Why did you choose Jane Austen’s world as the inspiration for your novel?Ī. Laurie lives in Los Angeles and is a member of the Jane Austen Society of North America. When not indulging herself in rereadings of Jane Austen’s six novels, Laurie Viera Rigler is a freelance book editor who teaches writing workshops, including classes at Vroman’s, Southern California’s oldest and largest independent bookstore. And 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.

Jane austen addict