gossip, fainting, and tears along the way.
November 14, 2025
Out of all the books I've read simply because they influenced Jane Austen, this is probably my favorite - but that doesn't necessarily mean it's good. On the one hand, it has obvious parallels to Sense and Sensibility, which will always score points. West's writing shares several things in common with Austen's: wit, humor, comical minor characters, female relationships, and juxtapositions, to name a few. West makes the wise move of not writing in an epistolary style, but instead uses an interesting premise of narrating through a town gossip. West herself seems like an interesting historical figure, one worthy of a feminist literature class, as a female writer who also helped manage a farm, raised children, and had a seemingly happy marriage.
On the other hand, her comical minor characters fall a bit flat. The interesting narrator is undermined by sounding very third-person-omniscient; indeed, Prudentia Homespun might as well not have been there at all. And that reminds me: the character names are often ridiculous. Prudentia Homespun? Captain Target? Miss Cardemum? West uses her fiction to teach, so she gets preachy, and since she's on the more conservative side, modern readers probably won't appreciate it. And, of course, there's the horrible ending for Marianne. Modern readers will probably not appreciate that either; she tries to please her husband, even giving up her best friend for him, then gets falsely accused of adultery, and somehow she deserves to be miserable and unloved in her marriage? Did I miss something? Whatever criticism Austen gets for marrying her begrudging Marianne off to Colonel Brandon, at least she's treated with respect for being a good (if misguided) person.
Anyway, a fine read if you're a fan of Jane Austen or feminist literature; not so much if you're looking for an escape novel.
On the other hand, her comical minor characters fall a bit flat. The interesting narrator is undermined by sounding very third-person-omniscient; indeed, Prudentia Homespun might as well not have been there at all. And that reminds me: the character names are often ridiculous. Prudentia Homespun? Captain Target? Miss Cardemum? West uses her fiction to teach, so she gets preachy, and since she's on the more conservative side, modern readers probably won't appreciate it. And, of course, there's the horrible ending for Marianne. Modern readers will probably not appreciate that either; she tries to please her husband, even giving up her best friend for him, then gets falsely accused of adultery, and somehow she deserves to be miserable and unloved in her marriage? Did I miss something? Whatever criticism Austen gets for marrying her begrudging Marianne off to Colonel Brandon, at least she's treated with respect for being a good (if misguided) person.
Anyway, a fine read if you're a fan of Jane Austen or feminist literature; not so much if you're looking for an escape novel.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
November 14, 2025
Giving this 5 stars not because it is gripping read (some of the sentences are tortuous) but because it is worthy of further study. It is possibly the starting point for Austen's Sense and Sensibility and it is easy to see why this is thought to be the case. The contrast between sensible Louisa and the sensibility of her sister Marianne is made very clear. Very didactic about the role of women in marriage. Some comic moments especially about the village characters who form part of the narrator's friendship group.
February 15, 2022
Read this book for one of my classes. I didn’t like it as it is not my style.
Read
August 20, 2024Includes a 30-page long poem kn the middle, but is still quite readable. Very interesting especially to see the parallels and differences to Austen.
June 20, 2019
La storia ha chiaramente influenzato 'Sense and Sensibility'; ma quanto la grande Jane Austen si è lasciata dietro il modello! Mi sembra quasi di vederla, la giovane scrittrice, discutere con il padre – com'era solita fare – il romanzo, segnalandogli i vari punti deboli, e lui, il reverendo, incoraggiarla a tentare di far qualcosa di meglio, e soprattutto, a scrivere qualcosa che non fosse così edificante! Perché, in questo caso, se questa 'Eleanor' (che in verità si chiama Louisa) troverà un po' a fatica il premio del suo buonsenso in un compagno ideale, la povera Marianne (che si chiama proprio così) verrà punita severamente per la sua eccessiva sensibilità, condannata dall'autrice a soffrire per sempre il disprezzo di un marito che aveva sposato per amore.
Displaying 1 - 9 of 9 reviews