When I first read Austen in middle school, I often dreamed of those stories as my own. Me, with Lizzie Bennet’s fearlessly opinionated spirit. Me, with Anne Elliot’s undying love. Me, with Elinor Dashwood’s strength to always do the right thing. Me, with Emma Woodhouse’s popularity, confidence, and need to set everyone else’s life to rights. All of it in my world with my parents and friends, in my city, and with my challenges. The very beginning of learning to tell stories comes from internalizing the storytelling of others. I didn’t know it, but my dreams were cultural translations. They were retellings, although that word was not yet in my vocabulary. As I got older, I found these women inside myself, aspired to them, accepted them as part of me. As I wrote more and studied my craft, I also started to realize that the true genius of Jane Austen lay in how clearly she saw her world, how she never hid from the absurdity of it, and how she pushed at its rules without ever breaking them outright. She was a master class in subversion.

Even though the specifics of our worlds and what was ridiculous about them was different, the heart of that absurdity was still the same. So much so that it defied the fact that two hundred years had passed. Maybe that’s why they call it the human condition. And maybe that’s why all these years later, authors like me still feel the need to take those stories apart and find something inside them that speaks to us so very resolutely.

Marrying off daughters is not quite the do-or-die situation it used to be when Pride and Prejudice was written. But social class still causes us to meet each other from behind the curtain of our prejudices. Titles and their trappings are no longer the obvious dividing lines they were in Persuasion. But being persuaded into giving up on dreams because those around us deem them beneath us is still part of the journey for anyone who steps out of the bubbles they were born into. Breaking an engagement no longer costs us our self-respect and social standing. But getting stuck in situations where we’re held ransom by the ambitions of those around us—and gathering the courage to identify and chase the parts that are ours to want—that’s just as true today as it was in the time of Sense and Sensibility. These were the pieces that spoke to me, the paths that the Rajes organically called me to walk.