Happy Monday, friends!! Can you believe how many fantastic new releases we’ve had come out in the last few weeks! 🙌🏼 Many of you have said it has felt like Christmas/your birthday and I quite agree! 🙋🏻‍♀️ And the best thing is….is that there are still many more new releases to look forward to! Like the one by today’s guest – Jennifer Kloester! 

If you are a fan of Georgette Heyer, you may recognize Jennifer Kloester’s in connection with her previous works: a Georgette Heyer biography (Georgette Heyer: Biography of a Bestseller) and her immensely informative guide (Georgette Heyer’s Regency World) – which we thought was phenomenal when we read and reviewed it a few years back. 

We are so excited that Jennifer is writing about Jane Austen now! And this new story of her sounds like it will be a fantastic and fun adventure! 👻

INSPIRED BY CHAWTON – JENNIFER KLOESTER ON JANE AUSTEN’S GHOST

I have loved Jane Austen from my first reading. It was Pride and Prejudice that began it and Persuasion that clinched it. In between those two marvellous novels came Mansfield Park, Sense and Sensibility¸ Emma and Northanger Abbey¸ all of them delightfully different; each of them like a feast to be slowly savoured and returned to again and again. My love of Jane led me to her home in Chawton, not once, but several times. The pretty village where she lived from 1809 until just before her death in 1817 is a Mecca for Austenites because the house she occupied with her mother and her sister Cassandra is still standing, and is now a wonderful museum. Chawton Cottage is now called the Jane Austen’s House Museum and it houses an incredible collection of things that once belonged to Jane and her family – including the desk on which she wrote or revised her six famous novels!

It was Chawton Cottage that inspired part of my own novel, Jane Austen’s Ghost. I was in Jane Austen’s bedroom – yep, her actual bedroom – and trying to take in the fact that she had actually slept here and walked on the very boards I was standing on. She and her beloved sister Cassandra would have spent hours in that space and I could imagine them staying up late talking, getting dressed together, doing each other’s hair and laughing over one of Jane’s pithy comments. I imagined Jane lying awake in bed thinking about what she would write the next day and getting up on a warm summer’s morning and looking out the window over the pretty cottage garden.

It was magical but I wondered what Jane herself would think of her home being turned into a museum? What would she think if she could see the tens of thousands of visitors in her house admiring the wonderful collection of Austenalia, or sighing (as I did) over the handkerchief she had embroidered for Cassandra, or feeling sad at seeing her father’s mourning brooch, or looking in awe at the little table on which she wrote?

\I love knowing that Jane held this fabric and lovingly embroidered these letters for her sister, Cassandra.Jane Austen never achieved fame in her lifetime. That came later – much later. Like Van Gogh, the world did not come to appreciate her genius until long after she was dead. But I wished so much that Jane Austen could have known how admired and appreciated she had become. I wanted her to know that millions of people read and loved her books, that people came from all over the world to see where she had lived and worked. And so I did what so many Austen fans have done: I wrote a novel. Jane Austen’s Ghost brings Jane into our world – the world of 2019 – and lets her cast her wickedly observant eye over it. What changes does she find? And what similarities? And what does she make of the world’s love of her and her novels?

Inspired by her books and by all that I found at Chawton and by her grave and memorial at Winchester Cathedral, I brought Jane Austen back to life (sort of) and the rest is… well, it’s a genre-bending, contemporary historical paranormal romance with a Regency twist!

It’s Jane Austen’s Ghost, and it’s out on October 29. You can pre-order it now. 🙌🏼

~ Jane Austen’s Ghost ~

A masterpiece of wit, ingenuity and impeccable style, Regency maven Jennifer Kloester brings the great Jane Austen into the modern world in this enchanting, exhilarating adventure of love, literature and life everlasting…

With her life a mess, Cassandra Austin seeks refuge in Winchester with her eccentric great-aunt – but Aunty B has problems of her own. Ghost problems.

Cassie doesn’t believe in ghosts but she’ll do anything to help the only person who’s ever loved her. Besides, a simple spell in the cathedral crypt couldn’t do any harm, could it? Well, except for the two-hundred-year-old curse on Jane Austen, that is.

Overnight, life is suddenly a whole lot weirder and it’s up to Cassie to save the day with the help of a dour Bishop, two literary geniuses, a couple of wise-cracking geriatrics and the enigmatic Oliver Carling.

Magic and mystery abound in this genre-bending contemporary-historical paranormal romance with a Regency twist.

~ Connect with Jennifer ~

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~ About Jennifer ~

Jennifer Kloester loves books: reading them, writing them, collecting them. Jennifer was born in Melbourne, Australia but has spent many years in other parts of the globe. She was living in the jungle in Papua New Guinea when she first read Georgette Heyer’s wonderful historical novels and she rediscovered them while living in the Middle East. Those novels inspired Jennifer to write Georgette Heyer’s Regency World and Georgette Heyer: Biography of a Bestseller. Recently she’s written two YA novels, The Cinderella Moment and The Rapunzel Dilemma, both published by Penguin Australia and her next novel, Jane Austen’s Ghost, will be out in 2019.

 

What do you think, friends? 🤔

I wonder what the curse is all about!? 🔮

So fun to think of Jane Austen having a ghost, isn’t it? 👻

I can’t wait to meet Cassandra and Oliver…😍