Invisible Sister

Journalist Alexa Stephens is fascinated by the life of 19th century author and scholar Margaret Fuller. She finally convinces the publisher of the magazine she works for in Madison, Wisconsin to pay her expenses to research Fuller at an obscure museum in a small town in Massachusetts. While digging through old boxes she discovers what might be a long-lost and totally unheard-of manuscript by Jane Austen. Wells writes Austen-like prose and takes the reader back to the Bennet family after the time of "Pride and Prejudice." Controversy follows the discovery.

Mary E. Wells is a graduate of the University of Wisconsin-Madison where she developed her writing skills in the tear gas-filled halls of the 1960s. Over the years, Mary was a real estate agent, an award-winning newspaper reporter and editor, a researcher for fundraising at the University of Washington (the other "UW"), an eBay entrepreneur, a used car dealer in the Ozarks, a purse designer, and a Photoshop artist. She used to joke that half of her jobs frequently appear on the list of "least trusted professions." She previously published a novel, "Insinguation" in 2006. Mary died in early 2020. Shortly before her death, she completed two manuscripts. She wrote "The Other Half of the Meaning of Life" as a witty and but also insightful feminine response to Daniel Klein's "Every Time I Find the Meaning of Life, They Change It." Her final books was "Invisible Sister", a novel that involved the discovery of a manuscript purported to be by Jane Austen, and, many years after her death, her brother's efforts to get it published. To make it believable, she wrote 60 pages of Austen-style prose. Both books were published posthumously by her brothers.