Jane Actually

Thanks
    I would like to thank my advance readers and proofreaders, especially my sensei, Susan Chandler; fellow JASNA member Maryann O’Brien; my husband James Bates; UK Janeite Christopher Sandrawich; and fellow Sherlockian Michael J. Newman. Their kind assistance is not meant to be endorsements of this story. Any mistakes are my fault.
    Apologies
    The real-life characters mentioned in this book have no association with or knowledge of this book. Garrison Keillor didn’t write an introduction to
Pride and Prejudice
; Brian Cox and Stephen Fry have never been on a radio program with Jane Austen; Amanda Vickery has never interviewed her; Jane has never been on the Graham Norton Show; and Colin Firth and Jane have never met. The Austen scholars/authors Joan Klingel Ray, Deirdre Le Faye, Elisabeth Lenckos, Janet Todd, Paula Byrne and Jon Spence mentioned in this book have my deepest respect but I cannot claim their imprimatur. This book also draws on the work of Claire Harman (
Jane’s Fame
) and Claire Tomalin (
Jane Austen: A Life
). I must also credit Vic Sanborn, Laurel Ann Nattress and Julie Wakefield, authors of the influential blogs
Jane Austen’s World, AustenProse
and
AustenOnly
. None of these persons should be blamed for this book.
    For reasons understandable only to myself, I decided to employ a trans-Atlantic narrator, but who generally follows UK spelling and grammar.
    As to Jane’s voice, please realize I’ve imagined a Jane Austen who’s been observing the world for two centuries, who’s been online for a decade and who now has a close friend, almost a sister, in her mid twenties. She’s read and enjoyed Hemingway, Dickens, Chandler and Christie. She may not be the Jane you were expecting.
    Chronology
    I borrow from a device employed by Stella Gibbons, author of
Cold Comfort Farm
, who prefaced her book: “The action of the story takes place in the near future.” The world of the AfterNet takes place in the recent past, but a past that diverged from our reality in 1997. I choose to parallel and depart from our timeline at my pleasure. This story takes place in 2011.

“It seems a great pity that they allowed her to die a natural death”
    Mark Twain
    Jane lies in Winchester—blessed be her shade! /
    Praise the Lord for making her,
and her for all she made! /
    And while the stones of Winchester,
or Milsom Street, remain, /
    Glory, love, and honour unto England’s Jane! /
    From Rudyard Kipling’s
“The Janeite”

The Real Jane Austen
    Jane Austen died in 1817. * In her forty-one years alive, she published four novels,
Sense and Sensibility, Pride and Prejudice, Mansfield Park
and
Emma,
and two were published posthumously,
Persuasion
and
Northanger Abbey.
She left
Sanditon
unfinished, and it promised to be quite different from her previous works, which have been described and criticized as both romantic, dull, witty, plotless, brilliant, complex, insightful, second only to Shakespeare and boring.
    To millions of Janeites, however, the best way to describe her novels is only—only six novels, plus two unfinished novels, and her Juvenilia (early works).
    Her novels are third person, chiefly from the viewpoint of the heroine; they always end happily with a marriage; they’re devoid of explicit sex but filled with rakes, cads and bounders; and the plots are simply driven by two people clearly meant for one another who still manage to deny their love for an entire book. The reader is rewarded, usually after considerably more than 100,000 words, with a single kiss (but only in the movie versions) and a wedding.
    Jane was born to George and Cassandra Austen. Her father was a rector (Church of England priest) of the parish of Steventon in Hampshire, a southern English county. Jane had six brothers (James, George, Edward, Henry, Francis and Charles) and a sister, who was also named Cassandra.
    Jane never married, although shortly before her twenty-seventh birthday, she famously agreed to Harris Bigg-Wither’s proposal and returned it the next day. The only sure romance in her life was with Tom Lefroy, who at the time was studying law under the sponsorship of a great uncle. The romance fell apart and Jane shows no great sorrow in her letter to her sister: “At length the day is come on which I am to flirt my last with Tom Lefroy, and when you receive this it will be over. My tears flow as I write at the melancholy idea.”
    Most detect a sarcastic tone, although perhaps her arch words disguise a