Beth Pattillo turns toward ‘Sense and Sensibility’

Beth Pattillo

Beth Pattillo’s Jane Austen tributes have been a hit with BookPage reviewers. Romance columnist Christie Ridgway called Jane Austen Ruined My Life—about a heartbroken Austen expert—“smart chick lit that’s an absolute pleasure to read.” This year, Linda White was charmed by Mr. Darcy Broke My Heart, in which an office manager meets a “dashingly handsome yet annoyingly aloof publishing executive” at a Pride and Prejudice seminar.

And now Pattillo has signed a deal to add more fuel to the current Jane Austen craze. GuidepostsBooks will publish The Dashwood Sisters Tell All: A Novel with Sense and Sensibility. (Right now there’s no set pub date, but my money’s on February 2011, since her two previous J.A. novels were published in Feb. ’09 and Feb. ’10.)

Per Publisher’s Marketplace, this novel will follow three sisters on a walking tour of Hampshire, England, where they find a book that might be the diary of Jane Austen and her sister Cassandra, chronicling their lives as sisters and shedding new light on the writing of Sense and Sensibility.

If you can’t wait that long for an Austen fix, pick up Allegra Goodman’s The Cookbook Collector in July—a Sense and Sensibility-type story for the digital age.

Have you had enough of Austen, or will you relish another homage to the queen of social comedy?