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 …
MERRY CHRISTMAS, EVERYONE! The Holiday season is in full swing. We’ve finished Thanksgiving (in the US) and Chanukkah, and Christmas Day is here. Our halls are decked and presents opened. How about something for those gift cards to tide you over in your quiet hours as you await New Year’s Day 2022? Like a great …
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, …
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 …
Jane Austen was a most judicious punisher of her least deserving characters. She had a high moral sense, as well as a wicked wit, and loved to mete out comeuppances as well as happy endings. Her comeuppances are generally very plausible and very fair, and the ones that might not seem entirely satisfactory, generally have …
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