This book examines the curious and often overlooked ways in which the lives, interests, work and sense of humour of two of Britain's most celebrated writers often intersected.

Jane Austen and Lord Byron are often presented as opposites, but here they are together at last. In Regency England he was the first celebrity author while she was a parson’s daughter writing anonymously. This book explores how their lives, interests, work and sense of humour often brought them within touching distance, and sets them side by side in the world of the Regency and Romantic period.

Using some little-known sources and new research, it illustrates how they were distantly related by marriage; how they knew about each other even though they probably never met; the acquaintances they had in common and how their literary work often came close in subject-matter, approach, technique and tone.

Engagingly written and beautifully illustrated, this book will inform and delight scholars and Austen and Byron fans alike, showing that these two great authors were closer than you might think, even in their own day.

"The idea of setting Byron beside Austen, his older contemporary, as a Regency figure enables Kenyon Jones to remove him from the conventional Romantic grouping ... much of the book works brilliantly, shedding new light on both writers from rewarding angles." - The New York Review of Books

"Jones cannot prove Austen and Byron met, but she does weave together fascinating stories of the Regency world that they both inhabited." - Canberra CityNews