THE JANE AUSTEN PROJECT

Rachel Katzman and Liam Finucane travel back in time to meet Jane Austen and her circle, purloin a rumored unpublished manuscript, and, maybe, keep the author alive and writing beyond her brief 42 years. Saskia Maarleveld masterfully crafts distinct voices for a huge cast of characters, male and female, though occasionally, as conversations among multiple characters take place, attributions are appreciated. Rachel herself, the narrator, is the weakest link; she speaks with a distracting forced low-register voice, which is out of character for a highly educated and well-traveled person. Also, there are some mispronunciations, and they are not of specialized nineteenth-century words. "Claret," for example, is sometimes pronounced correctly, other times with the emphasis on the second syllable. Minor issues aside, Maarleveld succeeds in drawing the listener into an engaging time-travel yarn featuring an enduring writer. C.M.A. © AudioFile 2017, Portland, Maine [Published: JUNE 2017]