Sara Waters - Dancing with Mr Darcy - Stories Inspired by Jane Austen

Stephanie Shieldswas brought up in the Midlands but has spent all of her adult life in the north of England, where she has combined sheep farming with a career in further education. She has written poetry since childhood, but short fiction is a more recent development. Having had some early publication of her poetry in the 1970s, she has continued as a covert writer. She is a member of the Otley Courthouse Writers, based in the market town of Otley, West Yorkshire.

Elsa A. Solender,a New Yorker, was president of the Jane Austen Society of North America from 1996-2000. Educated at Barnard College and the University of Chicago, she has worked as a journalist, editor, and college teacher in Chicago, Baltimore and New York. She represented an international non-governmental women’s organisation at the United Nations during a six-year residency in Geneva. She has published articles and reviews in a wide variety of American magazines and newspapers, but ‘Second Thoughts’ is her first published story. She has been married for 49 years, has two married sons and seven grandchildren.

Hilary Spierslives in Stamford, Lincolnshire, works in adolescent health policy part-time and writes every day, when time and life permit. She has won a number of national writing competitions, been published in several anthologies and had some of her stories broadcast on the radio. Her abiding passion remains playwriting, for stage and radio. Her play Hoovering on the Edge was staged by Shoestring Theatre in September 2009 and she has had work performed at London’s Hampstead Theatre and the Oundle Literature Festival. While collecting rejection letters, she acts in and directs other writers’ plays.

Stephanie Tillotsonjoined the BBC in 1989 and worked in television and radio for many years, at length crossing to the independent sector in Wales. For the past ten years she has been writing, directing and performing for the theatre. Originally from Gilwern near Abergavenny, she now lives in Aberystwyth, where she has been teaching in the Department of Theatre, Film and Television Studies at the university. At present she is editing a book of short stories for Honno called Cut on the Bias, a collection of fictional writing about women’s relationship to clothes and image.

Andrea Watsmorewas born in the London/Essex borders in 1966, has four children and a Fine Art degree from Chelsea School of Art. This has led to a number of opportunities including usherette, engineer, tote operator, teacher, shop girl, bag lady and artist.

She has always written, whether in paintings or on lonely walls. Now she generally limits it to a spiral-bound notebook and laptop. ‘Bina’ is her first published story.

Sarah Waterswas born in Pembrokeshire. She has won a Betty Trask Award, the Somerset Maugham Award and was twice shortlisted for the Mail On Sunday / John Llewellyn Rhys Prize. Fingersmith and The Night Watch were both shortlisted for the Man Booker and Orange Prizes, and Fingersmith won the CWA Ellis Peters Dagger Award for Historical Crime Fiction and the South Bank Show Award for Literature. Tipping the Velvet, Affinity and Fingersmith have all been adapted for television. Her latest novel The Little Stranger, was published by Virago in 2009. She lives in London.

Lindsay Ashfordis a former BBC journalist and the author of four published crime novels. Her second, Strange Blood, was shortlisted for the Theakston’s Old Peculier Crime Novel of the Year Award. She has had short stories published and broadcast on BBC Radio 4 and has edited two collections of short fiction and prose for Honno: Written In Blood and Strange Days Indeed. She splits her time between a home on the Welsh coast and Chawton House, where she is a PR consultant.

Mary Hammondstarted her career writing historical novels for an American book packager in the early 1980s. She is now Senior Lecturer in Nineteenth-Century Literature at the University of Southampton, specialising in book history, and convenor for Southampton’s MA in Creative Writing. She is the author of numerous books and articles on the print culture of Victorian Britain and has also written on contemporary creative writing.

Rebecca Smithis the five-times great niece of Jane Austen (descended from Jane’s brother Frances, through his daughter Catherine Ann, who was born at Chawton House). She is a Teaching Fellow in Creative Writing at Southampton University. Her first novel, The Bluebird Café, was published by Bloomsbury in 2001. Other novels are Happy Birthday and All That (Bloomsbury 2003) and A Bit Of Earth (Bloomsbury 2006).

Janet Thomasis a freelance editor, living in Aberystwyth. She has edited a wide range of books, including four short-story anthologies for Honno: Catwomen from Hell, The Woman Who Loved Cucumbers, Mirror Mirror and Safe World Gone, which were co-edited with Patricia Duncker. She has published short stories and her children’s picture book Can I Play? (Egmont) won a Practical PreSchool gold award.

Two hundred years ago Jane Austen made a momentous journey. On a July day in 1809 she set out from Southampton at the invitation of her brother, Edward. He had inherited the Manor of Chawton after being adopted by a wealthy, childless couple and had offered her a new home on his estate. On taking up residence there with her mother and sister, Jane did something she had felt unable to do for a very long time: she took up her pen and began working on a novel.

Her arrival in the Hampshire village marked the start of what was to be the most productive period of her literary life. Jane had begun writing many years earlier when her father was the vicar of Steventon. She had produced draft versions of three of her novels – including the manuscript that would eventually become Pride and Prejudice -before she reached the age of 25. But her father’s sudden decision to retire and go to live in Bath greatly upset his daughter. Leaving the house where she had been born and seeing her father’s extensive book collection sold off, along with many other family possessions, plunged her into depression and effectively disabled her as a writer.

The following decade was spent moving from one rented house to another, first in Bath and later – following her father’s death – in Southampton. During this period the prolific output of fiction she had produced during the 1790s came to a grinding halt. It was only when her brother Edward offered her a permanent home in what had been the Bailiff’s cottage on the Chawton estate that she found the peace and security she needed to flourish as a writer.

Sense and Sensibility, Pride and Prejudice, Emma and Mansfield Park were all published while she lived in the village. Northanger Abbey and Persuasion were published posthumously after her death at the age of just 41.

So the Great House, as Edward’s Elizabethan mansion was known then, was inextricably linked with Jane Austen’s destiny. Her brother provided an environment in which she could thrive and in those last fruitful years she would often make the short walk from her cottage to the grand building that rose above the parish church of Saint Nicholas.

Chawton House had a fine library that was an undoubted attraction to Jane. The house was also the setting for many Austen family gatherings: ‘…we four sweet Brothers and Sisters dine today at the Gt House. Is that not quite natural?’ she wrote to her friend, Anna Lefroy.