Audio Rights for The Unexpected Miss Bennet

Very good news — Tantor Media has acquired the audio rights for The Unexpected Miss Bennet and will put out an audiobook. I’m so excited that Mary Bennet will come to life in a new way and to a new audience.

I am especially looking forward to hearing the book read in an actual English accent (I hope) rather than mine. I’ve been doing readings from The Unexpected Miss Bennet ever since the book came out, and to my credit, I never attempted to sound like Keira Knightley (sidenote: Hey, do you think? … nah).

Here’s the beginning of The Unexpected Miss Bennet: I can’t wait to hear it out loud.

It is a comforting belief among much of society, that a plain girl with a small fortune must have no more interest in matrimony than matrimony has in her.

Mrs Bennet was not a particularly doting mother, but she did have one object, and that was to see all of her daughters married. She was the most often bemused by Mary, her third daughter of five, and the one with the fewest prospects.

It was not that Mary was plain, exactly, for she was a Bennet, and the Bennet girls were known as the prettiest in their small neighborhood. But she said the most alarming things and was full of dire pronouncements on the base leanings of men, of which men were not eager to hear, and though she applied herself diligently to the piano and singing, she was not as accomplished as many another girl who approached the task with rather more gaiety than determination.

The Unexpected Miss Bennet has received accolades ever since it was published in 2011, garnering a Top 10 mention and a number of gladsome reviews. It’s my little book that could, and I am so glad it will get an audio treatment.