Acknowledgments

I owe many people more than I can say.

Thanks to my daughter, Shannon, who not only read and advised, but also did all my skydiving for me.

Thanks to Kelly Link and Gavin Grant, who each looked over the emerging manuscript more often than any friend should have to, always with encouragement, and always with smart, smart advice.

Thanks to Sean Stewart and Joy Johannessen for their enormous help on the home stretch.

Thanks to Susie Dyer and Catherine Hanson-Tracy, each so generous with her time and expertise.

Thanks to Christopher Rowe for the book’s invisible vampires.

Thanks to Christien Gholson for a stolen image, to Dean Karnhopp for a stolen anecdote.

Thanks to the MacDowell Colony and also the Davis Crêpe Bistro for time, space, and really good food.

Thanks as always to Marian Wood and Wendy Weil for so many things over so many years.

And special thanks to the incomparable Anna Jardine.

Everyone has a private Austen. Mine is the Austen who showed her work to her friends and family and took such obvious pleasure in their responses. Thanks most of all to her, then, for those renewable, rereadable, endlessly fascinating books and everything that’s been written about them.