Courtney Stone finds her fianceé flirting with their woman
is to make the cake for their wedding. She goes to bed
with a bottle of Absolut and her favorite Jane Austen
novel. When she wakes up, she isn't in LA anymore nor even
in her own body. She wakes up in the early 19th century
being treated by a man who wants to bleed her. She is
addressed as Miss Mansfield and discovers her body is
totally different. How did she become Miss Jane
Mansfield?
Courtney learns that her mother, Mrs. Mansfield is an
uncaring witch whose only concern is that her daughter
contract an eligible marriage. As Courtney interacts with
others, she starts having memories of a life that goes with
the body she occupies. Mr. Edgeworth and his sister, in
particular, stimulate this flow of memories.
The longer she spends in Regency England, the more she
begings to indentify with the life. As she and Mr.
Edgeworth resolve the difficulties that caused a break in
their relationship, Courtney finds herself transported back
to her own time.
There was much about this novel that I enjoyed. The time
travel, the unfamiliarity of living in another's body and
the confusion that results from living in the past. The
behavior of the parents of Jane and her relationship with
them was moving.
The part that left me wanting more was the fact that we see
the resolution to the relationship with Jane and Mr.
Edgeworth but nothing that happened to Courtney upon her
return to her own time and place. I would have liked to
have seen more of her feelings after such a shock. In
addition, it would have been nice to have been privy to
Jane's reactions to being precipitately being thrown into
the future. Upon finishing the book, I was left wanting to
know a lot more than we were given.
In this Jane Austen-inspired comedy, love story, and
exploration of identity and destiny, a modern LA girl wakes
up as an Englishwoman in Austen's time.
After nursing a broken engagement with Jane Austen novels
and Absolut, Courtney Stone wakes up and finds herself not
in her Los Angeles bedroom or even in her own body, but
inside the bedchamber of a woman in Regency England. Who but
an Austen addict like herself could concoct such a fantasy?
Not only is Courtney stuck in another woman's life, she is
forced to pretend she actually is that woman; and despite
knowing nothing about her, she manages to fool even the most
astute observer. But not even her love of Jane Austen has
prepared Courtney for the chamber pots and filthy coaching
inns of nineteenth-century England, let alone the realities
of being a single woman who must fend off suffocating
chaperones, condomless seducers, and marriages of
convenience. Enter the enigmatic Mr. Edgeworth, who fills
Courtney's borrowed brain with confusing memories that are
clearly not her own.
Try as she might to control her mind and find a way home,
Courtney cannot deny that she is becoming this other
woman-and being this other woman is not without its
advantages: Especially in a looking-glass Austen world.
Especially with a suitor who may not turn out to be a
familiar species of philanderer after all.
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