It seems that Jane Austen was always in my house. My father, now retired, was an English Professor at Wake Forest University for the first forty years of my life, and his specialty was the eighteenth century. True, Jane Austen’s novels were not published until the early nineteenth century, but her work was very much a part of his syllabus and he often talked about her.
Writing Jane Austen
A few months before my first novel with a major publisher came out, I was having lunch with three other writers, two of whom had written historical novels. Melanie Benjamin is the author of Alice I Have Been and The Aviator’s Wife and Erika Robuck is the author of Call Me Zelda and Hemingway’s Girl. My book, The Bookman’s Tale, like books by Melanie and Erika, features historical figures as characters—particularly William Shakespeare. Not surprisingly we fell into a conversation about writing real people as characters in works of fiction.