By Nancy Moser, Bethany House, 2007, ISBN: 0-7642-0356-8
As JASNA National member Nancy Moser researched Just Jane, she found . . . a friend. She met a fellow fiction author who was “witty, wise, discerning, creative, and loyal” as well as “stubborn, judgmental, insecure, and needy.” A Jane Austen who is “a lot like us.”
Just Jane is fictional biography. Moser worked hard to present Jane accurately, though warning readers she used creative guesswork to flesh out, explain, and add immediacy to the action. Moser, daringly, writes in the first person. In its defense, the first-person present-tense approach confronted me with Jane’s emotions during critical events in her life—being dispossessed of all that was “home” in Steventon; weathering painful courtships, living with guilt and disregard as an unmarried dependent, enduring years of writer’s block and a manuscript languishing in a publisher’s storeroom.