Author’s Note

THE CHARACTERS OF Jane and Cassandra Austen, their parents, brothers, and their niece Anna are all based on historical figures. The basic facts of Jane Austen’s life—her family relationships, where she lived, and when she wrote and revised her novels—are essentially as presented in the novel. Jane and her sister did spend a year in Oxford and Southampton under the tutelage of Mrs. Ann Crawley and attended the Reading Ladies’ Boarding School from 1785 to 1786. Jane did travel to Kent in September 1796. Little Anna Austen, at the age of four and a half, “was a very intelligent, quick-witted child, and, hearing the original draft of Pride and Prejudice read aloud by its youthful writer to her sister, she caught up the names of the characters and repeated them so much downstairs that she had to be checked; for the composition of the story was still a secret kept from the knowledge of the elders.” I am grateful to Jane Austen: Her Life and Letters, a Family Record, by William Austen-Leigh and Richard Arthur Austen-Leigh, for this information.

The original version of Sense and Sensibility, titled Elinor and Marianne, was an epistolary novel, and some have suggested that First Impressions (which later became Pride and Prejudice) may have been so as well. The letters in my fictional version of First Impressions rely heavily on Jane Austen’s language from Pride and Prejudice. The letter Jane writes to Mr. Mansfield, but never sends, from Bath includes an account of a ball very similar to one in Northanger Abbey. The text of the letter from George Austen to Thomas Cadell is from the original.

Busbury Park and Richard Mansfield are completely fictional. The summaries and excerpts from his work A Little Book of Allegorical Stories are taken from an anonymous book of 1797: The Selector: Being a New and Chaste Collection of Visions, Tales, and Allegories, Calculated for the Amusement and Instruction of the Rising Generation. All the titles of Mansfield’s allegories are taken from this work, except for “General Depravity of Mankind,” which is a chapter title in Mary Martha Sherwood’s didactic children’s book, The Fairchild Family (published between 1818 and 1847).

There was, in fact, a printer in Leeds named Griffith Wright who published the Leeds Intelligencer, and his son Thomas did take over the business in 1784. The text of the article about penalties for using fireworks is taken from the Leeds Intelligencer, November 7, 1796. The character of Gilbert Monkhouse is entirely fictional.