“Book Descriptions: Jane Austen's love life — long the subject of speculation — is finally, delightfully dealt with in the title story of this collection. Many of the other stories, like 'The Sidmouth Letters,' bring together past and present — with sometimes hilarious, sometimes disturbing, often intensely moving results.
With quiet elegance and devastating accuracy, Jane Gardam probes many and varied lives. We meet a trio of Kensington widows, mean-spirited and middle-aged, paying improbable tribute to a long exploited nanny; we await — with dread — a stranger to tea in an English home; we witness the mercurial changes that take place in young love, and we watch as a bohemian, passionate past returns to tempt domestic bliss.” DRIVE