Read Confessions of a Jane Austen Addict for Free Online Page B

Where is her essence, her spirit, her personality, whatever it is that inhabits a person’s body?
    Maybe I’ve gone crazy. Maybe my mother, my real-life mother, is standing over me right now and patting my hand in some mental ward, looking into my vacant eyes while I live out insane fantasies of being an early-nineteenth-century Englishwoman. Was all Mrs. Mansfield’s talk about insane asylums my subconscious mind’s way of breaking the truth to me? But isn’t the catch-22 of being crazy that if you really are crazy, you don’t know you are?
    If I’m not crazy, then how do I explain my presence here? Did I walk through some kind of rip in the fabric of space-time? Have I watched too many Star Trek reruns? If this is time travel, then how am I in someone else’s body instead of visiting this time period in my own body? As if time travel would be any sort of explanation anyway.
    Could this be a past life? No, a past life would have already happened, and I wouldn’t be bringing my twenty-first-century persona into the mix. I wouldn’t even know about myself in the twenty-first century if I were really having a past life. I’m getting dizzy thinking about this.
    Wait. Could it be some sort of parallel reality happening simultaneously with my own? Okay, then why would I be in the body of a nineteenth-century woman but possessing the mind of a twenty-first-century woman?
    Have I died and reincarnated? Can people reincarnate into the past? That would be a good trick. Is that what Buddhists mean when they say that linear time is just a mental construct? Are we actually overlapping into different times? Will I return to the twenty-first century to find a Roman gladiator sitting in the next booth at House of Pies or Mrs. Mansfield standing behind me in the checkout line at Target? I’m not even so sure I believe in reincarnation. Why am I even engaging in these speculations? How is any of it going to get me my life back?
    Don’t be frightened, said the reflection in the pond. I can’t get the image of that face, her words, out of my head.
    I feel like I can’t breathe. I open the window with shaking fingers and will myself not to hyperventilate. My breathing slows, and I feel the sun warm my face. I inhale the tang and sweetness of herbs and grass and flowers, hear the birds chirping in the vividly green trees. I pull up the sleeve of my nightgown, and there is the same healing cut on my arm from the doctor’s knife. All of these sensations are undeniably real.
    I’m here. In someone else’s body. In someone else’s life. And here, it appears, I will stay until—or if—I figure out how to get back.
    Okay, so how do I get my life back? Willing myself out of here didn’t work. Insisting I’m not who they think I am almost got me committed, not to mention nearly bled dry.
    There has to be a way to get my real life back. I just haven’t figured it out yet.
    I hear a quick rap at the bedroom door, and then it opens a crack. It’s Barnes, wanting to know if I’m awake. Damn. I really don’t feel like dealing with anyone right now. Then again I’m not sure I can get into my clothes with all their laces and buttons in the back. Not to mention that horrible, stiff corsetlike thing that makes the simplest motion, like sitting down in a chair or bending over to pick something up, an exercise in creative problem-solving. Hasn’t anyone ever thought of ergonomics? Or common sense? It’s as if they purposely designed them for women who have hired help. Of course they did.
    It’s good that Barnes is here, that she can help me get dressed, that her very presence will stop me from curling into a fetal position or screaming until they cart me off to an asylum. Because—and I feel the blood drain from my face—being committed would be much worse than a nightmare. It would be a no-exit situation far more horrible to contemplate than life imprisonment in the higher echelons of a society that predates a woman’s right to do