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Diana Birchall worked for many years as a story analyst for Warner Bros. Studios, reading novels to see if they would make movies. Reading popular manuscripts went side by side with a lifetime of Jane Austen scholarship, and resulted in her writing Austenesque fiction both as homage and as close study of the secret of Jane Austen's style. She is the author of Mrs. Darcy's Dilemma and Mrs. Elton in America, as well as In Defense of Mrs. Elton and hundreds of short stories, many written for the Austen Variations website (http://austenvariations.com/). Her Austenesque comedy plays have been performed in many cities, with "You Are Passionate, Jane," a dialogue between Jane Austen and Charlotte Bronte in Heaven, being presented at Chawton House Library in England.
Diana has also written a scholarly biography of her grandmother, the first Asian American novelist, Onoto Watanna, and has lectured widely about her books at universities including Yale, Columbia, and NYU. Diana grew up in New York City, and now lives in Santa Monica, California, with her poet husband Peter and three cats, Pindar, Martial, and Catullus. Her son Paul is the Catalina Island Librarian.