Six people - five women and a man - meet once a month in California's Central Valley to discuss Jane Austen's novels. They are ordinary people, neither happy nor unhappy, but each of them is wounded in different ways, they are all mixed up about their lives and relationships. Over the six months they meet, marriages are tested, affairs begin, unsuitable arrangements become suitable - under the guiding eye of Jane Austen a couple of them even fall in love ... 

Karen Joy Fowler talks to penguin.co.uk about her bestselling novel The Jane Austen Book Club.

In interviews, what is the question you are most frequently asked?
Whose point of view is the novel written from.

What’s the answer?
You need to think of the book club as a kind of seventh character.  It’s a very flexible voice because sometimes all the other characters are in the collective, but at other times someone is disapproved of and therefore not in it.

Which of the characters in your novel are you most like?
Sylvia, because she is the one character whose children are present – and children are omnipresent in my life.  I also share her sense of impending doom!

Sony have bought the film rights to your book.  Who would you cast, and why?
I have such a strong image of the characters that I can’t begin to imagine who would play them.  No one actor matches.  If business considerations could be put aside most writers would prefer unknowns.

What are you reading at the moment?
One of the wonderful things about being a writer is that it’s part of my job to read.  Most recently I read a book called Mother Nature by Sarah Hardy.  The author is a biologist who looks at evolutionary theory, focussing on maternal strategies to keep offspring alive.  The chapter on insects was very distressing!  Recently I also read Lord Byron’s Novel by John Crowley.  I became so caught up in it that I then read The Bride Of Science, a biography of Ada Lovelace who was Byron’s daughter.  It’s wonderful that I can follow my obsessions, whatever is interesting me.  Now I must read Don’t Let’s Go To The Dogs Tonight because that is the next book club choice.

So you’re a member of a book club?
Yes.

Do you discuss your own books?
Yes, my fellow book club members insist.  It’s lovely of them but not always comfortable because they’re very smart and highly critical of other books – but when they get to me they always think it’s really nice.  I can’t go to the bathroom because I’m worried they’ll be telling each other what they really think.

What did you read as a child?
Lots of the children’s books I loved had fantastical elements.  I remember a book called Castles And Dragons, which was a collection of fairy tales from different cultures.  I also loved Mistress Masham’s Repose and The Once And Future King by T.H. White.  The Once And Future King is the most important model I have as a writer, because it persuaded me early on that there were no rules, that you can write whatever you like so long as you are enjoying yourself, that it’s fine to digress.  And The Lord Of The Rings, long before those books became what they are now, and which I loved.  Also the Nesbit books, The Wind In The Willows and Mary Poppins.

Which authors do you most admire?
There are so many.  Being a writer has made me less critical – mostly when I read books I like them.  Ursula Le Guin and Molly Gloss are absolutely fantastic.  Kelly Link is a short story writer who writes unlike anyone else.  My favourite book of the last few years was Kevin Brockmeier’s The Truth About Celia.  I loved Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell.  Also The Hamilton Case, by Michelle de Kretser, about the independence movement in Ceylon.  And The Woman Warrior by Maxine Hong Kingston.

Which of Austen’s characters would you choose to be stranded on a desert island with?
There’s good company, and then there’s competence in the wild.  Maybe Captain Wentworth to make a sail.  But I don’t think he’s the person whose company I’d enjoy the most.  For company I’d like to be with Elizabeth Bennett, just like everybody else.

And which of your own?
I’ll never write a group of characters that I’ll love as much as in my first novel – because they were the first. 

Austen’s books often leave you wondering whether all of her matches are good ideas. Do any of the matches in The Jane Austen Book Club create disquiet?
My New York editor was very distressed that Allegra went back with Corinne at the end.  I do feel that they are not a match and it will all explode again very soon.  And I don’t think Bernadette’s marriage will last.  But I think the others will.  I think Jocelyn and Grigg is a nice combination of a bossy woman and a man who likes bossy women.

Austen lovers feel a particularly intense connection to books. Are there more book communities you know of that engage with a like passion?  Why these and not others?
I don’t know the answer but will say that when the book came out I was expecting many emails about mistakes to do with Austen.  There were none.  However there are about five lines in the book to do with Patrick O’Brian and there were lots of emails about him.  In Kansas they thought I was lucky not to have chosen Dickens, as the Dickens people are much harder to please.  And, of course, there’s Sherlock Holmes.  I read recently that the Sherlock Holmes people are in two camps – those who want to believe in Sherlock Holmes as a real person, and don’t want to hear anything about Conan Doyle, and those who want to talk about Conan Doyle as well.  They can’t be in the same room together.  This demonstrates a passionate attachment to books that I highly approve of.

‘A luxuriant pleasure!  Karen Joy Fowler has written a novel which is rich and wonderful in all the ways I treasure. Smart, funny, full of robust characters and a wry wit that is uniquely her own.  If I could eat this novel, I would’
Alice Sebold

‘We defy you not to fall head over heels for this lovely novel’
You magazine

‘This wonderful novel shows how some books enter our bloodstream’
Independent

‘I laughed out loud four or five times in the course of the introduction alone … a tour de force’
Sunday Telegraph

‘Playful and gripping’
Eve

‘Before you know it, you’re hooked - by the elegant prose, bitchy asides and whispery hint of more revelation to come.  Dangerously addictive’
Elle

‘Stylish, homely and deeply comforting’
The Times

‘Contains all the necessary ingredients for comfort reading … very funny’
Daily Telegraph

‘A contemporary comedy of manners that Austen herself might have enjoyed’
Independent on Sunday

‘The clever resonances brilliantly flesh out a homage to the Jane of Janes, a gentle satire on critical theory and an affectionate salute to the pitfalls and problems of romance’
Sunday Times

‘Very enjoyable, very Jane Austen’
Daily Mail

‘Austen fans will find allusions galore, but the real fun comes from watching Fowler pay homage to Austen’s gift for depicting how people say one thing and mean another … It’s remarkable that Fowler squeezes such a nuanced evocation of reading into so tidy a novel … Miss Austen would be proud.’
Scotland on Sunday

‘I was enchanted.  A charming and intelligent read, with the best appendix I’ve come across since Mark Haddon’s The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time’
Kate Long, author of The Bad Mother’s Handbook

Each of us has a private Austen.

Jocelyn's Austen wrote wonderful novels about love and courtship, but never married. The book club was Jocelyn's idea, and she handpicked the members. She had more ideas in one morning than the rest of us had in a week, and more energy, too. It was essential to reintroduce Austen into your life regularly, Jocelyn said, let her look around. We suspected a hidden agenda, but who would put Jane Austen to an evil purpose?

Bernadette's Austen was a comic genius. Her characters, her dialogue remained genuinely funny, not like Shakespeare's jokes, which amused you only because they were Shakespeare's and you owed him that.

Bernadette was our oldest member, just rounding the bend of sixty-seven. She'd recently announced that she was, officially, letting herself go. ‘I just don't look in the mirror anymore,’ she'd told us. ‘I wish I'd thought of it years ago ….

‘Like a vampire,’ she added, and when she put it that way, we wondered how it was that vampires always managed to look so dapper. It seemed that more of them should look like Bernadette.

Prudie had once seen Bernadette in the supermarket in her bedroom slippers, her hair sticking up from her forehead as if she hadn't even combed it. She was buying frozen edamame and capers and other items that couldn't have been immediately needed.

Bernadette's favorite book was Pride and Prejudice; she'd told Jocelyn that it was probably everyone's favorite. She recommended starting with it. But Sylvia's husband of thirty-two years had just asked for a divorce, and Jocelyn would not subject her, the news so recent and tender, to the dishy Mr. Darcy. ‘We'll start with Emma,’ Jocelyn had answered. ‘Because no one has ever read it and wished to be married.’

Jocelyn met Sylvia when they were both eleven years old; they were in their early fifties now. Sylvia's Austen was a daughter, a sister, an aunt. Sylvia's Austen wrote her books in a busy sitting room, read them aloud to her family, yet remained an acute and nonpartisan observer of people. Sylvia's Austen could love and be loved, but it didn't cloud her vision, blunt her judgment.

It was possible that Sylvia was the whole reason for the book club, that Jocelyn wished only to keep her occupied during a difficult time. That would be like Jocelyn. Sylvia was her oldest and closest friend.

Wasn't it Kipling who said, ‘Nothing like Jane when you're in a tight spot’? Or something very like that?

I think we should be all women," Bernadette suggested next. ‘The dynamic changes with men. They pontificate rather than communicate. They talk more than their share.’

Jocelyn opened her mouth.

‘No one can get a word in,’ Bernadette warned her. ‘Women are too tentative to interrupt, no matter how long someone has gone on.’

Jocelyn cleared her throat.

‘Besides, men don't do book clubs,’ Bernadette said. ‘They see reading as a solitary pleasure. When they read at all.’

Jocelyn closed her mouth.

Yet the very next person she asked was Grigg, whom we none of us knew. Grigg was a neat, dark-haired man in his early forties. The first thing you noticed about him was his eyelashes, which were very long and thick. We imagined a lifetime of aunts regretting the waste of those lashes in the face of a boy.

We'd known Jocelyn long enough to wonder whom Grigg was intended for. Grigg was too young for some of us, too old for the rest. His inclusion in the club was mystifying.

Those of us who'd known Jocelyn longer had survived multiple setups. While they were still in high school, she'd introduced Sylvia to the boy who would become her husband, and she'd been maid of honor at the wedding three years after they graduated. This early success had given her a taste for blood; she'd never recovered. Sylvia and Daniel. Daniel and Sylvia. Thirty-plus years of satisfaction, though it was, of course, harder to take pleasure in that just now.

Jocelyn had never been married herself, so she had ample time for all sorts of hobbies.

She'd spent fully six months producing suitable young men for Sylvia's daughter, Allegra, when Allegra turned nineteen. Now Allegra was thirty, and the fifth person asked to join our book club. Allegra's Austen wrote about the impact of financial need on the intimate lives of women. If she'd worked in a bookstore, Allegra would have shelved Austen in the horror section.

Allegra got short, expensive haircuts and wore cheap, sexy shoes, but neither of those facts would have made any of us think twice if she hadn't also, on occasions too numerous to count, referred to herself as a lesbian. Jocelyn's inability to see what had never been hidden eventually became offensive, and Sylvia took her aside and asked why she was having so much trouble getting it. Jocelyn was mortified.

She switched to suitable young women. Jocelyn ran a kennel and bred Rhodesian Ridgebacks. The dog world was, as it happily turned out, awash in suitable young women.

Prudie was the youngest of us at twenty-eight. Her favorite novel was Persuasion, the last completed and the most somber. Prudie's was the Austen whose books changed every time you read them, so that one year they were all romances and the next you suddenly noticed Austen's cool, ironic prose. Prudie's was the Austen who died, possibly of Hodgkin's disease, when she was only forty-one years old.

Prudie would have liked it if we'd occasionally acknowledged the fact that she'd won her invitation as a genuine Austen devotee, unlike Allegra, who was really there only because of her mother. Not that Allegra wouldn't have some valuable insights; Prudie was eager to hear them. Always good to know what the lesbians were thinking about love and marriage.

Prudie had a dramatic face; deep-set eyes, white, white skin, and shadowed cheeks. A tiny mouth and lips that almost disappeared when she smiled, like the Cheshire cat, only opposite. She taught French at the high school and was the only one of us currently married, unless you counted Sylvia, who soon wouldn't be. Or maybe Grigg—we didn't know about Grigg—but why would Jocelyn have invited him if he was married?

None of us knew who Grigg's Austen was.

The six of us—Jocelyn, Bernadette, Sylvia, Allegra, Prudie, and Grigg—made up the full roster of the Central Valley/River City all-Jane-Austen-all-the-time book club. Our first meeting was at Jocelyn's house.