Time Travel, By A Lady
We heard from Leslie Carroll, the author of upcoming Austen paraliterature about which we posted previously. Ms. Carroll said that the book will now be called By a Lady: Being the Adventures of An Enlightened American in Jane Austen’s England and will be published under the pen name she uses for her historical fiction, Amanda Elyot. The book will be released in the spring of 2006.
As posted previously, the book is about an actress portraying Jane Austen in a stage play who travels back in time to meet the author.
An earlier incarnation of part of the book was published on USAToday.com, titled Jane Austen Unzipped. “Many elements of the JANE AUSTEN UNZIPPED serialization are not in the final version of the [By A Lady] manuscript that will be published next year,” Ms. Carroll wrote. She also noted that like BECOMING JANE, the Jane Austen biopic currently in preproduction, the book has Jane Austen’s relationship with Tom Lefroy as part of the story.
May 17th, 2005 at 9:54 am
Thanks for the post, Mags. Actually, the anglophilic heroine of BY A LADY, C.J. Welles, ACCIDENTALLY finds herself going back in time, resulting in a series of adventures and misadventures, not all of which are pleasant. Meeting her idol, Jane Austen, is unplanned; the acquaintance is pure serendipity … but it is (as they say in Casablanca) “the beginning of a beautiful friendship.”
May 17th, 2005 at 3:18 pm
Interesting! Hopefully the full version will resolve the many plot teasers in “UNZIPPED”, which were just left hanging.
May 17th, 2005 at 10:17 pm
JANE AUSTEN UNZIPPED was a substantial reworking of the first quarter of the manuscript (as it stood back at the end of 2003 when USAToday commissioned me to write something for their Open Book series.) Word count was incredibly tight for each of the 7 installments — nothing like the good old days when Dickens and Thackeray got lots of ink! So I had to recraft that part of the story, changing the plot for the purposes of the serialization — the entity separate from the full manuscript that was JANE AUSTEN UNZIPPED — making it into a Wizard of Oz kind of premise where C.J.’s focus was directed toward seeing if it was possible to get back home to her own century. The full story of BY A LADY is really very different from the full story of the 7-part JANE AUSTEN UNZIPPED, which ends with C.J.’s attempt to get back into the void that somehow led her to Bath.