Karen Joy Fowler: The magic of Jane

American writer Karen Joy Fowler has struck gold with her fourth novel, a shrewdly observed, superior reading group comedy about five Californian women of varying ages, all Jane Austen fans, who meet once a month to discuss her novels--and reveal much about their own lives in the process. The reading group is completed by one man, Grigg, a science fiction fan who has never read Austen before.

The Jane Austen Book Club has gone straight onto the New York Times bestseller list.

"I think that I probably read Austen first when I was in high school, and I read all the novels in rapid succession. The first time I read her, I thought she was all about romance and I was very taken with her young heroines, and the part of the plot that involved getting married, and getting married to the right person.

"Then I think I read her next when I went to college--this would have been in the '60s and I was very involved with feminism, and it seemed to me that her books were all about the very limited number of choices that the women in her books had, and a number of the romances which had pleased me so much the first time now seemed problematic.

"When I read her next, I had children and was far less interested in the romances and far more interested in the family dynamics in the books, all the parents and the siblings. It has been the case over the 30-plus years that I have been reading her that whatever has been on my mind at that moment, her books have seemed to be all about it.

"I'd never sought out her biographies or read any of the enormous body of critical work about her, until after I had written a lot of the book and my editor suggested including the section at the end [a collection of extracts from responses, both from Jane Austen's own family members, and the critics]. I was just mesmerised by it, the book is over and I can hardly stop myself.

"One of the things that strikes me so strongly is that her work has been put to every imaginable agenda: people are arguing that she's an intensely conservative writer and then that she's incredibly radical; she was apparently prescribed for shell-shocked soldiers after the First World War, and Emma was made part of the movement to emancipate women in Bengal. It's really quite astonishing.

"I help facilitate a reading club at the bookstore where I live, in Davis, near Sacramento. It's taken me about five years to be able to predict what one person will like and what they won't. It's both wonderful and troubling to me to see how we all read the same books, but we all read a completely different book. Some things that seem to me to be very tangential to a book will be the entire focus of someone else's reading.

"Austen is very, very, very funny--which is one thing which accounts for her popularity. It probably explains my love for her as a reader. I have very little patience with sentimental work myself and she provides exactly what I want.

"I certainly try to be funny. This is my fourth novel: I have written two that are lighter, and two that to my mind are funny, but when I read the reviews I learn what a very dark vision I have."

Karen Joy Fowler The Jane Austen Book Club (Viking, 7th October, h/b, £12.99, 0670915580)