Dancing With Mr. Darcy: Stories Inspired by Jane Austen and Chawton House Library by Sarah Waters

assembly. Plus the torn bit of newspaper someone had left on the seat by the bus stop. And it came to 27,373.
    I overheard Uncle Terry say to Mum once, ‘She’s a right little bookworm’, like it was something not quite right. I looked it up. The dictionary said Bookworm: An organism, sometimes a literal worm, which harms books by feeding on their binding or leaves. Also a term for a person devoted to books. I think he meant the ‘also’ bit. I like the word devoted. It makes me think of Little Women. I’ve read that too.
    I yearn to get back to Elinor and Marianne. Yearn is my word of the day. It means to long or ache or hanker for. I don’t like hanker much because it sounds too close to handkerchief which is not serious enough. Granny gave me a very old dictionary, which looks like someone has picked at the cover with their nails. I think it might be covered in leather because it smells a bit funny and the pages are blobby with little brown marks. I looked up yearn in that and it said: To have a strong, often melancholy desire. And I thought that suited Sense and Sensibility because that is how I feel about it. It makes me scrunch my toes up and hold my breath. I’ve just read the bit where Marianne falls ill because of the horrible Willoughby, which was so terrible I could hardly bear it (even though I think Marianne is a bit of an idiot sometimes) and I wanted it to go on forever at the same time. This is why it is such a good book, because it’s almost making you read it whether you want to or not.
    Sometimes when I’m lying in bed at night, all the characters of all of the books I’ve read swim round my head in a mad dance. My head feels like it might burst with words sometimes and then I think that I’ve years and years of reading still to come and where do all the words go? Mrs Finch said in class that everything we ever see or do or read leaves a memory in our brains, but I’ve seen a picture of a brain and it’s so small. And if we can’t store all the words and stories, then how do we know we aren’t just reading the same things over and over without knowing it? That’s why I keep all the books I’ve read in my bedroom so I can prove to myself I know what they are about. Some of my friends test me sometimes, especially Harriet. She says, ‘Okay, cleverclogs, tell me what happens in the book,’ so I do. I tell her about all the characters and what happens to them and the sorts of things they say and how it makes me feel. I did that with The Lord of the Rings, but she said, ‘Oh, I’ve seen that on DVD so I don’t have to read it,’ and even though I told her that the books were miles better and that the films left loads of stuff out, she didn’t care. At first, Mrs Finch didn’t believe I’d read all three books – it’s called a trilogy – because she’d never met anyone as young as me who had. She didn’t read them until she was at university. I told her I hope they have loads of books at university because I don’t want to go there if it’s full of things like The Lord of the Rings that I’ve already read. Although I wouldn’t mind reading something like Pride and Prejudice again (but not straightaway), because there’s so much going on and you can learn a lot about life in olden times. Plus Mrs Bennet is really funny.
    Once I’d learnt what a bookworm was, the word kept coming up all over the place. It was in the paper yesterday morning in an article about Jacqueline Wilson and I saw it on the back of a book I picked up in the local bookshop on the way home from school. I didn’t buy the book, I never do, unless it’s my birthday or something, but I love being in there, surrounded by the smell of books. Sometimes I think words just hang around in the background waiting to be noticed and then when they are they get sort of brighter so they stand out. I don’t like the ‘worm’ bit, but if that’s what the word is, then I suppose I’m stuck with it. I wonder if there