Many Facebook posts are cyclical. Topics rise and fall as interest does, appearing fresh and current about every three or four years. Social media has been alive and kicking for slightly more than two decades, so themes that were broached in 2005 will appear again in 2010, 2015, and so on.
One recent moldy oldie deals with quirks (errors?) that pull the reader out of Austenesque tales. I will note that what drives a reader nuts may not be the same as what drives me to bounce off the walls. I am not going to dive into the current state of the “I get crazy when an Austenesque story does…” argument. Nor am I going to engage in the debate over writing in accurate Nineteenth-century prose versus composing in a Twenty-first-century approximation of how modern folks think people from 1811 spoke.
What we can agree on is that the stories we enjoy writing and reading become more rich and more textured through the use of language. Part of the fun of writing stories set in the 19th and 20th Centuries is that they show us the language in its more modern, advanced usage. While English remains a dynamic tongue, it entered into its most expressive period during the first decades of the 19th Century–exactly the time when Ms Austen was setting pen to paper.
How many of you are writers? How many of you are readers? How many of you go a little nuts when you write something and later realize that you have butchered the language? And how many of you go bonkers when you read a work that loses the nuances of the language?
You do not have to be one with the Oxford English Dictionary (OED), but it is one-stop shopping for all English vocabulary and usage. But you do need to understand how the language “works.”
English can be fun. The tongue is widely criticized for having but one rule—that it has no rules.
As James Nicoll noted, …on occasion, English has pursued other languages down alleyways to beat them unconscious and rifle their pockets for new vocabulary.
I offer for your consideration a note I received from my chair in the Writing Program at Benedictine University. Some friends will appreciate the second point about “all right” and “alright.”
From: Jean-Marie Kauth, PhD
Associate Professor, Core/Languages and Literature
Writing Director
Words formed in combination with all can create confusion in modern English; watch for fine distinctions.
All ready, already. All ready means “fully prepared.” Already means “previously.” We were all ready for Lucy’s party when we learned that she had already left.
All right, alright. Avoid the spelling alright; it is non-standard English.
All together, altogether All together means “all in a group” or “gathered in one place.” Altogether means “completely” or “everything considered.” When the board members were all together, their mutual distrust was altogether obvious.
Ref: Andrea Lunsford. The St. Martin’s Handbook. 6th Ed. Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2008.
&&&&
All notes on language and grammar aside, we are fortunate to live in a time when publishing has been democratized. Genre writers are able to produce and distribute work across a variety of platforms. Promotional opportunities abound.
One that is near to my heart is the 2026 I Love JAFF Valentine Giveaway. Running through February 14th—you will have the opportunity to enter your email address to be eligible to win one of seventeen e-books…or ALL seventeen. See the website for complete rules, but here’s your shot to dig into old favorites or about-to-be-at-the-top-of-your-list.
https://authoramandakai.wixsite.com/home/post/ilovejaff2026
Two people will be fortunate enough to win an e-book of my novel, In Plain Sight.
Please enjoy this excerpt where Elizabeth, living incognito as the housemaid Lizzy Bennet, expands on the power of love to the farmhand Will Smith, the equally unidentified Fitzwilliam Darcy.
This excerpt is ©2020 by Donald P. Jacobson. Reproduction is prohibited.
&&&&
As epiphanies went, Elizabeth would have to ask Mary or Edward whether William’s pronouncements in the glade were on par with Saul of Tarsus’s visions on the road to Damascus. Like the Biblical latter, the former resonated with such power that her world tilted on its axis.
When a young girl, Lizzy had entertained notions of love at first sight. Lizzy was too much her father’s daughter to view such fanciful inclinations with anything but skepticism.
I believe Papa considers himself a victim of “instant infatuation.” That, sadly, has fed twenty-five years of cynical behavior on his part. My heart tells me that this is something thoroughly different. There is a bubble of happiness that has unsettled my core. Perhaps…perhaps…
Here before her knelt a man who, by every measure she had ever known, was a danger to her person and an insult to her station. William Smith was not just beneath her but as far from Lizzy’s original class as the distance from the moon to the lowest level of a Welsh tin mine.
None of that mattered.
What had begun in the Netherfield barnyard and renewed itself on the Mimram River Road had evolved into something more burnished during those Dower House days. Like a bronze battering ram, that understanding crashed through Elizabeth’s last reserves.
There was a goodness about William Smith that shone through the scales of his crime—the contours of which she did not know. His nobility, his treasuring of her shabby virtue, led her to try to see beyond easy labels.
His earnest gaze swept away all notions, all bias.
Elizabeth’s awareness faded as she replayed each interaction from that first through the waltz to their flight to Egypt beneath the straw piled atop Longbourn’s wagon. Flashes of his jawline as she had nestled in his arms during their dance, his profile as he stared out the window at Longbourn’s fields, and his natural scent redolent of musk that weakened her knees—all carried her from this plane.
The rest of her world receded.
Elizabeth needed to understand this new state of being! How had she arrived here? She felt as though great slabs of a snowy cornice had fractured and slid down to bury her in an avalanche of emotion. Even more profound was the grainy bedrock left exposed on the steep pitch above, a new foundation for her future.
These past months had stripped Lizzy to her essentials. No longer was she Elizabeth Rose Bennet, gentlewoman. She had been broken and reshaped to a mighty purpose: to be what she was meant to be and not what others insisted she should be. She was now simply Lizzy Bennet, a woman in love with a man. That defined her.
William Smith had been the glue to repair her through those sennights of uncertainty in the Dower House to that awful moment when everything collapsed around her head the night of the Netherfield ball. The scars that crisscrossed her heart were glorious, highlighted in gold, the result of the tender hand of a kintsugi master. All could see and understand the woman she was now.
The purity of her comprehension was glorious!
She pulled in a vast draught of air, so full of the land’s freshness that it burst with life itself. ’Twas as if she were a babe, freshly birthed! Fresh from the womb, her eyes opened, and her ears unstopped. She saw and heard as if for the first time!
***
Smith had watched those chocolate pools as they lost focus when her contemplations turned inward. Elizabeth stood and floated on elvish feet across the dell to stop and stand above the limpid pool, arms wrapped around her narrow waist, head dipped, hiding those incredible eyes beneath her bonnet’s brim. Her study was so immaculate that Smith assayed that he could have crossed to her side without her noticing to tuck an errant tendril that had escaped her chapeau’s confines in place.
At first, William feared that her reverie might lead her to slip and fall on the foam-dampened tufts that lapped over the lip. Yet, he allowed her to be the mistress of her fate, tamping down his old inclinations to protect one and all in his circle.
Time slowed as the woodland sylph inhaled a massive breath.
A single leaf broke free of a branch high above the pool, rode along invisible currents swirling above the waters, and landed on the membrane that separated the two elements.
Its brown spikes shivered reality before the sprig disappeared into the small flume leading toward the Derwent. The universe surrounding the two poles had forever changed with its passage.
Her sigh drew his attention.
Elizabeth had turned to him; her rosy lips parted to reveal perfectly shaped, pearl-bud teeth. Her soprano laughter bounced around their paradise.
All pain and fear flowed away in the face of her happiness. Smith immediately understood that she had broken free of the last chains binding her to her ancient life. With that, he knew that she had accepted who he had been, how he had been broken and reshaped, and that she would have to wait for him.
That she would wait for him.
***
The moment stretched into eternity, so timeless was the clearing. As if in a dream, Lizzy had returned to his side to hold her hand down before him, urging him to stand, to accept her embrace. Lips raised and lowered established the communion that had been incipient for months but now was confirmed in seconds. Then she drew back to demurely tattoo her thumbs upon his shirtfront.
Elizabeth patted a hand upon his chest, a smile playing upon her delightfully swollen lips. “I know, dear man, that you have been bound by your existence these five years gone by.”
“Nearly six,” his voice rumbled next to her ear.
“Six then. You have had considerable time to contemplate what led to your downfall. Much of what you have learned has become ingrained like this stain that darkens my hands.” Lizzy held up the offending members.
She continued, “My revelations are much younger, mere infants compared to your lofty conclusions.
“I must give voice to them, or I shall surely burst.”
She stepped back from him and gathered in their hiding place with an all-encompassing sweep of her arms. “Think about the beauty hidden here, just yards away from a farm field. If you had not escorted me here, I never would have discovered it…or you.
“Is that not the way of all things?
“The world is hidden in plain sight, waiting to reveal all its wonders and horrors. The sadness of it all arises from the fact that some do not see, and others choose to ignore what is before them.
“My father raised me to observe but not to see. And if I, perchance, moved past looking at a scene, I learned to forget lest remembrance upset my world.
“In my quiet moments, I can cast back into the mists of my memories to see where my privilege blinded me to the plight of others. I recall a scene where a line of men shuffled in the dust along Meryton’s byways. It shames me to realize that one of those unfortunates was you.”
He reached out to her, but she darted away to settle like a frightened bird on a fallen tree trunk, its mossy verdure rich green.
She comforted him to relieve his worried look. “This love, my love,”—she giggled at her wordplay—“is still new to me. I had accounted myself a fair-minded woman. You have done nothing to offend me.
“But I have come hard against the confines of my parochial vision. This is a rude—and new—shock for me. I had taken pride—foolishly, it now seems—in my ability to sketch the personalities of others. How ironic that the shape of my nature was opaque to me.
“We can count ourselves amongst the fortunate ones. Far too many of our compatriots—yours of old and mine of more recent vintage—are trapped in the miasmas of their prejudices and pride.
“They are hindered because they have accepted that others have the right to dictate their station and behavior. They will grasp and clasp at the weakest of straws and the foulest of lies to feel more secure in their location upon the rungs of a hierarchy that demands a self-reinforcing affirmation from its adherents.
“And the biggest falsehood, propounded by those at the highest reaches, is that all can rise to the top through the dint of their goodness. The truth is that, for most, elevation comes only through that same grasping corruption you earlier decried.
“In such a world, my dear William, we are the lucky ones.
“We have dropped so low that our station does not matter. Nobody will pay attention to our actions. Nobody will care to see us. You and I can be as invisible as England in its millions, all but the Ten Thousand.”
Elizabeth stood and glided over to him, hands clenched into fists. Then she raised them and opened her fingers, their walnut stains contrasting with her face’s pristine skin.
“We no longer must worry about what we lose by not meeting society’s expectations or threatening the established scheme.
“We can lose nothing except each other, and I promise you, I have waited twenty years to find you.
“Our loss…another’s curse…is a blessing.
“We are finally free.”
Leave a Reply to Regina JeffersCancel reply