All Louisa wants is to finish her doctoral dissertation on Jane Austen and find her Colonel Brandon. Or Mr Darcy. Or Henry Tilney. Or Edward Ferrars. Honestly, at this point, she’s stopped being picky about which Austen hero will (finally) come along and whisk her off to her happily ever after. But she still has someone in mind: for the past five years, she’s sat in the graduate students’ shared office space — twenty PhDs-in-progress to a single desk-packed room — and waited patiently for Daniel to realize that she just might be his own romantic heroine. But Daniel, a grad student obsessed with male beat poets of the twentieth century, has hardly noticed her since they both arrived in the same cohort five years ago. Louisa is determined to get his attention this year, though, as they enter their final semester of graduate study and prepare to defend their dissertations… If only her office mate Emilio would stop ragging on her about the value of studying Austen and leave her alone. When Emilio turns out to be Darcy-level dependable when it comes to sorting out her personal life (and even offers to be her “fake date” to try and get Daniel’s attention), however, Louisa starts to wonder what Austen herself would think of this new “hero” she’s encountered, one who seems nothing like the men she’s read about in novels.
All Louisa wants is to finish her doctoral dissertation on Jane Austen and find her Colonel Brandon. Or Mr Darcy. Or Henry Tilney. Or Edward Ferrars. Honestly, at this point, she’s stopped being picky about which Austen hero will (finally) come along and whisk her off to her happily ever after. But she still has someone in mind: for the past five years, she’s sat in the graduate students’ shared office space — twenty PhDs-in-progress to a single desk-packed room — and waited patiently for Daniel to realize that she just might be his own romantic heroine. But Daniel, a grad student obsessed with male beat poets of the twentieth century, has hardly noticed her since they both arrived in the same cohort five years ago. Louisa is determined to get his attention this year, though, as they enter their final semester of graduate study and prepare to defend their dissertations… If only her office mate Emilio would stop ragging on her about the value of studying Austen and leave her alone. When Emilio turns out to be Darcy-level dependable when it comes to sorting out her personal life (and even offers to be her “fake date” to try and get Daniel’s attention), however, Louisa starts to wonder what Austen herself would think of this new “hero” she’s encountered, one who seems nothing like the men she’s read about in novels.