Several solid biographies of Austen are available, but Claire Tomalin’s Jane Austen: A Life (1997) remains a gold standard for many. I also highly recommend Carol Shields’s treatment, Jane Austen (2001), as a short but nuanced introductory biography. And although it is strictly speaking a novel, Fay Weldon’s Letters to Alice: On First Reading Jane Austen (1984) makes for a delightful read, both for its subject and the treatment. Inspired by Austen’s own letters to her niece, this book makes the case for reading Austen in contemporary times.

I believe the most impressive Pride and Prejudice sequel or ‘view from below’ so far is Jo Baker’s Longbourn (2013), and I am indebted to this work for the way it helped me to think about my own novel. As a South African and a product of colonial history, I am concerned with who gets to speak and who does not, even in fiction, and as a feminist, I am most interested in those truths ‘told slant’, to use the poet Emily Dickinson’s words. I found that Longbourn challenged and stimulated me to think about the world of Pride and Prejudice in new and subversive ways.

Although I once lived in Britain, and have made pilgrimages to every possible Austen site, it was necessary to immerse myself in works on the English countryside, garden design, and history to gain a sense of the world in which Charlotte might have walked. I read numerous books on gardens and gardening, but found Katherine Swift’s The Morville Hours: The Story of a Garden (2008) and The Morville Year (2012) invaluable for giving me a sense of the way the seasons unfold in an English rural setting. Likewise, Adam Nicolson’s Sissinghurst: An Unfinished Story (2008) helped me to imagine rural Kent as Charlotte might have experienced it.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Never has writing a book been a less lonely experience. In writing the story of Charlotte Lucas, I’ve had the support of the proverbial cast of thousands. Writing these acknowledgements has been an opportunity to remember, with fondness and great gratitude, all those who helped me get here.

Having been a Jane Austen fan for over three decades, I am indebted to those lecturers who taught me her novels, and all the students and other groups to whom I’ve in turn taught Austen. I’ve given public lectures on Austen at home and abroad, so thanks to all those who attended and asked amusing and pertinent questions, especially the lively gang at the University of Alaska, Fairbanks. Jeanne Heywood, who taught Pride and Prejudice at the University of Cape Town, was the first to draw my attention to Charlotte Lucas’s resourcefulness and courage, thus planting this seed. To those who helped me write my Honours thesis on ‘Feminism in the Novels of Jane Austen’ many moons ago: a few lines from it live on in these pages.