Austenland (Austenland #1)

Prologue

It is a truth universally acknowledged that a thirtysome-thing woman in possession of a stable career and fabulous hairdo must not be in want of anything, and Jane Hayes, pretty enough and clever enough, was certainly thought to have little to distress her.

There was no husband, but those weren’t necessary anymore.

There were boyfriends, and if they came and went in a regular stream of mutual dissatisfaction—well, that was the way of things, wasn’t it?

But Jane had a secret. By day, she bustled and emailed and overtimed and just-in-timed, but sometimes, when she had the time to slip off her consignment-store heels and lounge on her hand-me-down sofa, she dimmed the lights and acknowledged what was missing.

Sometimes, she watched Pride and Prejudice.

While Jane relished the myriad adaptations, the first one she’d encountered had immediately stolen her heart—the six-hour BBC version, starring Colin Firth as the delicious Mr. Darcy and that comely, hazel-eyed actress as the Elizabeth Bennet we had imagined all along.

Jane couldn’t risk the series disappearing from streaming services, so she bought the DVDs and kept disc two permanently cued up in her ancient duo-TV-and–DVD player.

She watched and rewatched the part where Elizabeth and Mr. Darcy look at each other over the piano, and there’s that zing, and her face softens, and he smiles, his chest heaving as though he’d breathe in the sight of her, and his eyes are glistening so that you’d almost think he’d cry . . . Ah!

Each time, Jane’s heart banged, her skin chilled, and she clamped down on the distracting ache in her gut with a bowl of something naughty, like Fruity Pebbles.

At night she would dream of gentlemen in Abraham Lincoln hats, and then in the morning laugh at herself and toy with the idea of donating her DVDs to the secondhand store, as well as her collection of Austen books and Regency-era memorabilia.

Of course, she never did.

The pesky film versions were the culprit.

Sure, Jane had first read Pride and Prejudice at the precocious age of ten and reread it a dozen times since.

But as soon as she consumed the mini-series, those gentlemen in tight breeches had stepped out of her reader’s imagination and into her nonfiction hopes.

Stripped of Austen’s funny and insightful narrator, the movie became pure romance.

And Pride and Prejudice was the most stunning, bite-your-hand romance ever, the kind that stared straight into Jane’s soul and made her shudder.

It was embarrassing. She didn’t want to talk about it. So let’s move on.