- Rights sold to Hungary, Czech!
- Astute, clever and well ahead of her time: Jane Austen’s work has been inspiring people all over the world for generations

“There is a stubbornness about me that never can bear to be frightened at the will of others. My courage always rises at every attempt to intimidate me.” Jane Austen in Pride and Prejudice

The book starts in Steventon, December 1795: It is almost quiet in the Austen house as the year draws to a close. Twenty-year-old Jane especially misses her sister Cass, who is spending the holidays with her fiancé. Jane, on the other hand, wants nothing less than that: to marry. She'd rather be dancing at balls all over Hampshire or sitting at her writing desk, putting down on paper all the stories and characters that run through her head day and night. But no matter how much her family supports her, no publisher is interested in her writing. Wouldn't it be more sensible to find a husband? But even when her heart unexpectedly beats faster when she meets the charismatic student Tom Lefroy, luck does not seem to be on her side. Jane, however, is not discouraged in her search for self-determination and freedom. Because there is one thing she desperately wants: to publish a novel.

The book continues telling her life until 1815, when Jane Austen already is an accomplished author with three published novels and the Prince of Wales sends an messenger to ask her to dedicate her next novel to him… A question which puts her into a major dilemma.

Catherine Bell
is the pseudonym of the author and journalist Kerstin Sgonina. She has loved Jane Austen ever since she devoured her complete works while pregnant with her twins in the early summer heat on a Berlin balcony, oblivious to the stuffy air, the rattle of the underground and the passing traffic. Today she lives with her family in Brandenburg and tries to wrest an English cottage garden from the soil there every year - with modest success.