Insofar as any actual people, places, or things occur in Second Impressions, it has been of paramount importance to write what I believe to be historically, socially, factually, and legally correct for Jane Austen’s time. I have read Blackstone and Staves, Pope and Harris, Darwin (Erasmus) and Tomalin, Johnson (Samuel) and Wikipedia, and twenty-six years’ reading of relevant materials produced between the centuries that separate them. I have tried to understand and write within Austen’s context and her idiom. I have tried to reconstruct a place and time for the Darcys, Fitzwilliams, Wickhams, &c., to continue being themselves. No sane person would aspire to be Austen’s equal—all I wish for my effort, (it is not a very enviable one; you need not covet it), is to be a pale shade in the distant glow of that star. There are no references, no glossary, no illustrations, and no video; Jane worked without such aides à la compréhension. To what extent I have captured the taste, smell, complacency, security, and questions of her time is not a performance I may decide.

P.S. To those of you about to barrage the website with complaints of punctuation, capitalisation, spelling, the frequent use of the dash, and the ubiquitous comma—now largely forsaken by our collective need to save, perhaps, on virtual ink—this is an effort to plausibly reconstruct the fictional places and people of Jane Austen’s novels. Austen used the English language—much like Turner used his brush—sparingly, precisely, intentionally. Language to Austen was a tool, an art form, and a medium, not an artifact of a rigidly defined set of rules. She was concerned with the images she was forming in the reader’s mind, not with how those readers might dissect her sentences and pass judgement on their structure. My wonderful editor, Robert Lesman, notwithstanding, I believe she split infinitives, misspelt and inconsistently spellt, and lacked parallel structure without concern. She blithely put punctuation where she wanted to indicate, like a composer uses rests in a musical score, the cadence of her narrative and dialogue. If you disagree with my choices for spellings, italics, punctuation, the rampant substitutions for “s” instead of “z”, unnecessary insertion of “u” and a second “l”, more commas than in the entirety of Hemmingway’s oeuvre, &c., you are not alone. There was no way to do this without controversy (now, is that kon-truh-vur-see or Brit. also kuhn-trōv-er-see?); some of today’s most justly celebrated scholars of the long eighteenth century are in violent disagreement amongst themselves on precisely these points, so we are in very respectable company.

I pray, instead, that you have read this offering for pleasure and with pleasure, finding humor, a little peace, and some escape from the world as we know it.