For Jane Austen fans the possibility of meeting their favorite author or living in one of her novels is the ultimate fantasy. While time-travel is not available to us, creative and imaginative stories are. Recent books such as The Jane Austen Project and the Austen Adventures series have given us in-person meetings with Jane Austen during her early nineteenth-century life. In Nine Ladies, Heather Moll’s latest release, we experience the awe-inspiring ingenuity of Diana Gabaldon’s time-travel Outlander series combined with the classic hate at first sight love story of Jane Austen’s famous novel Pride and Prejudice, but with a twist.
In 2011 Elizabeth Bennet has returned to England after decades to attend to her estranged father, leaving her mother and elder sister Jane back in America. While touring the Derbyshire countryside, she unknowingly steps into an ancient stone circle called the Nine Ladies and awakens 200 years in the past at Pemberley, the country manor house of Mr. Darcy.
Aware of the power of the stones, and of other visitors from the future, the Darcy family has guarded their secret and dealt with those few who have appeared over the centuries. Taking authority Darcy presents the puzzling and outspoken new traveler with a plan. He will hide her until she can return through the stones during the next solstice in three months’ time.
After spending months alone with her dying father, Elizabeth will not be imprisoned in an outbuilding on the Pemberley estate and rejects his plan. Instead, she offers her own solution. She will stay at Pemberley with him by becoming a fictitious distant relative of the housekeeper Mrs. Reynolds. Darcy begrudgingly agrees, though as time advances both are challenged by their decision and their growing attraction to each other: Darcy by the convoluted story he must spin to keep her and Pemberley safe, and Elizabeth with the trappings of nineteenth-century life, the attitudes toward women—and especially the information that she knows about the bleak future facing the Darcy family and the estate. Continue reading
Hey-ho Janeites. I hope that you are all coping during this crazy time. I am on lockdown here at Woodston Cottage trying to be productive while immersing myself in audiobooks and rom-com movies. It is Spring and the birds are singing, and the flowers are blooming. I have much to be grateful for.
London, 1815: Two travelers—Rachel Katzman and Liam Finucane—arrive in a field in rural England, disheveled and weighed down with hidden money. Turned away at a nearby inn, they are forced to travel by coach all night to London. They are not what they seem, but rather colleagues who have come back in time from a technologically advanced future, posing as wealthy West Indies planters—a doctor and his spinster sister. While Rachel and Liam aren’t the first team from the future to “go back,” their mission is by far the most audacious: meet, befriend, and steal from Jane Austen herself.
