Friendship and Folly

Avoid Reader Remorse! Before purchasing this book, or even wasting a few minutes of your time on a borrowed copy, please spare a moment to take the following short quiz: 1. Does the cover of your preferred historical reading matter traditionally feature either a woman in danger of a ‘wardrobe malfunction’ or a man who has misplaced his shirt (or at least his buttons), or both? 2. When you say to your friends, “Oh, I just love Mr. Darcy!” are you, in fact, thinking of Colin Firth jumping into a BBC fish pond, rather than Jane Austen’s intricate creation, who had been ‘a selfish being all his life, in practice, though not in principle’? 3. Do you deplore the fact that Jane Austen was herself the daughter of a clergyman, and that, however delightfully ironic her writing and witty her observations, she insisted on adhering to the somewhat priggish view that a charming rake was not a hero, but a villain--and also demonstrated other symptoms of ‘outdated morality’? 4. If you dutifully plowed through "Mansfield Park", were you horrified to discover that Henry Crawford was not, after all, the hero? 5. And finally, like Winnie-the-Pooh, do you find it is “more fun to talk with someone who doesn’t use long, difficult words but rather short, easy words like ‘What about lunch?’”--and, perforce, more fun to read them, as well? If you answered yes to all, or even most, of the above questions, DO NOT BUY THIS TITLE IN ANY FORM. You won’t enjoy it, and, thus embittered by this needless waste of your time and funds, your only satisfaction will be to write a scathing review of a book that was never intended for your delectation in the first place. From the back cover: The year was 1805; the place, England. Napoleon was scheming how to wrest control of the Channel from the British Navy so that he might at last invade the island "nation of shopkeepers" that kept interfering with his plans to dominate all of Europe. Lord Nelson was chasing the Emperor's fleet across the oceans in a hunt that would shortly culminate in the battle of Trafalgar. But on a quiet estate in Warwickshire, "just near enough to Stratford to take a proprietary interest in its immortal Bard," Ann Northcott was much more concerned with her mother's schemes. Those schemes would send Ann and her friend Julia Parry far away from their beloved Merriweather, on a turbulent voyage into a fashionable London season. For both of them, it would prove to be a journey of discovery into the true nature of Friendship and Folly.