(Note: As previously indicated, the Lowndes books I have read are mostly available on Gutenberg and/or Amazon. In past reviews of early 20th century books, I have not made any effort to offer content warnings, on the assumption that anybody reading these reviews knows better than to expect present-day attitudes on certain topics from books of this timeframe. I am continuing with that assumption here.)

“Fanfics” is maybe a strong word for it; “remixes” or “riffs” might be better. But there are definitely places where you can see kind of a Jane Austen strain in the Lowndes novels, both in their interest in the social order and their microscopically close study of the characters’ emotions, even though Lowndes is not remotely in Austen’s league as a writer. The title character in Heart of Penelope has something of an Elizabeth Bennet vibe – plus nicer parents and more money and a hundred years of progress in the status of women, but minus Mr. Darcy. The title character in Jane Oglander is a bit like the “people-pleaser” interpretations of Jane Bennet, although the situation she’s in during the later stages of the novel would look more familiar to Elinor Dashwood or Fanny Price.

The novels I discuss below have a stronger Jane Austen angle than usual; two of them namecheck Austen characters and one recognizably reworks the Henry Crawford subplot from Mansfield Park.

Barbara Rebell(1) is the redemption of Henry Crawford fanfic. The heroine is a rather fragile personality, raised by parents who’d been cast out of polite society for stuff that wasn’t their fault. She then married a plantation owner cousin in the West Indies who turned out to be an abusive husband(2). Still married but separated, she returns to England, and is taken in by a family friend, the ex-mistress of the analogue to the Crawfords’ uncle(3). Barbara meets two men while she’s there, the Henry analogue, who is in politics like his uncle, and a sort of vague Edmund Bertram analogue who is also in politics and saddled with a Mrs. Norris/Mrs. Rushworth type as his mother. Poor man.

We’re shown at great length why the Henry analogue is the way he is: he’s the widower of a Dead Rich Older Woman(4), who left him her fortune on condition that he not remarry; he didn’t love her, and in any case his role models for True Love were his uncle and his uncle’s mistress. We’re also shown step by step the process by which he courts Barbara, invites her to a love nest in France, and then decides he can’t bring himself to ruin her reputation by sleeping with her. It all makes Barbara look rather more spineless than her prototype Fanny Price, but it also gives us a “rake’s reformation” that I found plausible. If there’s a problem with this aspect of the story, it’s that this rake’s charm remains mostly an informed attribute, unlike Henry Crawford’s. I believed in the Lowndes character’s reformation, and that Barbara loved him enough to be happy with him once her evil husband died offscreen, but I didn’t believe the rake was a man particularly worth the fuss, if that makes any sense. The Edmund analogue, although prissy at times and very jealous of the Henry analogue, felt like a more vivid human being than the Henry analogue, and I was rooting hard for the Edmund analogue to get back together with the woman he was seeing before Barbara came into the neighborhood. Incidentally, this novel has another one of Lowndes’s “benign ghost” scenes, in this case a character manifesting at the home of a loved one moments after dying.

The Story of Ivy is probably a remix of the slightly more famous Letty Lynton, which I only know from scholarly reviews of Lowndes’s work, and didn’t feel like reading because it was apparently based on the real life Madeline Smith(5) case. Both novels spend most of their time in the POV of a young woman who’s beautiful and charming in an angelic, non-sinister way, but also extremely self-centered. It’s a dangerous combination that leads, in The Story of Ivy, to the murder of Ivy’s husband.

The main Austen angle in Ivy comes from the maguffin that Ivy pursues, the tall, studly yet starchy, incredibly wealthy businessman named Mr. Rushworth. This character feels like Lowndes got into an argument about whether Austen’s Rushworth is really as dumb as he seems: “Maybe that prig Edmund(6) just thinks Rushworth’s stupid because he has no small talk and doesn’t know the Roman emperors as low as Severus! Maybe Rushworth’s a perfectly sensible man of business! After all, when he turns to Henry for advice on improvements to his property, he’s talking to someone who’s considered pretty gifted in that department!” The result is a much nicer, more grounded man than one usually thinks of Austen’s Rushworth being, even if he’s still amazingly stupid about women. His cold anger when he finds out the truth about Ivy, and his attempts to sweep the potential scandal under the rug, feel more like Austen’s Mrs. Rushworth, the mother, than Mr. Rushworth, the son, but the Austen resonance is still there.

Ivy’s husband has a bit of a Mr. Yates feel to him (complete with an interest in the theater, which is where he met Ivy). I wonder if the original story idea was “a modern Julia Yates gets tired of Mr. Yates and makes eyes at her ex-brother-in-law(7) Mr. Rushworth.” But Ivy herself is not a close match for Julia Bertram, who is one of the less unsympathetic characters in Mansfield Park, with a whole two moments(7.5) of being somewhat nice to Fanny the heroine.

Instead, Ivy somehow has the vibe of an Austen bad girl without being exactly like any of them. She has Lady Susan’s facade of wholesome good looks and nice manners without Lady Susan’s humor and self-awareness; she has Lucy Steele’s near sociopathic focus on her own welfare and ability to move in fashionable circles without Lucy’s brains and foresight; she has Lydia Bennet’s spendthrift selfishness and desperate need for male attention while being considerably less crass and more physically attractive(8) than Austen portrayed Lydia as being. And we’re stuck in this creature’s head for most of the book – it’s a very well-done POV but it’s an unpleasant one. There is no such thing as an essential Marie Belloc Lowndes novel; you can go your whole life quite comfortably without reading the best things(9) I’ve run across by this author, but Story of Ivy strikes me as particularly nonessential. Unless you need a studlier version of Mr. Rushworth for some reason, because I’m pretty sure your options there are limited.

From Out the Vasty Deep is both a Christmas ghost story and something of an Emma remix, with the cast including a wealthy, intelligent and good-looking woman with hazel eyes whom another character describes as looking like Emma Woodhouse. She’s not a matchmaker like the Austen character, but she is clueless about the relationship between the bad guy, who’s kind of an evil Frank Churchill type(10) and his Dead Rich Older Wife, even though the Emma analogue knew both of them when Dead Rich Older Wife was alive. The Emma analogue is pursued by the bad guy as a potential second wife, but there’s also Sir Lyon, the calm, kind, slightly older man who is supposed to make the reader go: “Yay, Mr. Knightley!” Since he’s also a former paranormal investigator, my actual reaction was more like: “Yay, Hammer Van Helsing finally got the girl!” but whatever. Most readers will probably go “Yay, Mr. Knightley!” as intended.

Unfortunately, the ghost story angle pushes the Emma and Knightley analogues rather to the background. There’s much more emphasis on the ditzy, volatile flapper girl who’s not very much like Harriet Smith but is on-again, off-again with a stolid boyfriend who suggests Robert Martin. He disapproves of his girlfriend’s enthusiasm for channeling spirits. There’s also a chic, jaded older woman without much money, holding onto her status in high society by her fingernails – very different from Miss Bates in personality and story function, but a little bit similar in her social situation. I could have done with more of the Emma and Knightley characters, but this is, along with Chink in the Armor, probably the most satisfying of Lowndes’s novels in my opinion. The ghosts haunting the quaint manor house at Christmastime are spooky without being disturbing to the average reader, spiritism is condemned in terms I sympathize with, the crime thriller parts are reasonably well-executed, the good guys end well, and the bad guy ends badly(11), and that’s really all I ask of this kind of book.

(1) I seem to recall from the book that it’s pronounced like Lebel, with the emphasis on the first syllable.

(2) This is the point at which I started to suspect that somewhere among Lowndes’s effects, one would find a manuscript from her teenaged years where Sir Thomas marries Fanny Price off to a cousin in charge of the Antigua property.

(3) He’s not an Admiral and both he and the ex-mistress are much nicer people than Austen would have made them, but he’s the wealthy, prominent uncle of the Henry Crawford analogue.

(4) Who actually died of natural causes; this is not the case in The Terriford Mystery or From Out The Vasty Deep.

(5) That’s Madeline Smith, alleged poisoner, not Madeleine Smith, the actress who plays Shane Briant’s love interest in Frankenstein and the Monster from Hell.

(6) Not my opinion of Edmund, but I think Lowndes makes her opinion of him reasonably clear through the Edmund analogue in Barbara Rebell.

(7) The Story of Ivy does not have a Maria Bertram analogue, although there’s one floating around in the background of Barbara Rebell, which rather enhances the impression that Ivy is about the Mansfield Park characters omitted from Barbara.

(7.5) I’m counting the time Julia made a footstool as an arts and crafts project and gave it to Fanny “because it was too ill-done for the drawing room.”

(8) Some adaptations portray Lydia as more of a looker than I think Austen intended; I was particularly struck by a still from the lost 1952 TV version, where Prunella Scales’s Lydia seemed a lot prettier than Daphne Slater’s Elizabeth.

(9) Which would probably be Chink in the Armor, and From Out the Vasty Deep, maybe Why They Married. Maaaaaybe Jane Oglander and Chianti Flask.

(10) We eventually find out that there’s a Jane Fairfax analogue floating around in his backstory.

(11) He suicides to dodge a murder charge, but since he’s a much more straightforwardly evil person than the suicidal murderer in Love and Hatred, his suicide is not glorified as much and therefore doesn’t bother me as much.