Behind the Appearance: Jane Austen’s Legacy in Letitia Elizabeth Landon’s Lady Anne Granard

This paper explores Letitia Elizabeth Landon’s homage to and rewriting of Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice in her novel Lady Anne Granard, or, Keeping up Appearances. Landon was a widely acclaimed poet and novelist active during the 1820s and 30s, and Lady Anne Granard is her last silver fork novel, depicting the fabulous life of Regency high society. The novel is strikingly similar to Pride and Prejudice: both tell the story of a mother concerned with the problem of marrying off her five portionless daughters. The subtitle of the novel, ‘keeping up appearances’, reveals the vanity and difficulty of maintaining a glamorous appearance in high society despite being heavily in debt. This paper argues that the characters and plot of Lady Anne Granard are largely derived from Landon’s insight into the dark side of the benign façade of Pride and Prejudice: Mr Bennet is a highly irresponsible father, and Elizabeth Bennet’s financial situation is identical to that of Charlotte Lucas, but she has no obvious sympathy for her friend. Landon consciously makes her novel a darker version of Pride and Prejudice, transplanting Austen’s story from the rural setting to the fashionable circles of metropolitan London, and reinforcing the satire with descriptions of the material ‘appearances’ of Regency high society — a core feature of the silver fork novel. Landon's insight into the literary surface of Pride and Prejudice’s narrative and her portrayal of the dilemmas beneath the ostentatious surface of high society together shape this novel.