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room. There are a couple of sofas, several chairs, a massive fireplace, and a couple of tables in the sunny room. Mrs. Mansfield is seated at one of the tables, intent on some sewing she’s doing. She looks up and smiles when I walk in, and indicates an embroidery frame on the table.
    “Here you are. I knew you would be eager to get back to your work.”
    In your dreams, lady. And last time I checked, this is mine. I sit down at the table and pick up the embroidery, amused by the thought that anyone could think I am capable of doing anything that involves a high level of domestic skill. I can’t even hem a skirt.
    As I look at the embroidery (pretty, whoever had done it), Mrs. Mansfield says, “What is it, my dear? Are you not interested in your needlework today?”
    “Just not in the mood, I guess.”
    “Are you unwell again?”
    Again? This Jane person must be one of those fainting hypochondriac types, a Mary Musgrove, always loosening her stays and reaching for her smelling salts. Then again, with all this tight stuff around my torso it doesn’t take much imagination to figure out why fainting might not be that farfetched. “I’m hanging in there.”
    Mrs. Mansfield’s brows contract. “‘Hanging in there’? You know that is a common way of talking I cannot abide. Have not I warned you about engaging the servants in idle conversation, Jane? Now pick up your needle. You have a bad habit of leaving things unfinished. Accomplished women do not leave work unfinished. And women without accomplishments do not make good marriages, especially women of thirty whose first bloom is a distant memory.”
    This woman is more and more resembling my real-life mother. The same put-downs masked as helpful advice, the same warnings about becoming an old maid. Okay, how about I show Miss Bossy-corset just how much I can fuck up that embroidery with my clumsy, home-economics-dropout fingers. So I pick up the needle. And watch in stunned disbelief as my long, tapered fingers (oh so different from the small and somewhat stubby ones of my waking life) fly over and through the cloth, creating lacy flower petals and leaves and delicate little borders. Who is this? What Martha Stewart–like demon of a Stepford wife is possessing me?
    I think about stopping, but watching the effortlessness of my alien hands doing their embroidery thing sucks me in. Time stretches out, yet passes quickly. Before I know it, Mrs. Mansfield is telling me it’s time to dress for dinner. I attempt to make sense of all this in the quiet of my bedroom. But what sense is there to be made of anything? It’s a dream, where anything is possible. Even my ability to sew. And like it.
    At dinner, a true carnivore fest, I finally meet my “father.” He is a tall, thin, quiet man with strawlike hair in shades of brown and gray and the hollow-cheeked look of an ascetic, though he consumes more food than I can imagine he has room to put it. He’s either a bulimic or blessed with the metabolism of a hummingbird. Clearly he likes me or, more precisely, likes who he thinks I am, as the only words he speaks other than those in response to his wife are when he tells me how happy he is to see me looking so well again and how his joy has inspired his painting the entire day. This is a welcome departure from my real father, a would-be writer who left when I was only nine years old, ostensibly to pursue his art, but who has not, to my knowledge, published so much as a greeting card, let alone ever sent one to his only daughter.
    After dinner, Mr. Mansfield retires to his “atelier,” the mention of which causes Mrs. Mansfield to arch her brows and make a sort of snorting noise, and leaves me consigned to sit with her in the drawing room.
    I see a newspaper lying on a table. The date: August 12, 1813.
    So what does one do for entertainment in 1813 England? Fortunately, conversation is not on the menu. The expected activity is my reading aloud to Mrs. M from the second volume