Jane Austen famously wrote, “I could not sit seriously down to write a serious romance under any other motive than to save my life; and if it were indispensable for me to keep it up and never relax into laughing at myself or other people, I am sure I should be hung before I had finished the first chapter.” This is the Jane Austen whose writing and example taught and inspired me to become a biographer, essayist, and writer of Austen-inspired fiction.

I have always been more interested in Austen’s style and humor than in the romantic aspect of her work, and have therefore been drawn to her grotesque, villainous and comic characters. It was these characters who opened my mind to my own process of analysis, which has led to a writing style I refer to as writing pastiche.

As a young person, I aspired modestly to write like some combination of Jane Austen, Charlotte Brontë, and Nancy Mitford. By five and twenty, I had sensibly adjusted my expectations but considered that at least it would be of benefit to study the best writing mistress under the sun. Accordingly, I gave many happy years to pondering Austen’s every sentence, like an artisan taking apart a prodigious Renaissance clock to see what made the golden boats and towers revolve so enchantingly.

A study may not be profitable in the way one expects but succeed in another. I never became a great writer, or even a commercial one; for one thing my interest was ill-timed, commencing long before the Jane Austen popularity boom. However, I was able, before the speeded-up internet age, to leisurely admire the exquisite Johnsonian balance of her sentences; the skill of concealment and revelation in plot; and most of all, what I had been attracted to in the first place: her supreme genius as a humorist. Her study of human nature invites us to laugh with her at its “follies and nonsense, whims and inconsistencies” (PP 57). This was such an integral part of her that she had to teach herself to tone it down in her writing, from the young girl who wrote truly outrageous comedy, to the mature artist who taught herself not to be “a person whose first object in life is a joke” (PP 57).