When people picture Regency England, they often imagine elegant ballrooms and whispered declarations of love. But for many young women, marriage was not a matter of choice at all. Arranged matches, family duty, and questions of property meant that girls—sometimes shockingly young—could be pressed into marriages they did not want. Legal Framework Under Lord Hardwicke’s…
When people picture Regency England, they often imagine elegant ballrooms and whispered declarations of love. But for many young women, marriage was not a matter of choice at all. Arranged matches, family duty, and questions of property meant that girls—sometimes shockingly young—could be pressed into marriages they did not want. Legal Framework Under Lord Hardwicke’s…
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When I first started writing, my former publisher encouraged me to work on a series. So, I started writing what would become The Darcy and Elizabeth Series that consisted of the following: The Women of Longbourn Attending a Ball Darcy and Bingley Darcy Chooses Part 1 Darcy Chooses Part 2 Elizabeth’s Choice The first three…
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After a little more than two years, this will be my last post for “Always Austen.” The blog is coming to an end. For two years I’ve learned and enjoyed so much content from blog owner Regina Jeffers and the rest of the authors who participate. There’s a mind-blowing collection of experience, scholarship, and gifted…
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Hi there. Well, this is my last post here on Always Austen. Thanks for reading my goofy and off the wall posts. I know I am not everyone’s cup of tea. I have been doing some research again tonight, which means its rabbit hole time. If you have ever done research, you will understand what…
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By Alice McVeigh #MariannebyMcVeigh #historicalfictionnovel My first experience of being bombed was on holiday in Israel, when very young, when the Six-Day War broke out, and the hotel just across the road from us got bombed. (My family flew out the next day.) My second bomb was in Belfast, in the 90s, during the “Troubles”…
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Austen’s novels speak loudly with society’s obsession with money and connections. Money and status was obtained through marriage. What we soon come to accept as a reader of Jane Austen’s novels is that her heroines marry for love (and a bit money). It is not ironic that Austen’s heroines marry within their class. It was…
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Hello everyone! As I mentioned last month, I went to Nashville to visit my daughter and see yet another stage adaptation of Pride and Prejudice. I arrived on February 14th and my husband had arranged for flowers and ice cream cake to be waiting for me. It was a wonderful extended weekend. We went to…
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One scene has kept me coming back to George Eliot’s Middlemarch for fifty years. Dorothea, a young and engaging woman, has married an older man, clergyman Mr. Casaubon, out of an intellectual and religious ardor for his scholarship. After just eighteen months, she realizes that she is trapped in a loveless marriage with a third-rate…
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“When first Mr. Bennet had married, economy was held to be perfectly useless, for, of course, they were to have a son. The son was to join in cutting off the entail, as soon as he should be of age, and the widow and younger children would by that means be provided for.” — Pride…
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Back in January 2021, I released my Austenesque novel, The Mistress of Rosings Park. In that story, draper’s shops play a strategic role. In my upcoming novel from Dragonblade Publishing [book 4 of 5 in the Lyon’s Den Connected World Series, Lost in the Lyon’s Garden], my heroine is employed at a draper’s shop and…
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She is an established literary figure in English literature. Austen’s skillful use of mixing together the narrator’s telling the story with a character’s thoughts and emotions and dialogue was just catching on in the late 1700s and early 1800s, but it is a mainstay in modern fiction. She created literary realism.
People speak of the greatness of Shakespeare, but falter when asked to read or explain his works. Not so, with Jane Austen. Because her works have been so easily consumed for more than 200 years, some forget how groundbreaking the six novels of the daughter of a simple rector in rural Hampshire, England, can be. We on this blog have not forgotten.
