Your online source for Jane Austen and her legacy
As regular readers of this blog well know, Jane Austen and murder mysteries are my genres of choice. Combine the two, and I’m as giddy as Lydia Bennet with an invitation to Brighton. Last year I discovered a new author who blended both of my favorite flavors into an Austen inspired parfait. Murder at Longbourn... Continue Reading →
Last week a customer presented me with a torn clipping from a newspaper and passionately told me she HAD to read this book! It was a review for The Cookbook Collector, by Allegra Goodman. Ok! I hadn’t read a word about this one yet, but she sure caught my attention. As a bookseller, I love... Continue Reading →
What qualifies a story as a retelling of a Jane Austen novel? Reverent adherence to Austen’s plot line? Faithful interpretation of characterization? Emulation of her prose style? I asked myself these questions several times while reading Jenni James’ new novel Northanger Alibi, the first book in her Austen Diaries series of contemporary counterparts to Austen’s... Continue Reading →
From the desk of Christina Boyd: I was anxious to read The Man Who Loved Pride & Prejudice: A Modern Love Story with a Jane Austen Twist, by Abigail Reynolds as I have been a fan of her Pemberley Variations series for a few years, own all her other commercially published and self-published books and... Continue Reading →
Stepping into the 21st-century, Elizabeth Aston’s new novel Writing Jane Austen offers a completely different vintage of Austen inspired paraliterature than her previous six books based on Pride and Prejudice characters and their families from the early 19th-century. Set in present-day London, readers will immediately discover that Austen’s influence of three or four families in... Continue Reading →
If you have not heard about the book Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, you must be from another planet. The break-out best seller of 2009 (and soon to be a major motion picture starring Natalie Portman) took the publishing industry quite unawares making its co-author Seth Grahame-Smith a hot property, oodles of publicity for its... Continue Reading →
From the desk of Virginia Claire Tharrington: In the new novel Dearest Cousin Jane, author Jill Pitkeathley paints a wonderful portrait of Jane Austen’s cousin Countess Eliza de Feuillide. Eliza seems to have had an intoxicating effect on most of the Austen family, but Henry, James, and Jane are the most taken with her. It becomes... Continue Reading →
Happy Easter everyone. I received my Easter egg a day early. It is sitting on top of my head and is not the chocolate variety. Add to that a nice shiner and I feel quite the proper street ruffian. I joke about my enthusiasm to sell Jane Austen to the masses at my job at... Continue Reading →
In The Other Mr. Darcy, last year’s debut Austenesque novel by Monica Fairview we were introduced to Fitzwilliam Darcy’s American cousin Robert Darcy. Now the story continues with The Darcy Cousins, a Pride and Prejudice sequel to a sequel when his two younger siblings Clarissa and Frederick Darcy arrive from Boston and join their brother... Continue Reading →
From the desk of Laurel Ann Nattress: Last unfinished works by acclaimed novelist have an irresistible attraction. Inevitably someone will want to complete them. Psychologically we all want closure in our own lives as well as our literature. I readily admit when I first read Sanditon, Jane Austen’s last unfinished novel, and came to the... Continue Reading →
Jane Austen’s last unfinished novel Sanditon ended after 22,000 words and midway into what may have been chapter twelve. Her draft manuscript was a bright beginning introducing us to the seaside town in development as a health resort and a list of over 20 characters. For anyone who has turned to the last page and... Continue Reading →
It is a truth universally acknowledged that in Carrie Bebris’ clever Jane Austen inspired mysteries, whenever Mr. and Mrs. Darcy embarks on a carriage journey across England they are sure to end up investigating a murder in a country village inhabited by someone or other of Jane Austen’s characters from one of her novels. This... Continue Reading →
