First Impressions

l will add a properly considered review son.

Von allem etwas, Jane Austens Welt, Liebesgeschichte und Krimi, für entspannte Stunden, mal für eine Weile in eine andere Welt entführt. Und Jane Entwistle liest es so fantastisch, dass ich das Hörbuch fast noch mehr empfehlen kann.

Book as described, arrived on time.

An Austenite I respect, who ordinarily hates Austenesque novels, recommended this one very highly, so I hastened to read it. It was indeed an enjoyable experience! If I were enslaved to ratings, I might have given it 4.5 stars, but for the pleasure it yielded I rounded up.The book tells two parallel stories, one set in 1796 and focused on a twenty-year-old Jane Austen, and the other set in an unspecified present and centered on the twenty-something Sophie Collingwood. Sophie’s story is a romantic mystery, and Jane’s tale, while interesting enough on its own, exists primarily as a gradual elucidation of Sophie’s mystery. The author is adept at pulling the reader through both tales by breaking off each one at a suspenseful moment, returning to the other only to leave an enticing tease there as well. Once I started reading, I didn’t want to stop. The pace, and the charm of the characters, concealed what in retrospect I might consider a few flaws.Sophie is an Oxford postgraduate, at a crossroads in her life. She has unsympathetic parents and a sister who is emotionally close to her but physically distant. She lives mostly inside books, especially those of Jane Austen—encouraged in this mind-set by a bibliophile uncle, living in London, who is her mentor and inspiration. As the story opens, she meets an intriguing American stranger, Eric, and they share a tentative connection before Eric disappears for the Continent. Sophie plans to go visit her uncle so he can advise her on what she should do with her life, but he suddenly dies. She moves to his apartment, which he has willed to her, only to find that it has been stripped of all his books—by her father, who sold them to pay the uncle’s debts. (Her father has always resented books, apparently because he can’t sell the family library to pay for expenses at the family’s country house. He even keeps the library at his house locked.)Sophie goes to work in a used bookstore and meets another intriguing stranger, Winston. He asks her to seek out an obscure book, the second edition of a collection of allegorical tales by an eighteenth-century cleric, the Reverend Richard Mansfield. In short order another collector asks for the same book, and this one is impatient and threatening in his demands that she locate it.We have already met the Reverend Mansfield, as it turns out, thanks to the Jane Austen half of the story. He is an elderly cleric who has come to visit a nobleman not far from Jane’s home in Hampshire; when they meet, Jane and the Reverend form an immediate and fast friendship. Rev. Mansfield delights in having Jane read aloud her youthful writings; he gives her advice and encouragement on novel-writing, while after she discovers his collection of allegorical tales, she returns the favor. An unexpected and devastating event in her life, when confessed to her new friend, deepens their relationship as Rev. Mansfield assigns to her an act of penance.The author is cagey about the penitential act because it is central to the mystery of the book. As Sophie pursues the elusive second edition of Rev. Mansfield’s collection of allegorical stories and dangers cluster around her, she discovers clues to the mystery of Jane and the Reverend. As is typical of contemporary romantic suspense fiction, both of her intriguing men offer her reasons both to trust and to mistrust them; and there is always the threatening “other collector” waiting in the wings to ratchet up her fears.The storytelling is for the most part tidy, and the style of the contemporary tale is pretty standard romantic-suspense. I was charmed by all the characters, primary and secondary, except perhaps for one who too readily gave away his villain status. I particularly enjoyed all the details about rare books, an area of knowledge that seems to be the author’s strong suit. The style of the Jane Austen half of the story is good-but-not-perfect period prose, and the manners didn’t bother me as much as they usually do. The intimacy between Jane and the Reverend grows too quickly and she is allowed too much license to be alone with him, but I made allowances for her youth and simply took pleasure in following the twists of the plot. Other readers have objected to the idea that the Reverend, a writer of bad allegorical tales, should be so insightful in teaching Jane Austen how to write, but this bothered me only in retrospect.At the crisis point where the two stories meet, there are some coincidences that I didn’t buy, but by then I was fully hooked. All in all, it was a satisfying swift read that gave me a good deal of pleasure.

Bien que n'ayant jamais lu Jane Austen en anglais, j'ai beaucoup aimé ce roman qui la met en scène, ainsi que les diverses étapes de ses travaux. L'auteur entremêle habielment la quête contemporaine d'un mystère littéraire et les scènes de la vie de Jane au XVIIIème siècle. c'est constamment passionnant et émouvant. Bien que lisant assez difficilement en anglais, j'ai adoré et je suis allée très vite (trop !!!). Un seul regret , que Charlie Lovett ne soit pas traduit en français : j'ai beaucoup apprécié son style et la richesse de son vocabulaire qui a enrichi le mien...Merci à lui