Jessie Lewis Audiobooks

Room for Improvement: romance written in the long shadow of Jane Austen

1 audiobook reviewed

★ 4.5/5 average

633 listener ratings

Who is Jessie Lewis?

Two centuries on, Jane Austen is still setting other novelists to work. Our catalogue files Room for Improvement under the heading Inspired by Austen, which tells you the company Jessie Lewis is keeping: writers who take the manners, the misjudgements and the slow correction of first impressions, then build something of their own on that frame.

The book supplies the rest. At well over eight hours this is a full novel rather than a quick diversion, with room for misunderstandings to accumulate and for characters to earn whatever they are eventually granted. The title has its joke ready before you press play: improvement is the business at hand, and somebody is going to need a good deal of it. Everything else is left to the writing, which arrives with a considerable weight of listener opinion behind it.

Jessie Lewis in audiobooks

Elizabeth Klett reads, and in Austen-inspired fiction the reading carries more than usual: the irony lives in the delivery, and a narrator who misses it flattens the whole enterprise. Eight hours and a quarter gives the story proper room to breathe.

The score sits high across several hundred verdicts, which counts for something in a corner of romance whose readers guard the original fiercely. Newcomers to Austen variations could do a great deal worse as a first experiment, and those who already know the form will recognise the pleasures on offer straight away. The audiobooks gathered below are ready when you are.