Customer Reviews

By a Lady: Being the Adventures of an Enlightened American in Jane Austen's England

5 star:		(9)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(7)
1 star:		(10)

 

 

It's a cliche, but I can't help it: reading this novel was like watching a train wreck. You try to avert your eyes, but curiosity gets the better of you--it couldn't possibly get worse, could it? Oh yes, it could. By a Lady starts out as as a cute, if improbable, tale of a young actress who steps offstage during a casting call and finds herself in 19 century Bath. Elyot is a bit too eager to show off her research and overstuffs the text with period detail, but at least she attempts to address the problems a 21st century woman would encounter in the past. At some early point, however, the author just throws in the towel and the story gets weirder and more ridiculous with every page. Watch our heroine meet Jane Austen, who is a walking compendium of quotes from her novels rather than an actual person. Listen as our heroine engages in the most unconvincing romance to grace the literary world in some time. Stare in increasing incredulity as our heroine wanders through a Bath prison, a Regency brothel, the Bedlam madhouse, and the slums of London. And what's up with this chick, anyway? She shrieks at bitter almonds in the cookies, cringes at the bunny rabbit on the dinner menu, and then causes a commotion at the Assembly by plunging her arm into the punch to remove a fly. At this point, I would have tossed her into Bedlam myself, but the hero just finds her "an original." Yes, ladies, try this at your next social event. All the young men will be intriuged by your sassy style. Uh huh. I haven't made a study of Austen spinoffs so I can't be sure, but By a Lady may rival that classic, Emma Tennat's Pemberely, for the title of Worst Austen Tie-In ever.

Actually, this book is so silly that I can't help but wonder if the author is winking at us. At the start of her novel, she quotes a selection from Sandition about what makes a good novel that is so clearly one of Austen's satirical moments that I can't imagine that Elyot doesn't know that. Perhaps this is Elyot's "Northanger Abbey," a witty skewering of period romances. The very serious "Readers Group Guide" at the back of the book suggests otherwise, but perhaps this too is a sly, postmodern jab at pompus book clubs.

Nah, probably not.

The only thing I can give this author credit for is the idea. The rest of it just made me want to laugh! Everything was so horrifyingly predictable - at first I wondered if it was supposed to be a satire on the quintessential "happy ending" novel of the time, but its countless sex scenes forced me to scrap that idea. Not to mention the endless (and I mean endless) coincidences and silly actions by silly characters that I just can't be forced to believe.

And honestly, I could not bring myself to like the protagonist. Her "modern" outlook on life seems, to put it plainly, like that of a modern hooker. She does stupid things and never learns from them - insisting that she won't be "put down" by an era wherein it's merely common sense not to do certain things.

All in all, the author had a good idea, but her writing was too silly to make it worth reading. At least it gave me a good laugh.

Cynthia Froning's review covers it quite well. You don't expect much in the way of plausibility from a novel about a woman time traveling back to the time of Jane Austen, but plausibility is kicked so often and so resolutely to the curb in this book that it becomes utterly impossible to care about these characters. The silliest acts of stupidity are reserved for the heroine, but her feckless suitor is a close second, and together they have all the self control of hungry puppies. (ex: They are shocked and dismayed when having sex on a bench in the middle of a garden party is frowned upon...) Even Jane Austen comes off as an idiot, as her out of context self quotations make her seem like the queen of non-sequitors. The author's 'extensive research' seems to be the justification for the most dramatically unmotivated sequences - thirty minutes with a decent history book would probably suffice for anyone who wants to write a book that is similarly well supported.

I picked up this book because of its promises of Jane Austen. Thankfully, Jane's poor carcass is only carted onto the stage for a total of five pages, spouts lines from her novels as if she were reading her entry in Bartlett's, and mostly stays out of this train wreck of a trash romance novel masquerading as modern literature. I kept reading, thinking that something in it would redeem it. But alas, it only got more contrived and ridiculous. Basically, the book is completely wish-fulfillment, the desire to go back in time, fall for a rich hottie, and hang out with Jane Austen. But even in that respect, it fails horribly. The characters are flat and boring, the plot silly and melodramatic (C.J. dances between the two time periods, gets pregnant and thrown in a madhouse, and eventually saved by the man she loves with an inheritance that falls conveniently into her lap). The characters are flat and stereotypical, with no chemistry between any of them. The action is poorly illustrated and ridiculous. There are glaring historical inaccuracies, including the characters' behavior and the fact that supposedly Percy wouldn't marry Jane because she was his cousin (has the author read Mansfield Park???) and confused Jane's brothers (Henry and Frank). Even putting aside the sad attempt to cash in on Jane Austen, the book has no redeeming value whatsoever. Grade: F

I have never written a book review before for Amazon, but felt I needed to save other readers from this book. It started out just fine, but started to get plain silly and ridiciulous by the half way mark. By the time I approached the end I forced myself to finish and I should not have. It was a waste of my time. Please believe the readers who have given this book a poor review before me!

This is HORRIBLE. DON'T be tempted to read it because you're an Austen fan. This author is the example that proves true an essay, The Janeites, about how sometimes.. those who like Austen the most.. would be exactly the ones who disgusted Austen herself.

This book starts off with an interesting story line with a ton of potential and then goes progressively downhill! The minute C.J. steps through the stage door into the past, the author seems to lose control of her own story.

My biggest problem with this book is the characterization of the Darcy character - known as Darlington in this story. Once again, one of the most dashing and romantic characters in all of literature is reduced to a 'very expericed' man fulfilling someone's very graphic sexual fantasy. Yuck!! That is a great disservice to both Jane Austen and Darcy.

I'm an English Literature major and voracious reader. I can count on one hand the number of books I have not been able to finish; this piece of trash is one of them.

I've enjoyed reading the fellow one star reviews more than I enjoyed reading By A Lady. Lady? Who is she kidding?

I found this book in my local library. I really enjoyed it to begin with. It soon became overly improbably: a Georgian scullery maid who can't bear to buy or eat meat? Lady Dalrymple "finds" C.J. to be her "long lost niece" after an acquaintance of a few minutes? But once it turned X-rated in the brothel scene, which I skimmed - what true Jane Austen fan wants to read details about two prostitutes pleasuring each other to titillate their client? - the tiny amount of interest I still had dried up. Jane Austen purposely wrote what was probable, Amanda Elyot does not. I slogged through a few more scenes, but when Jane Austen appeared again spouting quotes from her books and letters, I simply couldn't go on. I considered throwing it in the trash and paying the library for a "lost" book, but that would have been lying. So I turned it back in and told them what a horrible book I thought it was. It's quite sad, because Ms. Elyot's writing isn't bad, but her storyline is outlandish and X-rated. Don't waste your money; I'm glad I didn't.

I came upon this book at the library and checked it out without first reading the Amazon reviews. What a mistake! I do not recommend this book to fans of Austen's books for a number of reasons. First, and foremost, it has no heart or soul; there is nothing to care about in this book. It reads like a comic book of 1801 Bath, with a plot constructed either to reveal factoid after factoid or to pull another Austen "theme" into the mix. How else to explain the improbable and irrelevant action of the novel and its painfully two-dimensional characters? Second, it has no focus or tension, and it is inconsistent on so many levels. It reads like a schoolgirl's attempt at a "romantic, historical" novel with a few steamy sex scenes thrown in. Although the author considers this a work of historical fiction, I beg to differ. To be considered historical fiction it would have to have some depth, some feel for the era; and there is none of that here. Telling us the characters drank Earl Grey tea just doesn't do it. And even though there are an abundance of factoids in this novel, how can I believe anything this author writes when she asks me to believe the main character taught an illiterate servant-girl how to read within the span of a few weeks (a vegetarian, no less, who refuses to purchase meat for her master because she can't bear to think of those poor sweet creatures being eaten)?! If her intent was to treat this as a parody in the style of Austen, she sadly missed the mark. She would have been much more successful if she'd written in a broader style and made the book entertaining. To be really cynical, I'd say this book was written to make a buck off of a niche market of Jane Austen fans: most of the five star ratings seem written for that purpose; the other ones are based on the sex scenes (if that's your interest, chapters 15 and 28 are for you). The first "book" was so tedious and superficial that I almost stopped reading, something I have never done (I'm compulsive that way). I forced myself to finish the book so I could warn other Austen fans. And that brings me to my third point. I was actually quite offended that someone who claims to love Jane Austen would parade her through such a work, and use her own words to portray her as an impertinent fool. While I doubt it was the author's intent to mistreat her so, I still find it very offensive that she did.

The idea behind this book is clever, but it just wasn't implemented well. For starters, I had a hard time liking or relating to the main character, CJ. Not much about her that made me interested in what happened to her. But I persevered, since I thought the journey might be fun. Once she's transported to Bath in 1801, I liked some of the depiction of the gritty, difficult life of the lower classes and unfortunates of that era, but found that the author was heavy handed in her attempts to demonstrate that she knew a lot about it. At times it read like an encyclopedia, rather than narrative description. Along the same lines, the language used was often unnecessarily obscure. I think the author was trying to capture the language of the time, but succeeded only in making it difficult to read while losing the naturalness of the dialogue. The author also chose to have the Jane Austen of the book speak only in Jane Austen's own words, selected from her novels, short stories, and letters. This only had the effect of making her sound like someone who was unwilling to speak, unless she expected to say something that would amaze the whole room, and be handed down to posterity with all the éclat of a proverb. Very hard to read, made the flow of the story choppy, and made Jane Austen into a caricature rather than a real person.

On the positive side (there is a small one), the end wasn't completely predictable (yes, it's a little far-fetched, as another reviewer said, but when you're in a time-travel story, what part isn't far-fetched?), and I liked the idea of respectable people of the Regency era taking pride in ignoring many of the social conventions of the time. And CJ's character grew on me a little bit as the story progressed.

Overall, this book was an okay read if you're in the right mood (not sure how to tell you what the right mood might be), but I'd recommend getting it out from the library rather than purchasing it.