Flynn’s novel a delightful exploration

from Jamaica.

Rachel and Liam — that is, Mary and William — surreptitiously land in a field surrounded by birch and hedgerow. Although their training has prepared them for the speech, manners and other peculiarities of the era, being welcomed to the Age of Austen by the sight of a body rotting on a gibbet leaves Rachel queasy and anxious.

Still, the two proceed with their plan to get close to Jane through her favorite brother, Henry, and her sister, Cassandra, and pilfer the letters and the allegedly finished manuscript called “The Watsons.”

Liam pretends to be a doctor because you cannot be a female and a doctor in England in 1815. What’s more, it was difficult for a woman to work and be taken seriously in almost any capacity; even Austen published her novels using a pen name, although many of her friends and relatives knew her as a writer.

That difficulty will affect Rachel, who is an independent and outspoken woman. Like Austen, Rachel will have trouble being an “intelligent woman in a world that had no real use for them.”

Naturally, there’s some “fear of significantly disrupting the probability field, possibly influencing macro-historic events in unforeseeable and damaging ways.” But there always is when you go back in time.

Flynn’s story is an appealing speculation about Austen’s life seen through the eyes of Rachel, a neomodern woman who is subjected to 19th-century circumstances. As Rachel says, to survive as a woman and a second-class citizen, it was necessary to assume a “healthy sense of the ridiculous.”

“The Jane Austen Project” (Harper Perennial, 384 pages, $15.99) by Kathleen A. Flynn