April 19, 2026
Why I Write JAFF
A defence of the Jane Austen variation — and the small differences that change the whole book.
JAFF — Jane Austen Fan Fiction — is the genre most often dismissed by people who have not read any of it.
The dismissal usually arrives in two flavours. The first is why would anyone change Austen? — said by readers who suspect the genre is disrespectful. The second is why would anyone read it? — said by readers who suspect the genre is repetitive. I will tell you what I tell both of them.
The genre isn’t a rewrite. It’s a counterfactual.
A good JAFF doesn’t replace the canon. It runs alongside it. Like the chapter Austen could have written if she had been in a different mood, or if she had taken her tea in the orchard that morning, or if her sister Cassandra had asked her one more question.
The premise of every JAFF I admire is the same: one small thing is different. A footman delivers a letter to the wrong house. A storm keeps Elizabeth at Netherfield for a third day. Mr Darcy hears one sentence that, in the canon, he never quite heard. And then the whole novel reshapes itself around that difference, the way a river reshapes itself around one stone that fell in the night.
That’s the pleasure of JAFF, for me. It’s the pleasure of seeing the book’s nervous system — what holds the canon together, what doesn’t, what bends when you push, what doesn’t. You learn more about Pride and Prejudice by reading twenty good variations than you do by re-reading it a twenty-first time.
The thing that keeps me coming back
The other thing JAFF gives a writer is permission. Permission to slow Austen down where she ran fast. To linger in the long letter Elizabeth might have written if she’d had the words. To find out what Anne Elliot said in the chapter that begins after the persuasion. To watch Darcy try, twice, three times, and keep getting it slightly wrong before he gets it right.
Austen wrote the first time. The variation writer gets to write the second time. That’s the contract, and it’s a good one.
If you’ve been on the fence about JAFF, my best recommendation is to start with The Letter Returned (mine, yes, sorry) or any variation that takes one Austen letter and gives it a different sender. That subgenre — the letter variation — is the cleanest entry into the genre. One folded page. One small difference. A whole different morning.