The real problem, though, is that the book club remains a convenience for gathering the novel's capsule stories. Fowler does not contrive any pleasing symmetries between her stories and Austen's, and the characters' discussions of Austen's novels are thin and uninteresting. They manage little more than "I think Catherine Moreland's a charming character", versus "She's very, very silly. Implausibly gullible." Fowler may have faith in Austen, but she does not trust her characters to make you interested in their particular readings. And she is certainly not prepared to make these characters as foolish or parti pris as some of the readers whose judgments Austen so mercilessly recorded.

If, as a writer, you are going to take on Jane Austen - a novelist whose art, as Thornton Wilder put it, is so consummate that its secret is hidden, impossible wholly to illuminate - you had better make damn sure you are up to the job.