The Eyre Affair was a fast but enjoyable read: the reviews at Amazon are as good or better than anything I can put here, but I’ll take a stab at it.
The book was recommended by my niece and I just decided to try it without researching it at all. Just as well: I have no idea what I would have made of a book where time travel, alternative history (the US and England are not separate, air travel is by airship since the airplane was never invented, England was occupied by the Nazis but still won the war, though somehow w/o Churchill), and a variety of literary japes (a villain named Jack Schitt?) are employed. The book moves along so quickly, you don’t really linger over the rough bits and the inspired lunacy of the plot and premise amply covers any shortcomings.
Imagine a world where it’s possible to move between fantasy and reality and the characters in books are as alive as we are, within their books and outside of them if they can get out. They can also become just as dead, which rewrites the book — just the copy they were in or all copies if a character were removed from the manuscript version. Mucking with literature is a crime in this not quite parallel world and someone has taken it to the next level by removing, at first minor and then namesake, characters from the original manuscripts of great books (the title of the book should give a clue as to one of the books involved).