“Young people, says Ms. Viera Rigler, are deep into Austen’s universe and obsessive fandom ‘is normal to them.’

“‘It’s true,’ she says. ‘We are a little crazy.'”

“She’s almost eerily contemporary despite the bonnets, the balls and the carriages, because she’s so keen and hilarious an observer of human nature,” says author Laurie Viera Rigler. “To me, it’s as if she’s a modern-day psychotherapist who time-traveled back to the Regency period and writes a novel about everyone who spent time on her couch.”

“Laurie Viera Rigler’s Confessions of a Jane Austen Addict leads the field”

“Bloomsbury & Babelgum paired up for Sex and the Austen Girl –a new web series to air weekly over 20 webisodes – providing great publicity for the lead up to the publication of Rude Awakenings of a Jane Austen Addict in Feb 2011.”

“Janites will adore the underlying P&P story and romantic comedy tropes, while all readers will enjoy the honest, nitty-gritty details of early 19th-century life.”

“Laurie Viera Rigler… says fans never tire of new interpretations. ‘Jane Austen wrote just six books, and they want more, more, more.'”

“I found out that not knowing is the best place for me to be. If you can embrace not knowing in a playful manner wondrous, magical things can happen.”

“Being a woman, especially a single woman in the contemporary world can be quite confusing,” says Viera Rigler, author of Confessions of a Jane Austen Addict. “There are no rules. Who’s supposed to pay? What do sex and dating and monogamy mean? Looking back and putting our own modern nostalgic construction on Jane Austen’s world, the rules were very clear, and I think people long for that.”

“Though a man may appear to be in love (or pretty close to it) prior to making love, the woman may never hear from him again after the deed is done. In that respect, things have not changed at all since 1813.”

How do relationships compare then and now?

“I love the freedom that I have as a woman today, but I think that Jane Austen was also lobbying very heavily for that freedom herself in her books. She was a big advocate in her novels and in her own personal life of marrying for love, but at the same time she was a practical woman and she understood that people have to have something to live on.”