WRITING JANE AUSTEN

Georgina Jackson is an American novelist and English lit scholar living in London who has never read Jane Austen and doesn’t wish to. Completely unqualified, she is forced by her monster agent to accept a lucrative contract to complete a long-lost Austen manuscript. Now if you believe one word of that setup, please contact me at once about a large bridge I’d like to sell you. The plot, both unbelievable and infuriating, cannot lead to any ending except the one the author has in mind, and the writing is padded and repetitive. Chick-lit should at least make sense. There are charming characters here, but almost all of them except Georgina are English, and Julia Whelan’s English accents are painful, though her Poles aren’t too bad. While a creative narration can sometimes improve a less-than-stellar text, that simply doesn’t happen in this production. B.G. © AudioFile 2010, Portland, Maine [Published: JULY 2010]