Plot summary

Lilly Thorpe is in a rut and at a crossroads in her life. She works as a copywriter at a Boston ad agency, a job she doesn't much like, especially in that her dream would be to finish her novel on which she's long stopped working. The president of the Jane Society, as in Jane Austen, she has been informed by Mr. Whitcomb, the owner of the English pub where they hold their meetings for free, that he is retiring and thus selling, meaning that she has to find somewhere else appropriate to hold their meetings at an affordable price. She has long talked about going to England to do a Jane tour, but one thing or another has always stopped her. And while she would like to find her proverbial "Mr. Darcy", she doesn't want him to be her savior, she turning down the marriage proposal of her current boyfriend Martin, he offering her a life in Chicago as that savior. Her friend and coworker Alisha, who is having her own man problems in feeling pressured by her family to get married despite not having that man, believes their coworker Brennan is interested in Lilly, he being someone that Lilly would not even entertain as a romantic partner, while the latest man to enter her life is the rude new clerk at her favorite local bookstore. Part of what Lilly loves about Jane, beyond the romantic nature of her novels, is that she has an answer for most of life's problems. So in wanting Jane to provide her answers to her life's problems, Lilly is nonetheless surprised when the spirit of Jane enters her life. While Jane has to update her two hundred year old thoughts to Lilly's twenty-first century world, Lilly has to deal with the agency's newest client, Trevor Fitzsimmons, the rude bookstore clerk who is really its new owner and a tech giant who wants to market the bookstore to link to his online world, which is somewhat against Lilly's sensibilities.—Huggo