Published by HarperCollins Canada
320 pages
Jane Austen is a 21-year-old gentlewoman living with her father, mother and sister, and she has just had her first manuscript rejected. She decides to go to a dance with her sister Cassandra to put her book out of her mind and meets a Mr. Smith, who promptly turns her. Into a vampire, that is. Her father takes the family from their country house to Bath where Jane may partake in the waters, the only thing that will cure her illness into damnation. While they are there, the French are invading England, and her cure is not as simple as she and her father had hoped.
So many books that try to write in the Jane Austen style fail. The words sound stiff and unnatural, but Janet Mullany has done a wonderful job with the 1797 era dialogue. Of course Jane loses some bit of her genteel voice after her change, and things loosen up a bit.
I enjoyed this as the fantasy I believe it was meant to be, not as a documentary that others might feel failed to meet with a biographical standard. It was fun, light-hearted, and written well enough to not pull me out of the story. A favorite part was some dialogue between Jane and Margaret that true Austen fans will not miss as showing up in one of Jane's later published novels. Very funny.
I won this book on the First Reads giveaway at Goodreads.com, pleased to have read it and enjoyed it well enough. I give it a 3 out of 5.
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