My Jane Austen Summer: A Season in Mansfield Park - Paperback

by Cindy Jones (Author)

"When one has read the six great Austen novels...and then reread and then reread the six again, one's only recourse is the company of others equally bereft. Cindy Jones's My Jane Austen Summer fills the gap with a nourishing Austen-soaked setting, a wonderfully surprising plot, and Lily, a delightfully peculiar heroine."
--Karen Joy Fowler, author of The Jane Austen Book Club

Author Cindy Jones has a gift for the millions of readers everywhere who have been enchanted by Pride and Prejudice, Sense and Sensibility, and the other wondrous works of the inimitable Austen--not to mention fans of more contemporary delights such as The Jane Austen Book Club. Jones's My Jane Austen Summer is a delightful, funny, poignant novel in which a contemporary woman--an obsessed Austenphile--learns much about life, love, and herself during one magical summer in England spent re-enacting Jane Austen's Mansfield Park.

Back Jacket

Lily has squeezed herself into undersized relationships all her life, hoping one might grow as large as those found in the Jane Austen novels she loves. But lately her world is running out of places for her to fit. So when her bookish friend invites her to spend the summer at a Jane Austen literary festival in England, she jumps at the chance to reinvent herself.

There, among the rich, promising world of Mansfield Park reenactments, Lily finds people whose longing to live in a novel equals her own. But real-life problems have a way of following you wherever you go, and Lily's accompany her to England. Unless she can change her ways, she could face the fate of so many of Miss Austen's characters, destined to repeat the same mistakes over and over again.

My Jane Austen Summer explores how we fall in love, how we come to know ourselves better, and how it might be possible to change and be happier in the real world.