From the very beginning, Vansh was the essence of Emma. With all her gifts and privileges, but also the blind spots that come with those gifts. To me, Emma was always the story of a woman who had it all and assumed that it made her well equipped to solve the problems of those who had less than her. It is the story of growing into your own empathy. Matchmaking may not be quite the popular pastime it was when Emma strolled the halls of Hartfield with nothing but time on her hands, but the charity of the privileged to solve the problems of the not-so-privileged and all the power play attached to that is more relevant today than it has probably ever been.

As I struggled to let go of this world and these characters that I’ve spent so much time with, a wise writer friend suggested I honor the gifts writing these books gave me.

The greatest gift, of course, was these characters. They let me take the questions Austen’s novels threw at me and undertake the journeys to finding the answers. They made those struggles their own. With each of these stories, I had the burning need to say something, to walk in shoes different from mine. Each of these stories started out a tangled mess with no clear path to where it would all go. Jane’s themes, my themes, my characters, her characters. But there was a beauty and an organic ease to how it all came together in the end. That magic moment when it became wholly my story, when it became its own story—that is something I will cherish forever.

I studied architecture in college, and one of my design professors loved to say that there are no original designs, no original ideas. The most worthwhile designs come from when you start at the point of genius where the masters left off and you build completely honest solutions from there. The art is in knowing how not to be beholden to the masters but to acknowledge their work as a springboard and to become faithful only to what you’re trying to build, what you need to build.

That is the other gift. I wanted to say things about the world we live in. I got to say those things. Jane held my hand and then she let it go. That’s what I honor: her holding my hand, and my learning to let it go. Much the same way her characters held my hand and taught me how to be me. My reward is the fact that I will always have these books, these characters to return to, a vision brought to completion. And the satisfaction that they are exactly what I set out to build, what I needed to build.

Praise for Sonali Dev and the Raje Series!

INCENSE AND SENSIBILITY