A Dance with Jane Austen
How a Novelist and her Characters Went to the Ball

Jane Austen loved to put on her satin slippers with shoe-roses, her white gloves and muslin gown, and go off for an evening of fun at the Basingstoke assemblies. The Bennet girls share their creator's delight and go off joyfully to dance, and of course to meet future husbands.

Drawing on contemporary accounts and illustrations, and a close reading of the novels as well as Austen's correspondence, Susannah Fullerton takes the reader through all the stages of a Regency Ball as Jane Austen and her characters would have known it.

Her subjects learn their steps, dress in readiness, find transport to convey them to a ball, choose between public and private balls, worry over a shortage of men, prefer a cotillion to a quadrille, talk and flirt with their partners, sustain themselves with supper, fall in love, and then go home to talk it all over at the end.

SUSANNAH FULLERTON is President of the Jane Austen Society of Australia and has lectured extensively around the world on Jane Austen's life and novels. She is the author of Jane Austen and Crime, a book described by Claire Tomalin as 'essential reading for every Janeite'. Her other title for Frances Lincoln is the forthcoming Happily Ever After: 200 Years of Pride and Prejudice (9780711233744). She lives in Sydney, Australia.
DEIRDRE LE FAYE is an expert on Jane Austen, and the author of several books about her, including Jane Austen: The World of Her Novels, the definitive biography Jane Austen: A Family Record for the British Library, and a completely new edition of Jane Austen's letters. She lives in Portishead, North Somerset.