In one of the treasure troves that the internet habitually throws off these days, the AUSTENLIST itemizes sixty-eight Jane Austen literary "reversions" (including eight of Pride and Prejudice) written between 1850 and 2000. [1] Most are sequels to the novels or a given...

It's 1974, and Emma Tennant is establishing a new literary magazine. She calls it Bananas (after Woody Allen's science fiction film spoof), and from its down-at-heel office in Notting Hill she starts to assemble the list of writers who will keep the magazine afloat...

[Emma Tennant] has added another sample of her own brand of sci-fi fantasy to her first two, The Time of the Crack and The Last of the Country House Murders. Somewhere she has referred to her 'trilogy', so that Hotel de Dream may be intended as the last of her laughing-gas murders. Be that as it may, plenty of old English attitudes get murdered in this latest offering of hers and in her own wittily and elegantly lethal way too. Perhaps one needs to read the book more than once to catch the rel...

In Emma Tennant's The Bad Sister, gentlefolk are distressed when one of their number is put to death by his illegitimate daughter. Dependence on the fiction of the first Romantic period is in this case deliberate, explicit, and surprising. So far from shy is Emma Tennant that she has used as a model James Hogg's celebrated novel of 1824, The Confessions of a Justified Sinner. Hogg describes the or-deal of a fanatic, who, duped by antinomian Calvinism, by the teaching that those to whom God�...

With The Last of the Country House Murders we leave Life behind and begin to play the Tennant games. There is a strong Napoleonic streak in Miss Tennant, which first declared itself at the time of the crack and is now rampant once again: large armies sprout and march on; orders are expected and orders are issued; revolutions have taken place and others will follow. Whole galaxies have been swept off the skies with a few well-aimed sentences and now the Earth stands despondent and unaccompanied, but for the ...