You know I just love a good Jane Austen variation, so I couldn’t resist Jane in Love by Rachel Givney. When a matchmaker promises Jane Austen a spell to bring her to her one true love, Jane finds herself in Bath in 2020, well, in an alternate 2020 with large crowds, active movie filming, and open businesses. (At one point, Jane asks if the current 6-month drought is the apocalypse, and I longed for an alternate history where that was what we’d worry about in 2020.) As she wanders around, her period clothes and speech just make her seem like another Janeite visiting Bath, an adorable twist.
The sharp wit and developed characters keep me rereading Jane Austen novels, so I was slightly disappointed by this version of Jane as a bewildered time-traveler. For large parts of the novel, she’s much more acted-upon than active, and she spends far too long playing with electric lights or self-inking pens. Constantly noting that people spend a lot of time on their mysterious talking boxes made her seem like a boomer bemoaning technology.
As Jane stays in 2020, though, her disappearance from 1803 affects the timeline, and her books start popping out of existence. This may be one of my favorite kinds of wibbly-wobbly timey-wimey stories. This is bad news for Jane’s legacy, obviously, but also bad news for Sofia, Jane’s friend in 2020, since she’s hoping to make her acting comeback in a Northanger Abbey movie. I thought Sofia’s worries about being sidelined as an over-thirty actress nicely mirrored Jane’s struggles as an almost-thirty spinster.
The very heavy choice of work vs love didn’t really work for me. I did like love-interest Fred a lot, especially the scenes of him as a teacher, but Jane’s decisions didn’t pull me in with tragedy, because the choices were to hang around 2020, cooking dinners for her love, or to return to 1803 and become a successful author. It felt a bit too heavy to be sympathetic and intriguing.
Not a huge win for me, although I really enjoyed the scenes visiting modern Bath with time-traveling Jane.
Jane In Love will be released on October 27, 2020 by William Morrow. Thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for the ARC.