Confessions of a Jane Austen Addict by Laurie Viera Rigler

Courtney/Jane goes to Bath and then London. Actually, no, the plot is straight forward enough: Courtney/Jane wakes up. I don’t even want to attempt to summarize what happens in this book because I’m not entirely sure what happened. I too thought these same things and I was sorely mistaken. I like Jane Austen so, what the heck!” Don’t be fooled, my friend. The synopsis even makes it sound like it may be fun. So, I bet you thought to yourself, “Hey, this book looks okay. Especially with a suitor who may not turn out to be a familiar species of philanderer after all.” 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. Edgeworth, who fills Courtney’s borrowed brain with confusing memories that are clearly not her own. 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. 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. Who but an Austen addict like herself could concoct such a fantasy? “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. Confessions of a Jane Austen Addict by Laurie Viera Rigler, 293 pages, Penguin Group, 2007.