Welcome back to My Jane Austen Book Club, Collins! Congratulations on your latest release and thanks for accepting to answer a few questions. Here's the first one: most
of the authors writing in the Jane Austen world are doing sequels to her books
or variations on her plots and characters. You chose to write about Austen
herself. Why?
I had two different ideas come together. The first
is that I wanted to tell a serious story of what life was like for women in the
early 1800s. This was a time when everything was against them, from
society to biology. I wanted to test the heart and soul of an intelligent,
sensitive woman. As I began the early scenes, the voice that kept coming to me
was that remarkable voice. Also, I had a literature professor at
university, long ago, who encouraged me to see the depth of Austen’s writing as
well as its brilliance. The literary constraints on a woman of that day limited
Jane to courtship novels and forced her to deal with important issues in the
background or in passing, with secondary characters.
Through the years, I kept asking myself: What would
have happened if Jane Austen had been able to put her talents toward the
serious issues of life after marriage? What if she had been able to
write directly about some of the big social issues of the day? What if she
herself had faced the good and bad of married life, as most women of that era
did? How would all that come together in a story involving a man very much her
equal—though unsuitable, perhaps, to her family.
