Come to think of it, Procrastination is not a bad title for a pseudo Jane Austen novel, is it? Starting a fashion for one word titles with her own Persuasion, Jane Austen also wrote to her niece Anna, approving of the one-word title of her work in progress, Enthusiasm. She wrote, “Enthusiasm is such an …
In our Austen Variations fundraiser for Ukraine, our authors offered cameos in their forthcoming novels in exchange for donations to the cause. My first cameo was written for donor Michelle d’Arcy (a most fortuitous name to work with!), to be included in my next novel The Darcys and Lord Byron in Venice, and it …
At Austen Variations we are overjoyed that our fundraiser for Ukraine has been so wildly successful, with over $10,000 raised so far! Our authors are offering readers cameos in their forthcoming novels, as well as signed books and other Jane Austen-related treasures, in exchange for a donation. Here is my own first contribution, a chapter …
I’ve been thinking about returning to a story I posted here, and finally finishing it – there’s a novel concept for you! Some may remember it as “The Darcys and Lord Byron in Venice,” and I posted twelve episodes sporadically over a year and a half, with the first episode on December 30, 2017, and …
There is always something to learn from Jane Austen. Even when you sit down to write a light piece picking out some of your favorites among her infinite jests, you notice things you never saw before, and come to new observations, new conclusions. Last week, when I divided her books into the first three last …
Of all the many reasons why I have loved Jane Austen for so long, one of the very greatest is her sublime brilliance as a humorist. This quality in her naturally appeals to me so much because, like Lizzy, I “dearly love a laugh.” But there’s more to it than that. It’s not just her …
Today, Jane Austen’s birthday (her 246th to be exact), it is tempting to reflect on how she spent her birthdays and what she thought of them. This simple question is surprisingly difficult to answer, first because she made little mention of birthdays in either the surviving letters or in her novels; and also because birthdays …
Jane Austen’s felicitious phrase, “a comfortable coze,” which we use as our banner theme for November (a month in need of a coze or two), comes from Mansfield Park. Fanny, preparing for her first ball, is perplexed about how to wear the cross given her by her sailor brother William, for she has no chain. …
It had been an exceptionally wet October with winds and gales blowing around Mansfield Park almost daily, and Fanny was thankful to have recourse to her own dear East Room. This had been the Bertram sisters’ former school-room, now Fanny’s own refuge; but it was a chilly refuge in the inclement weather, for Fanny was …
The only mention of the word harvest in Jane Austen’s major novels, as far as I can discover, takes place in Mansfield Park. Not surprisingly, her “harvest scene” provides us with another opportunity to observe the cleverness and deliberation with which Jane Austen reveals her characters through subtle details. Each of the two paragraphs …
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