I'm not entirely sure on this one. From the small amount of text (from the novel) that I read in Kowal's interview, as well as the excerpt, she doesn't seem to have a knowledgeable grasp on what an Austen novel should read/sound like. Or at least, her tone is so mockingly trite that it seems more like parody than anything else. There's a particular late 18th century tone that all sequel or prequel-writing Austenites strive to emulate and it isn't always achievable. There are entire message boards on the Republic of Pemberley focused on writing styles, just for this purpose.
The concept is "light, bright and sparkling", to use Janie's own words, and Kowal is smart to keep this "magic" within the realm of womanly arts and carefully consider glamour's impact on Regency social history before going too far. That's called research and critical analyzing. But if you plan to conceptualize a Jane Austen world, you should write it like one. Jane would have written this sentence...
"The drawing room already had a simple theme of palm trees and egrets designed to complement its Egyptian revival furniture,"
...something like this:
"The drawing room's unaffected quality, lent chiefly by the images of palm trees on the walls, complimented Miss So-and-So's recent purchase of furniture from Mr. So-and-So's habberdasher shop, of which sported a particular Eastern style."
But then, perhaps I'm making the same mistake as Kowal is. Just forget the modern fiction pretending-to-be-something-else (perhaps with the exception of "Jonathan Strange", which did indeed read like a 19th century Dickens tome).
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