Alice is an eighteen-year-old student and aspiring novelist with green spiky hair, a child of the modern age who recoils at the idea of reading Jane Austen. In a sequence of letters reminiscent of Jane Austen''s to her own niece, ''aunt'' Fay examines the rewards of such study. Not only is her correspondence a revealing tribute to a great writer - it is also an original and rewarding exploration of the craft of fiction itself.