I don’t know what I expected, except that it was certain to be interesting. It was that, and much more. Ms. Lerner, it turns out, has written a novel, having spent 26 years researching an historically accurate sequel to Pride and Prejudice. Her talk was essentially a brief account of the primary sources she consulted in these 26 years, and while this was interesting, it did make my heart sink a bit. For one thing, an ordinary person cannot fail to envy a Cisco founder’s fortune in how it helps gaining access to primary sources. If you need a rare book, you buy it. It’s almost as simple as that. You establish your own library of circa-1800 English books on every topic that might possibly be of use or interest, and when you want to consult them, you stroll down the hallway to your library! How can the rest of us possibly compete with that? We can’t. But this is a minor point, and any envy I might want to feel is tempered by deep respect; if I had lots of money, that’s how I’d use it, too. This is a person making good use of money! A more worrying point that began to trouble me midway through the lecture that this all seemed at risk of being obsessively pedantic. Could you possibly produce a living work of fiction by this method, or would it be more like regurgitated chunks of knowledge, the way mother wolves eat something they kill and come home and throw it up for their cubs?

In the second portion of the lecture, a reading from the book put this fear to rest, and expelled all images of vomiting mother wolves from my mind. This is the first Jane Austen sequel I’ve ever read that really gets it right. And I can say only, wow. Well done.

I’ve written a little, and thought a lot, about the importance of tone in writing. When you notice it, it’s nearly always for the wrong reasons. Writing a novel is like casting a spell, putting the reader in a voluntary trance, a kind of waking dream. It’s not real, but as the reader you make believe it’s real, and you want to believe it’s real, for as long as the dream lasts. The reader and the writer are actively working in the service of the same illusion — for there are no books without readers, just as a theatrical performance requires not only actors, but an audience.

The reader/audience wants to suspend disbelief. If a story is compelling enough, the critical faculties can be stilled, though never entirely silenced. What’s weird, though, is now even a similar minor error — a single wrong word, an ill-chosen metaphor — can jar the reader awake again, leaving them incredulous and annoyed. This is particularly a risk with a story set in another time or an exotic place. There are always going to be readers or watchers who know more about the subject than the writer. And I am not the only one who thinks about these things; Ben Zimmer has recently written an entire article about verbal anachronisms in Downton Abbey.

Ms. Lerner understands this as almost no one else writing sequels or making film adaptations of Jane Austen does. Characters living in 1819 cannot use language from nearly 200 years later. More important, they cannot think or act like people from 2010. They cannot suddenly exchange kisses with their new fiances in public, for instance. Most people in the sequel/adaption line either don’t seem to understand these simple facts or just don’t care, because they are pandering to modern tastes. The modern world never bleeds through in Second Impressions; Ms. Lerner is writing as though it doesn’t exist, just as Patrick O’Brian wrote as if it didn’t exist. That is no easy feat. She never breaks tone by choosing a wrong word or phrase. Two things only can explain it: relentless research and obsessive attention to detail.

But perhaps I am giving a false impression by praising the book first for what isn’t there. What about what is? Wit, for a start. A tender regard and healthy respect for its characters, for another. With one exception (named Mary Crawford) the characters created by Jane Austen act in completely believable ways, and exist in a completely believable world. There are some from Pride and Prejudice, but people from other works amusingly crop up too: from Persuasion, Emma, Mansfield Park and even Sanditon. The story is amusing, plausible and well-told, and the deserving people end up engaged to each other, while the undeserving people get their just deserts.

If there is a potential flaw in this brilliant, amazing and funny work, it is that it is not afraid to be old-fashioned in the sense of being sometimes completely boring, in a way that did briefly revive for me the vomiting wolf image. Just as Fielding can fill pages with stuff, like extended classical metaphors, that one can deal with only by skimming and skipping, or Patrick O’Brian can give us excessively detailed sea battles when we really just want to be back in the cabin with Aubrey and Maturin as they eat toasted cheese and tune up their string instruments, so Ms. Lerner can regale us with more about Mr. and Mrs. Darcy’s sight-seeing trips through England than we ever possibly could have wanted to know, bringing all forward action of the plot to a halt.

But. This a minor complaint. And the reason we have hands is so we can use them to turn the page. If you really love Jane Austen, read this book! You won’t be sorry.

I’ve also been thinking about a lot of things, like Downton Abbey, which deserves a post of its own, only I don’t know where to start, and also, not completely unrelated, about chapters. For one thing that intrigues me about Downton Abbey is the issues it raises about the different ways there are of telling a story, and chapters have something to do with that. How do we decide where they begin and end, and what do they have to do with the architecture of a novel?

In the days of two or three-volume novels, which was when Jane Austen was initially published, Book I and II or sometimes III, which seem to us in the 21st century merely a brief moment of white space as we gallop on to the next exciting plot development, were literally that — books. In one of those references that are easy to read right past, Miss Bingley, near the start of Pride and Prejudice (when Elizabeth is stuck at Netherfield with an ill Jane), is described as reading with not much interest a book that she had picked up only because it was the other volume of the one Mr. Darcy was reading. Supposedly, books were published this way so more than one member of the household could be reading the same book at the same time. It also certainly must have had the effect of making you notice much more the pause where Book I (or II) ended and Book II (or III) began. Even if someone else in the household wasn’t reading it, you had to put down Book I and pick up Book II, or maybe go in search of it. There was at least a brief interlude when you had to stop and think about what had just happened, or what would happen next. It wasn’t just a big book you were carrying around for weeks at at a time and falling into whenever you could (I’m looking at you, Clarissa).

Later in the 19th century, of course, with the rise of novels in installments, published in magazines, this notion of where you left off telling a story for maximum dramatic impact and suspense became much more important. It’s exciting to think about a world where you had to wonder about what would happen next in Middlemarch, and wait to find out, instead of just turning the page… but, oh, I just lived through that world. It involved Harry Potter.

Downton Abbey, by virtue of being a miniseries, enforces this kind of pause, too, even if people today can just use their iPads or DVD players to watch the whole thing at once. What’s interesting is what happens in between, when people speculate about what will happen next and reflect on what has just happened. We need more of that in the world.

How to decide where and why to start and end a chapter? I haven’t made a serious study of this, but the more sophisticated sort of modern novel often seems to neglect the chapter entirely, instead dividing the book into segments according to some sort of logic (a break in time, a change in point of view), and just seguing from one scene to another within those segments. The long chapter descriptions that could stand in as capsule summaries, so beloved by 18th-century novelists like Fielding and Goldsmith, are now used only ironically. Standard chapters, of roughly equal lengths, each ending at a suspenseful moment, now seem mostly the realm of suspense tales and murder mysteries.

So I have chapters, but why do I have them? Do I need them? Do they accomplish anything? For me in the writing, they were way stations, a moment to pause and breathe. In the early days, when I decided I had finished a chapter was when I would actually put down my notebook and type in that section of the manuscript. This sense of accomplishment, of finishing one thing and moving on to the next, was vital in the nonetheless glacial progress of writing The Jane Austen Project. But are they just scaffolding, that I can discard now that I have a structure? An interesting question and one I don’t know how to answer. The truth is I hardly notice chapters when I read novels. If it’s a good novel, I plow on regardless. If it’s a bad one — I stop, chapters be damned.

It’s a question I’ve often asked myself while researching and writing The Jane Austen Project, but never more insistently than when considering the works that make up the short story anthology “Jane Austen Made Me Do It, Original Stories Inspired by Literature’s Most Astute Observer of the Human Heart.” I use the subtitle advisedly, for this is one way of viewing Jane Austen, and perhaps a message from its editor, Laurel Ann Nattress of Austenprose, of how she, at least, does.

JAMMDI is on one hand a brilliant marketing idea, combining the brand recognition of Jane Austen with some of the biggest names in Austen and Austenesque fan fiction. But ideally it is more than that, being also an effort to wrestle with the question of what Jane Austen means to people living today, nearly 200 years after her death.

The collection consists of 22 short stories, half of them set in Jane Austen’s time and half in our own, broadly defined. (One is actually set in 1964; another in a sort of alternate universe something like our own time.) By bringing modern life and Jane Austen together in one setting, the authors of those 11 works most directly confront this question of what Jane Austen means to them, or what they imagine she might mean to readers.

If Jane Austen were to confront a living person today, it would have to be as a ghost. Two stories – “A Night at Northanger” by Lauren Willig of Pink Carnation fame, and “The Ghostwriter” by Elizabeth Aston — take this direct approach. In “A Night,” a disaffected employee of a TV series that goes around hunting for ghosts finds herself talking to a transparent Jane Austen while visiting, yes, Northanger Abbey. In “Ghostwriter,” Jane Austen, magically summoned by a lock of her own hair, appears in the apartment of the main character, a struggling writer who’s just been left by her boyfriend. Willig’s ghostly Jane is kind and sympathetic, while Aston’s is more bossy and acerbic, but the setup is strikingly similar: both modern women face challenges with love and work, and Jane Austen appears to provide a sympathetic ear, pointed advice and, in the case of “Ghostwriter,” an actual solution to her work problem, in the form of a racy forgotten novel from the 18th century.

I can’t help being reminded in these stories of older stories: those from the lives of saints, for example, when miraculous interventions take place to resolve impossible situation, or classical myths, or children’s tales with fairy godmothers. It’s as though Jane Austen has become a modern, secular saint: the patron of frustrated writers, and of women with romantic problems and work problems. She is kind and infinitely wise, and through her seemingly hopeless problems are magically solved.

Sometimes the Austen magic works at a remove, through her fictional creations. In “The Mysterious Closet: A Tale” by Myretta Robens, a 29-year-old woman with a string of failed romances behind her takes a vacation in a converted English abbey and finds herself repeatedly visited by what seems to be the ghost of Henry Tilney, but eventually proves to be a corporal, contemporary man. In “When Only a Darcy Will Do” by Beth Patillo, an American graduate student in London trying to make some money by giving Austen-themed walking tours in Regency dress gets only one taker: a handsome man in Regency dress who introduces himself as Fitzwilliam Darcy. He charms her, then disappears, but turns out to be the cute guy at the coffee bar, hitherto overlooked, though she has been going there for weeks. In “Me and Mr. Darcy, Again,” by Alexandra Potter (the italics are the author’s, though I, too, felt a little Darcied-out by page 306 of this 445-page book) a woman who’s just quarreled with her boyfriend jets off to London with her compulsively shopping pregnant friend (whose raison d’etre seems to be as a checklist of chicklit cliché) to find herself mysteriously encountering … Mr. Darcy, who engineers her successful reunion with her boyfriend, culminating in a scene in which he (the boyfriend, not Mr. Darcy) climbs out of a lake, drops to one knee, and proposes.

Sometimes the magic operates through the text itself. In “The Love Letter” by Brenna Aubrey, one of the few in this collection to feature a male protagonist, part of a page torn out from “Persuasion” and anonymously mailed prompts the recipient to seek out the whole book and then to revive a dead romance, essentially reprising the plotline of “Persuasion” in modern dress. That a medical student in the middle of studying for important finals and with a confessed complete lack of interest in literature would be riveted by “Persuasion” must also be attributed to the magical powers of Jane Austen’s prose.

Other times the Austen magic operates a little less supernaturally. “Faux Jane,” which I found unreadably arch at first and later, as the joke dawned on me, improbably amusing, features two urbane New Yorkers, an homage to Nick and Nora of “Thin Man” fame, finding themselves involved with a movie star, her handsome new aristocratic English boyfriend, a signed first edition of “Pride and Prejudice” and –since such a thing by definition cannot exist – the underworld of literary fakes. Where does “The Thin Man” intersect with Jane Austen, except in the febrile imagination of “F.J. Meier”? I don’t know “The Thin Man”well enough to say for certain – there may be more jokes here I’ve missed – but the role of Jane Austen is clear enough. She represents class, first of all, which the movie star lacks but is chasing in the person of her English boyfriend: the book is supposed to be an offering to him. She stands for romance, of course, and the romance of the unattainable object: the signed first edition of “Pride and Prejudice” had for me a faint whiff of Maltese Falcon, that other Hammett creation. Jane Austen occupies the point where high culture and mass culture collide; an actress who made her name starring in some kind of Jane Austen-related movie but who knows so little about the writer that she would fail to spot such an obvious deception is just close enough to reality to work beautifully as satire, a comment on the general Cult of Jane.

Two stories feature realistic main characters being transformed by their encounter with the work of Jane Austen, no ghosts or other supernatural elements required. “Jane Austen, Yeah, Yeah, Yeah,” by Janet Mullany, set in 1964 England and improbably looping in the Beatles, features a young teacher and three teenage students she has been assigned to supervise in detention discussing “Sense and Sensibility.” The girls are lovesick over the Beatles but manage to conduct a reasoned analysis of the novel all the same; the teacher, smarting over a disappointment with her boyfriend, eventually concludes she’s better off without him and would find more inspiration in teaching girls to care about the life of the mind. This story is unlike nearly all of the others in the collection in that it actually meets Jane Austen as Jane Austen – the encounter is not with Saint Jane, patron saint of romance, or her dishy fictional avatars, swooping in to save women in romantic distress. Rather, it’s about reading, which I found refreshing, and also kind of sad, for it made me realize how many of the other stories here really aren’t.

“What Would Austen Do?” by Jane Rubio and Caitlen Rubino-Bradway has an audacious title, with the implied comparison of Jesus and Jane Austen, and an equally audacious premise: It is narrated by a teenage boy, who, obliged to sign up for a summer session in English country dancing, makes a series of surprising discoveries: that Jane Austen is a good writer, than line dancing is more fun than it might seem, and that people are full of surprises. The unique voice of the narrator, compelling, slangy and funny, like a nicer Holden Caulfield updated to contemporary life, is what makes this one sing. Like “Yeah, Yeah, Yeah,” it is really about reading, and how Jane Austen can transform the attentive reader. Here is the narrator on “Sense and Sensibility,” which I think as trenchant a three-sentence analysis of the work as anything out there:

The girls and their mother lose their house and don’t have much money, almost like when the economy takes a dive, and these two sisters, Elinor and Marianne, both fall in love with guys who can’t marry them, but Elinor sucks it up while Marianne goes all emo princess and almost dies. And I think the point is, stuff happens, so do you deal or do you get all ‘Poor me’? Are you Team Elinor or Team Marianne?

If I were magically given the opportunity to converse with any writer, living or dead, I would not pick Jane Austen; something tells me she would not listen to my tales of romantic and professional woe with that kind patience she used to exhibit in letters to her nieces. Writers in general are probably a conversational disappointment, since they tend to save their best selves for the printed page; Samuel Johnson being the exception, but I am for sure not smart enough to hold up my end of a conversation with him. Maybe if I could just sit in the room while he talked to other people? Fanny Burney would have better stories to tell; George Eliot I suspect would be kinder; E.M. Forster would probably be a legendary gossip. Anything Shakespeare could tell me would be interesting. But nobody publishes short-story anthologies centered on these people.

How did “Jane” get so domesticated that people presume to call her by her first name? We don’t do that to Virginia, Vladimir, Leo, Gustav or Charles. What made her the patron saint of romance novelists? JAMMDI, though it may not have set out with this goal, goes quite a long way to answering this question.

Despite the perils, people keep doing it, drawn like moths to a flame: writing sequels and prequels, imagining Jane Austen as a vampire, a sleuth or a con artist who fakes her death at age 41 and runs away, disguised as a man, to start a theater troupe, for which she writes all the plays, that tours the young nation of America. Actually, I made that last bit up. Nobody has written that book, which is not to say nobody ever will.

What makes them (us) do it? I suppose there are as many reasons as there are retellings of “Pride and Prejudice” through Mr. Darcy’s eyes: simple homage, awareness that there is an already created fan base, the same spirit of fun that impelled the teenage Jane Austen to mock the fictional conventions of the late 18th century. Then, too, there is the desire to fill in the unknown bits, and a large element of wish fulfillment. If reading a story is a way to indulge one’s fantasy of being or having what one is not or lacks in real life, then writing one is even more so.

And perhaps the strongest wish of all is to somehow be closer to Jane Austen, to connect with her spirit, her genius. The same spirit animating the women who sew their own Regency outfits and then model them on YouTube videos inspires others, more adept with a keyboard than with a needle, to write fan fiction. Jane Austen Made Me Do It! one can imagine them explaining with a shrug.

And that is the inspired title of something else I read recently, a new anthology of short stories edited and delightfully introduced by Laurel Ann Nattress, who runs Austenprose, one of the best Austen blogs out there. Featuring some big names in Jane Austen fan fiction (as well as some exciting work by newcomers), JAMMDI offers an excellent tour of the promises and pitfalls of this kind of fiction, in 22 stories running the gamut of Jane Austen reaction.

Of the 22, 11 are set more or less in our own time, with the others set in Jane Austen’s. Five have Jane Austen as a character, while two have Jane Austen as a ghost. Five of the Austen-era ones set out to fill in perceived narrative gaps in the novels: “Waiting,” by Jane Odiwe, imagines a scene only hinted at in “Persuasion,” when Captain Wentworth comes to seek formal permission from her father to marry Anne Elliot. Since we know from the novel that worked out without difficulty, though, creating suspense and surprise was something of an uphill battle. “Nothing Less Than Fairy-land,” by Monica Fairview, more promisingly imagines a scene after the marriage of Emma and Mr. Knightley, seeking to answer a question many readers have probably asked themselves: How is that actually going to work, having Mr. Knightley move into the household of the querulous, change-hating Mr. Woodhouse? “Heard of You” by Margaret C. Sullivan amusingly explores how Captain Wentworth’s sister Sophie might have met her husband, the future Admiral Croft, something alluded to but never explained in “Persuasion.”

“Mr. Bennet Meets His Match,” by Amanda Grange, imagines a young Mr. Bennet and his attraction to his future wife. This has some funny moments, but rather like “Waiting,” struck me as a solution in search of a problem. From “Pride and Prejudice” we pretty much already know what brought the Bennets together: sexual attraction on his part; high animal spirits and the disinterested desire for an establishment on hers. In “Letters to Lydia,” Maya Slater retells “Pride and Prejudice” as a series of letters from Charlotte Lucas’s younger sister Maria to the youngest Bennet sister. It shows considerable technical mastery of a certain overheated epistolary style apparently popular with girls of the age, but for some reason I had trouble getting completely engrossed in it. Maybe because I know how “Pride and Prejudice” ends? But that hasn’t stopped me from rereading it many times.

Turning to an imagined Jane Austen, “Jane Austen’s Cat” by Diana Birchall gives us a quiet conversation on a summer afternoon between Jane Austen and three of her favorite nieces. Cute without being precious, both imaginative and factually accurate, this is one of my favorites in the collection.

Another winner is “Jane and the Gentleman Rogue” by Stephanie Barron, whose series of novels imagining Jane Austen as a detective (less absurd than it sounds) accomplishes the rare feat of delivering a similar sort of pleasure that reading Jane Austen does. There is the same sense of wit held in check, of there being a world outside the frame. Her work imaginatively enlarges on the world and the character of Jane Austen without doing violence to the reality of it, which is harder than it looks.

“Jane Austen’s Nightmare,” by Syrie James, in which Jane Austen dreams of her characters coming to life, and for the most part being really annoyed with her, is a witty imagining of Jane Austen’s relation to her own work, marred only by a strange blunder. The premise of the story is that Jane Austen, who has the dream shortly before starting work on “Persuasion,” is inspired by the reproaches of her other heroines to create Anne Elliot, appealing without being too perfect. Yet when most really hateful characters are gathering around their creator with torches and pitchforks, right before she wakes up screaming, several of the malefactors are characters from “Persuasion.” What??

And as for the modern stories… they were a mixed lot, but I can write no more right now, being already over budget and way past deadline. This review will have To Be Continued.

Language is a cracked kettle on which we beat out tunes for bears to dance to, while all the time we long to move the stars to pity. –Gustave Flaubert

So my novel was workshopped. I was horribly nervous the whole day waiting to go the workshop at 8 p.m., like I was waiting for my own execution. But I needn’t have worried. My colleagues and instructor were enthusiastic in their praise; specific and constructive in their criticism. It gave me a much clearer idea of what wasn’t working and why not. More important, fixing it seemed, at that moment, both possible and completely worth the effort. It was an exciting few hours.

And now I have to actually do it. When I sat to revise Chapter 1 — that was when Flaubert and his troupe of dancing bears entered my mind; not only entered but sat down and made themselves at home. What a horribly blunt instrument language is, how inadequate to our supposedly profound ideas! That Flaubert came up with such an unforgettable metaphor for this inadequacy does nothing to diminish the truth of his observation.

Everything is there; I see it now, what needs to be there: sharper, deeper, truthier. But how to get it out?

The most important might also seem the most obvious. Writing a novel takes a lot of time. If you have other commitments, like children and/or an outside job, writing a novel is something you can do in your spare time only if you are willing to ruthlessly refrain from (or at least drastically reduce the frequency of) doing many other things in your spare time, things people often consider normal and desirable, even indispensable: seeing your friends, watching your television shows, exercising, going to the movies or to a museum, keeping your home reasonably clean, volunteering, attending worship services, studying a foreign language, managing your finances, spending a weekend at the beach, surfing the Internet, having people over for dinner, even reading other people’s novels. Such activities become the enemy, for however different they seem, they have one thing in common: they are not writing. When you are doing them you are not writing.

I was extraordinarily slow to grasp this. It puzzled and irked me that I could not seem to “find the time to write,” even though I supposedly wanted to write a novel, had an idea, a plan, an outline. I made up complicated psychological explanations about writer’s block, but the real answer was in front of my eyes. There are only so many hours in a day, and many of them are spent on sleep and other unavoidable things. And particularly in the early stages, the writing seemed far less real and vital than all those other things I was used to doing, and it was hard to put it first. It was just a bunch of thoughts in my head; nothing very clear. It seemed natural to wait until I had some other stuff out of the way — until the apartment was clean, until I had had lunch with the friend I had been meaning to have lunch with since February. Then, then, then, I could really concentrate!

But finally I began to understand that it doesn’t work like that, because however much stuff you get out of the way, new stuff shows up to take its place, until you either give up and don’t write the novel, or something changes in your mind and you do.

Another big problem I had, once I had started to accumulate words, was with seeing the thing as a whole. This seemed an immense challenge, because when you are writing one part you can’t remember just what you wrote 100 pages back — was that servant named Thomas, or Richard? Was that inn the Bull, the Swan, or the Crown? Nor do you want to: you want to keep going forward, not messing around with what happened 100 pages back.

And it wasn’t only small things like that, can be easily fixed with search and replace, but larger questions about the tone and the voice and the arc of the story. Is there an arc, or even a story? Or is it just a random collection of scenes? Is one thing really leading to another? It’s strange how hard to say this is, and I think it that has to do with the fact that you are both writing and reading — in effect, as the writer you are the first person to read your novel, but writing is much slower than reading. You do actually forget as you go along, and this is natural, for it is happening over months.

To my surprise this problem eventually took care of itself, but only once I had made the mental shift to totally immerse myself into the novel, to let the rest of the world go on with whatever it was doing, without me. Retyping all 150,000 words and revising as I went did it for me. Then going through it and chopping 11,000 words out. I see the thing as a whole now; what it cost me was time. Again, it comes back to that.

Three, you have to be writing the book you want to read. There is nothing else that can keep you going through the slog, unless you are lot more self-disciplined than most people. If this book already existed, there would be no need to write it; you could just read it (always assuming you could find it). If someone else could write it, you should let them. When I got the idea, about 3 a.m., almost four years ago, in a burst of insomnia-fueled inspiration, about an Austen-loving physician who travels back in time with the wish to find out what really happened and to maybe save JA from premature death, my first thought was, damn, I would love to read that book!

I am still thinking that.

I consulted the Internet for recommended copy shops in my neighborhood and set out to Remsen Graphics with my thumb drive. “I have a 360-page document,” I told the man there, who seemed more cheerful than was appropriate to a hot summer Monday morning in the copy shop. “I need five copies. Double-sided. Is that possible?”
“Of course! No problem! Come back in an hour or so.” He took my thumb drive and information about the file. He did not take my name or my money, nor did he write down any of the information I had just imparted. Feeling a bit uneasy about this and hoping the shop would get it right, I went away.

My fears were groundless. When I returned, the copy job was waiting for me, was just as requested, and the price was reasonable. The copies were given to me all in one big box, the thin kind of non-corrugated cardboard like bakeries put cakes in. I had wondered how big the product would turn out to be, had debated which of my reusable shopping bags would be the best size and shape to bring, but as it turned out I chose right. I paid and loaded the box into the bag and lifted the bag onto my shoulder and walked back out into the hot summer morning. The package was sharp-edged, and much heavier than a cake, and it was as I were carrying the weight of the product of my own mind, my own thoughts, home with me.