Category: military
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Two Women, A World Apart
Two books give me joy in the New Year. The first, by Sarah Emsley, is The Austens, a novel about Jane Austen’s relationship with her sister-in-law, Fanny Palmer Austen. The second, by Rebecca Romney, is Jane Austen’s Bookshelf, nonfiction about women writers who shaped the English author. Both works are part of the onslaught of…
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Packet Ships, Peril, and Persuasion: Setting Sail in 1813 (+ an Excerpt)
There’s something gloriously impractical about sending a lady to sea in the Regency era. The skirts! The cockroaches! The chamber pots that slid everywhere! Yet by 1813, Britain was bursting with people doing exactly that—soldiers, diplomats, merchants, and, occasionally, their wives—rattling around the globe in those sturdy little packet ships I’ve been describing lately. My…
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All The World’s A Stage
We just returned home from our second visit of the summer to the Stratford Festival here in Ontario to end the summer with a celebration of theatre. This time, it was all Shakespeare! The festival—being in a place called Stratford, which is most conveniently on the River Avon—concentrates on The Bard’s works, and has a…
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Blackbirds in Austen’s World
The war widow: sentimental depiction of a grieving woman whose husband has gone to fight in the South African War. Photograph of The Boer War, a painting by John Byam Shaw. &&&& These reflections upon military widowhood in Austen’s time found root in the first and seventh volumes of the Bennet Wardrobe Series, where Lydia…
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Thaddeus Ever Valiant
There’s always the hope that there might remain a brilliant female writer from the 1700s or early 1800s who has been lost to obscurity. That’s why, over the years, I go back once in a while to read someone new to me. One of these is Jane Porter, who along with her sister Maria became…
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The Soldier and the Author
Last month, I mentioned that I’ve started into serious edits for a novel I began a while ago. The working title is The Soldier’s Tale, and this is Colonel Fitzwilliam’s story. As do so many Austen-inspired authors, I love the colonel. Jane Austen gives us such a small glimpse of him; he is little more…
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Freud and Writing Austenesque Fiction
Consider the Canon. Jane Austen is frequently thin on details and does not offer much data about the Regency’s social environment. She rarely addresses the great questions of the day, except for suggesting that Tom Bertram’s time in the West Indies left him scarred and damaged. The same holds for settings. She does not expend…
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A Taxing Subject for Americans—and for Austen, Her Peers
April is tax month in the U.S. for most people, so this month’s blog will cover the topic. For the British of Jane Austen’s time, as well as for modern citizens, taxes were both necessary for the realm and a drain on the populace. (My fellow Always Austen author, Don Jacobson, took on the topic…
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Tough World for Jane Austen
In reflecting back on my first work of fiction on the life of Jane Austen, I knew I had my Jane Austen novel when I read a seemingly unrelated work: Richard Holmes’ The Age of Wonder. This history of scientific and industrial developments during the period spanning Austen’s life went far beyond “three or four…
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Fresh Thoughts on the 2024 AGM
It is ever so difficult to characterize an annual general meeting (AGM) of the Jane Austen Society of North America (JASNA). There are so many different elements—local tours, specialty events, sometimes a major evening event, the plenary speeches open to all attendees. Multiple breakout sessions go simultaneously for two days so that no one person…