“If you have ever found sustenance in a Jane Austen novel—or sought meaning in your own life through the power of books—this is the novel you’ve been waiting for.”—Kristin Harmel
“An absolute winner.”—Fiona Davis
Austen at Sea
Coming in 2025, the 250th anniversary of the year of Jane Austen’s birth…AUSTEN AT SEA, the next historical fiction from Natalie Jenner!
With thanks to Sally Dunne for the stunning artwork www.sallyillustrates.com
From the bestselling author of The Jane Austen Society comes a new novel about Austen's fans set in 1865 Boston and Hampshire.
In Austen at Sea, Henrietta and Charlotte Stevenson, the only children of a widowed Massachusetts supreme court judge, are desperate to experience freedom of any kind, at a time when young unmarried women are kept largely at home. Striking up a correspondence with Jane Austen's last surviving sibling, ninety-one-year-old retired admiral Sir Francis Austen, the two sisters invite themselves to visit and end up sneaking on board the S. S. China, a transatlantic mail packet steamship heading to Portsmouth.
They are joined on the China by a motley crew of fellow Americans including a reluctant chaperone, two Philadelphia rare book dealer brothers secretly also sailing at Admiral Austen's request, a young senator's daughter and socialite in hot pursuit of the brothers, and Louisa May Alcott, traveling to Europe for the first time as an invalid's companion. Alcott will end up leading the other women on board ship in a charity performance of vignettes from Charles Dickens's latest novel A Tale of Two Cities, and hilarity ensues when the men petition to join.
Landing in Portsmouth, the American visitors soon learn Sir Francis's real purpose in receiving them, and the battle begins over a piece of Austen's legacy so controversial, it will result in historic and climactic court cases on both sides of the Atlantic. Jenner's trademark large cast of characters this time includes a theatre impresario, a newspaperman, a street waif, suffragists and Boston bluestockings, a fortune teller, a disgruntled divorce court judge, and the entire bench of the Massachusetts state supreme court. Releasing in the 250th year since Jane Austen's birth, Austen at Sea is a celebration of literature and the lengths we will go to, to protect who and what we love.
