Natalie Jenner has been a Jane Austen devotee since she was a child. As a precocious nine-year-old, she tackled the gift box edition—complete with ribbon bookmark and illustrations—of Pride and Prejudice in her parents’ library. There was no turning back.
“She’s a lodestar,” Jenner says via Zoom from her home outside Toronto. “My immersion in Jane Austen has yielded countless dividends, and I wish that for everybody.”
Best known for her bestselling 2020 debut novel The Jane Austen Society—about a group of people in the small English village of Chawton who set about saving Austen’s house after WWII—Jenner returns to her favorite author with Austen at Sea, out in May from St. Martin’s. The novel follows Charlotte and Henrietta Stevenson, upper-class sisters in 1865 Boston who start a secret correspondence with Francis Austen, the famed author’s brother, who invites them to visit him in England.
“I very much wanted to go back to Jane Austen and was hoping to get it done for the 250th anniversary of her birth in 1775,” says Jenner, who at 56 is animated and ebullient. “This will be the last milestone anniversary that I will get to celebrate properly in my lifetime.”
Born in Ely, England, Jenner is the oldest of three siblings. Her father was an actuary and insurance executive, and her mother was a homemaker. Jenner says she wanted to be a writer before she could read. But she also wanted to be a lawyer. “I’m 11, watching the movie The Paper Chase, my brain goes on fire, and I tell my mother, ‘That’s what I want to do when I grow up.’ ” Jenner graduated from the University of Toronto with a BA in English literature and completed a law degree there in 1993.
After getting her degree, Jenner practiced corporate law, which she calls “a pretty demanding mistress,” until 1997, when she pivoted to become a legal recruiter and coach for the next two decades. However at 30, she decided to finally write a novel. The results were not encouraging, and her path to literary success was circuitous and full of grief, disappointment, faith, and gratitude.
“Nobody cared,” Jenner says of her first novel. So she wrote four more, which she says are “sitting prettily in a drawer somewhere.” She queried hundreds of agents, sometimes getting close on the strength of the pitch or the title or because she was a lawyer, but the result was always rejection.
“I was pretty heartbroken,” she says. “I think it was a plume of grief, which sounds trite, but I had worked so hard and thought there was something there, which might sound arrogant, but you write because you feel you have something to say and something to share.”
At 40, Jenner says, she put writing “to bed for a decade,” rationalizing that she had a life and a family and didn’t need to wake up at five a.m. to write. But books were still important to her, and in 2015, she opened Archetype Books, a store in Oakville, Ontario. “Like all writers, I love to read, and I’ve always wanted to have a bookshop that I would curate and be able to share my love of both popular fiction and classics and design it the way I wanted.”
In 2016, her husband was diagnosed with a rare and terminal lung disease called idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis, and within a year, she closed the bookshop to concentrate on his recovery and raising their 13-year-old daughter. During that difficult time, Jenner returned to an old love: she found herself rereading Jane Austen. “There’s something so rich and comforting about her prose,” she says. “It doesn’t matter if you know the story or have seen the movies 100 times—it’s about her voice. She is in total control, and when you go through hard times, you want to read an author who’s in total control.”
In 2017, Jenner went to Austen’s village of Chawton to walk in the author’s footsteps. When she returned, she began reading everything she could about Austen. A year later, she went to a meeting of the Jane Austen Society in Philadelphia. Two weeks after that, she announced to her family that she was going to write another book. It took her just a few months to finish The Jane Austen Society. “I had so much fun writing,” says Jenner, who sent the novel to agents over the course of a weekend. On the following Monday, she got a call from Mitchell Waters, an agent at Brandt & Hochman, asking for an exclusive, with the prediction that she had a bestseller. He was right. The Jane Austen Society was a runaway success and has been translated into more than 20 languages.
Like Jenner’s second and third books—Bloomsbury Girls (2022) and Every Time We Say Goodbye (2024)—Austen at Sea is a historical novel. As Charlotte and Henrietta prepare to head to England, Nicholas and Haslett Nelson—bachelor brothers, Civil War veterans, and rare book dealers in Philadelphia—are also corresponding with Francis Austen, who lures them across the pond with the promise of literary treasure. Jenner tosses them all on a transatlantic voyage, complete with a senator’s daughter looking for a husband and a pre–Little Women Louisa May Alcott.
“I decided to place the story as the Civil War ends and Lincoln is assassinated,” Jenner says, “so the characters would be in some grief.” As for Alcott, “I love having real-life characters in cameos. Where they lived and what they did is based on fact, but I get to fictionalize their personality and their dialogue and the things they do in the context of my plot.”
When it comes to her success, Jenner’s taking it all in stride. “I’m so grateful that I have this passion and love for Jane Austen and this love of books and reading that sustains me,” she says. “And I’m grateful that I felt, after three published books, confident in my voice. Writing for me doesn’t feel intentional; basically, I write out of my creative consciousness and can’t wait to find out what happens next.”
“It was great to go back to Austen,” she adds, “especially being in the heads of the different characters and thinking about her books from different standpoints. I had so much fun being back in that world. I also love creating a world where everything is going to work out, a world where people have adventures and take risks. It was an optimistic experience for me, much like reading Austen.”
