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 …
Mrs. Isabella Knightley looked with concern at her guest. Pretty little Harriet Smith was usually the most cheerful, happy natured young lady, but just now she was leaning on the sofa in a despondent, listless posture, and not seeming to even notice Isabella’s five children, who were romping at their feet, in various states of …
While ruminating on our theme for June, Blossoming Love, and having written a piece on the subject already (“I have always been indifferent to flowers,” June 3), I was reminded of roses, and the fact that in my first Austenesque novel, I wrote a character who was actually a Rosarian. He was a minor character, …
A Northanger Abbey story, and the myth of Hyacinthus It was an awkward morning in Milsom-Street. It had been arranged that the Allens would deliver Catherine from their Bath lodgings to General Tilney’s superior ones, in time to join the family for breakfast, and then make ready for the journey to Northanger Abbey. This departure …
Jane Austen was never confined – at least, not in the sense of experiencing pregnancy, childbirth, and “lying-in.” She had plenty of opportunity to see other women undergoing confinements, at close quarters, as several of her sisters-in-law had large families. Both Edward Austen Knight’s wife Elizabeth and Frank Austen’s wife Mary died after having eleven …
I take a personal interest in this month’s theme of Sonnets and Bonnets, because as it happens I am the daughter and the wife of poets. My father, Paul Eaton Reeve, was a fairly well-known avant-garde Greenwich Village poet who did most of his writing and publishing in literary magazines in the 1930s and 1940s. …
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