Young Jane Austen, then seventeen, is invited to accompany her friend, Mrs Anne Lefroy, on a visit to Maybridge during the summer of 1793. She is delighted to meet the delightful brown-haired village girl, and the tall, dark and proud young gentleman who was visiting nearby. She hoped to attend dances and balls while there and to visit grand estates. No doubt romances would develop, but they would hardy proceed without some share of difficulty. They so rarely do. Miss Jane Austen began writing her novels when she was about nineteen years of age. The very first of these, Lady Susan, was never completed. The others, after being revised and rewritten, and after the passage of many years, were eventually published and are among the world’s best-loved works. It is well known that Jane Austen used many familiar characters and scenes in her stories. Readers ac-quainted with both her life and works can connect the two, but attempts to identify the inspiration for her best-loved characters, Elizabeth Bennet and Mr Fitzwilliam Darcy, have failed. That, of course, does not mean that there were no such individuals. Very few details of Jane’s teenage years remain and so we do not know what she may have done and whom she may have known. But suppose...