Lost In Austen: Create Your Own Jane Austen Adventure, by Emma Campbell Webster
This book was amusing. If you are a fan of Jane Austen’s novels, and the author assumes that the reader is going to identify with Elizabeth Bennet in particular, the thought has probably crossed your mind that it would be fun to imagine yourself progressing through the plot of Pride & Prejudice and other Austen novels. This book is one of the more obvious ways that this itch can be scratched and it has at least some re-read value, I must admit, although it can take a bit of effort to keep up with the major and minor connections as well as the fortune, intelligence, and confidence scores as well as the failings and accomplishments and how they affect the ending one reaches. As someone who is a fan of choose your adventure books [1], this volume was definitely one that I found appealing and I managed to read most of it while I was getting my car tuned up a bit, which is always something that is enjoyable to do. This is a book that is easy to enjoy and appreciate and should have a lot of fans of Jane Austen enjoying it.
What happens when one is lost in Austen? Well, most of the book uses the plot of Pride & Prejudice and divides the material into five parts, and the choices made along the way can drastically affect one’s fate in very dangerous ways. Periodically there are choices that have to be made that will push the reader into one sort of relationship or another, that will plunge the character into the depths of despair or grant new friends and enemies as well as an understanding of the social world of Austen’s novels. Throughout the book there are also quizzes that give the character new skills and abilities that will make the adventure more successful, while some disasters will lead to a life of spinsterhood or a gruesome death or even a lifetime in prison as I found out in one of the choices I made. Obviously, most readers will have one or two endings in mind that they want to achieve, but it is not always as easy to reach this desired ending as one may hope and it can take a bit of rereading and retracing one’s path to get away from some of the more disastrous conclusions that this novel can take, so readers should be prepared to face up to some truly serious and weighty decisions being made in what seem like very trivial choices. The world of Jane Austen was one where single jokes and comments and even the choice of a lane or a way to spend the evening could have drastic effects on one’s fate.
The author has clearly done her research in making this book a compelling look at the social context in which Jane Austen’s novels take place. And there are certainly elements of several of Jane Austen’s novels that blend together wonderfully here, as the author views all of Austen’s novels as being in a shared universe where one can reject a marriage proposal from multiple heroes of Austen novels and step out of Pride & Prejudice to enter Emma and Mansfield Park over the course of one’s adventure as I did while reading this book. The more one has read and appreciated Jane Austen the more this book is easy to enjoy and succeed at. Will your heroine end up being killed by highwaymen or stuck in a loveless marriage or end up jilting half of the heroes of Austen’s novels and leaving them heartbroken and lifelong bachelors? Only you can decide, so choose wisely.
[1] See, for example:
Edge Induced Cohesion 
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