"...it was very important to me that these characters who are silent presences in Austen ... actually got to be active, dynamic and fully realized in their own right."

At NPR:

"There was a line in Pride and Prejudice that just stopped me dead, and I couldn't get past it on one of my re-readings," she says. "It's that period leading up to the Netherfield ball when it's just been raining for days and days, and there's no way the Bennet girls are going to venture out into the muddy roads ... but they need these decorations for their dancing shoes. And the line is 'the very shoe roses for Netherfield were got by proxy,' and I just thought, who's proxy?"

I've been wanting to read Longbourn for a while now, and this NPR piece only made me more eager to do so... however, WHY ON EARTH would they title it "Don't Call It Fanfic: Writers Rework Their Favorite Stories"? IT IS TOTALLY FANFIC. Fanfic is fanfic is fanfic, traditionally published or not.