I wonder whether Jane Austen ever escaped into the lives of her characters? On sleepless nights, or whenever she needed a distraction, did she travel in her mind to the homes of the Darcys, the Bertrams, or the Knightleys?

We know she liked to tantalise her family with extra snippets of information about her creations, and she searched for likenesses of Lizzy and Jane Bennet at a portrait exhibition in London. Perhaps those people of her invention became just as real to her as her own flesh and blood family. Did she take refuge with them in times of need?

This illustration from my book, Jane in Winter, shows a nightdress-clad Jane eluding insomnia on a stormy night during the last winter of her life. In a dreamlike state she peers in at the drawing room window of Mansfield Park:

‘Tibby’s claws through the quilt brought her back to consciousness again but she was loathe to leave such friends behind. What would the Bertrams think of this woman spying so impertinently on their family circle? If she was discovered by a servant and brought in to explain herself, how would they receive such a strange gaunt woman, with the temerity to observe them in the sanctity of their home? How could she explain to them that they owed their very existence to her, that she had summoned them up out of the recesses of her imagination and bestowed immortality on them. She had done for them that which was impossible for herself.’ - Jane in Winter, chapter fifteen.

Lovers of books are blessed with a truly miraculous, lifelong ability to remove themselves from the more trying aspects of life into other, more congenial, worlds - whether Narnia or Netherfield, Hogwarts or Highbury. Thank heaven for books.