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…
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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I am writing this post on New Year’s Eve 2025, with the idea that I will need this information for the release of the 5th book in my Dragonblade mystery/romantic suspense series. Actually, the first draft of the book,Lyon on the Inside is finished. I am busy typing it. Yes, I know that sounds laborious.…
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This year is the 185th anniversary of when six Dorset farm labourers were sent to an Australian penal colony, but their ‘crimes’ helped change the face of employment rights for generations to come – and it all began in the small village of Tolpuddle. Tolpuddle is a village near Dorchester in Dorset. During the years…
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Recently, I was attempting to explain this concept to my grandchildren, who were anticipating no school for President’s Day. However, they did you know that George Washington was actually born on February 11, 1731, and NOT on February 22, 1732, as we in the United States celebrate. How is that possible? First, let us look…
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This past September, my husband, aka the Marine, and I went to England for a day to see Stonehenge, then we traveled the next day to Romania. I shared of my visit to the lovely England countryside, and the busy Romanian Old Port in the first post. Here I continue my adventure. Our first two…
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After three years of effort, my current work in progress, Such I Was, is nearly complete! I have shared one or two excerpts from it before, but I would like to share a passage below. And at the end, there will be a giveaway! In this variation of Pride and Prejudice, after Jane follows Bingley…
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If you were to ask a gathering of Jane Austen fans and Pride and Prejudice lovers who their favourite side character is, I suspect Colonel Fitzwilliam would receive quite a large share of the votes. He has very little page-time, and Austen uses him as little more than a plot device, both to act as…
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Why did Colonel Brandon and Willoughby fire one shot and then walk away? This post explores the ins and outs of Regency duels.
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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.
