Your online source for Jane Austen and her legacy
Mansfield Park is considered (by some) to be the dark horse of Jane Austen’s oeuvre and her heroine Fanny Price intolerable. Poor Fanny. She really gets the bum’s rush in Austenland. The patron saint of the weak, insipid and downtrodden, she is Jane Austen’s most misunderstood heroine. In fact, many dispute if she is the... 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 →
From the desk of Laurel Ann Nattress: “One abandoned and the other uncompleted.” The Watsons and Sanditon may be fragments in Jane Austen’s literary canon, but they still deserve due deference. Composed over a decade apart in 1803-4 and 1817, each represents Austen’s desire to continue writing during two challenging times in her life. Written... 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 →
Gentle Readers: Please join me in welcoming author Lauren Willig today as she answers questions about her new book The Betrayal of the Blood Lily, Jane Austen and what's next in her writing career. Thanks for chatting with us Lauren! Your latest novel in the Pink Carnation series The Betrayal of the Blood Lily has... Continue Reading →
Northanger Abbey is the exuberant lesser-known child of Jane Austen’s oeuvre. Even though it was her first novel to be completed and sold in 1803, much to Austen’s bemusement it was never published and languished with Crosby & Co for thirteen years until she bought it back for the ten pounds that the publisher had... Continue Reading →
A nineteenth-century exotic locale, a handsome officer and a feisty heroine make for archetypical romantic fare, but Lauren Willig’s new novel The Betrayal of the Blood Lily is anything BUT a conventional bodice ripper embellished with historical detail. In her sixth novel in her “Pink Carnation” series, Willig exhibits once again that she is an... Continue Reading →
From the desk of Laurel Ann Nattress: Emma, Jane Austen’s fourth novel was published in 1815 and dedicated to the Prince Regent, later King George IV. The dedication was a request by the Prince and not Austen's idea. She privately abhorred the Regent for his treatment of his wife Princess Caroline, and his abhorrent dissipated... Continue Reading →
After being introduced to Jane Austen’s Lady Susan via A Soiree for Lady Susan, Austenprose’s rollicking cyber group read, replete with wagging tongues and fluttering fans, I delighted in discovering this ‘most accomplished Coquette in England’. So different from other Austen heroines, I welcomed her all the more for her flagrant flaws and mercenary machinations. Regretfully, as Jane Austen never got the chance to revise this novella, the limitations of the epistolary form did leave me with a desire for more. Enter Jane Rubino and Caitlen Rubino-Bradway’s novel Lady Vernon and Her Daughter, which certainly fulfills this desire… and more! This clever re-imagining by a mother and daughter team turns my previous notion about this heroine on its head. It intriguingly opens with an Austen inspired witticism:
Tuesdays in the book world are like Christmas. It is the official release day for many new titles. They arrive like presents to be opened and savored. Today, The Betrayal of the Blood Lily by Lauren Willig was officially released. It is the sixth book in the Pink Carnation series set in England, France and... Continue Reading →
While the Jane Austen sequel industry abounds with numerous books inspired by Pride and Prejudice, regretfully there are very few sequels to Austen’s first published novel Sense and Sensibility. Why? Possibly because some readers have been disappointed with half of Austen’s unsatisfactory ending for her two heroines. While the two Dashwood sisters do marry: staid... Continue Reading →
