Posts Tagged ‘jane austen’

Birthdays are a big deal…even more so when you’re turning 236, like the inimitable Jane Austen. I’m excited to participate in Austen’s Birthday Soiree today along with dozens of other Janeites worldwide…and to be giving away a copy of Potter-style Pride and Prejudice notecards to one lucky commenter! 

I’ve done lots of book events over the past few months, and the issue keeps coming up. Why is Jane Austen so revered and so relevant 236 years after her birth?

The answer is probably one that will annoy academics and occupy writers for centuries to come. In celebration of her birthday, I’ll tell you why I find Miss Austen so refreshing, two centuries on.

You see, the more I appreciate her body of work, the more I realize that it’s not Austen’s love stories that interest me. It’s the sense of inner amusement with which the author approaches all of society. Nobody found other people as ridiculous and as gently amusing as Jane, and even today in a world without the marriage market, the fumbling country-dance or the Empire waist, there’s something to be relished in passages that poke at all we once held dear.  Things haven’t changed so much in the many years since Jane Austen helped invent the modern novel, and what better birthday present could you wish for than the gift of timelessness?

Why do you find Jane Austen relevant today (or not)? Comment below and you could win a set of Potter-style Pride and Prejudice notecards!  The contest will close next Friday, December 24, and is open to residents of the United States and Canada only.

Don’t forget to visit the other Austen’s Birthday Soiree participants, listed below, for your chance to win even more Austenesque gifts.  Thanks to Maria Grazia of My Jane Austen Book Club and  Katherine Cox of November’s Autumn for organizing.

Participants in Austen’s Birthday Soiree

• Sharon Lathan
  Blog: Sharon Lathan
  Giveaway: one copy of Miss Darcy Falls in Love
• Emily Snyder
  Blog: O! Beauty Unattempted
  Giveaway: one copy of Letters of Love & Deception 
• Laurel Ann Nattress
  Blog: Austenprose
  Giveaway: one signed copy of Jane Austen Made Me Do It
• C. Allyn Pierson
  Blog: SemiTrue Stories
  Giveaway: one copy of Mr. Darcy Little Sister (open internationally)
• Cindy Jones
  Blog: First Draft
  Giveaway: one signed copy of My Jane Austen Summer and a package of Lily Berry’s Pink Rose Tea by Bingley’s, Ltd.
• Farida Mestek
  Blog: Regency stories set against the backdrop of Regency England
  Giveaway: one copy of I was Jane Austen Best Friend, by Cora Harrison
• Marilyn Brant
  Blog: Brant Flakes
  Giveaway: A canvas ACCORDING TO JANE tote bag and a pair of A SUMMER IN EUROPE luggage tags
• Prue Batten
  Blog: Mesmered’s Blog
  Giveaway: one copy of Georgiana Darcy’s Diary: Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice continued, Anna Elliott
• Erin Blakemore
  Blog:  The Heroine’s Bookshelf
  Giveaway: Pride and Prejudice notecards, by Potter Style
• Blog: vvb32 reads
  Giveaway: Jane Austen’s Little Instruction Book (Charming Petites), by Jane Austen, edited by Sophia Bedford-Pierce, illustrated by Mullen & Katz, introduction by Barbara Paulding
• Karen Doornebos
  Blog: The Fiction vs. Reality Smackdown
  Giveaway: 2 Jane Austen candles and 2 signed copies of Definitely Not Mr. Darcy plus drink coasters and tea!
• Regina Jeffers
  Blog: ReginaJeffers’s Blog
  Giveaway: one signed copy of Christmas at Pemberley
• Alyssa Goodnight
  Blog: Alyssa Goodnight   
  Giveaway: one Jane Austen Action figure
• Deb Barnum
  Blog: Jane Austen in Vermont
  Giveaway: 2012 calendars from the Wisconsin JASNA Region
• Laura Hile, Susan Kaye, Pamela Aidan, and Barbara Cornthwaite
  Blog: Jane Started It!
  Giveaway: one copy of Young Master Darcy: A Lesson in Honour, by Pamela Aidan; one set of Frederick Wentworth, Captain (Books 1 and 2), by Susan Kaye; two copies of Mercy’s Embrace: So Rough a Course (Book 1), by Laura Hile; one copy of George Kinghtley, Gentleman (Books 1 and 2), by Barbara Cornthwaite
• Juliet Archer
  Blog: Choc Lit Authors’ Corner
  Giveaway: one copy each of Persuade Me and The Importance of Being Emma
• Jane Greensmith
  Blog: Reading, Writing, Working, Playing
  Giveaway: one copy each of Intimations of Austen, and Sense & Sensibility (Marvel Illustrated)
• Jenny Allworthy
  Blog: The Jane Austen Film Club 
  Giveaway: a copy of Northanger Abbey DVD starring Felicity Jones and JJ Feild (The winner will choose region 1 or 2 DVD)
• Sitio Jane Austen
  Blog: El Salón de Té de Jane
  Giveaway:  one copy of the Spanish edition of Sense and Sensibility and one copy of  DVD package with adaptations of Jane Austen. (It’s only zone 2, but it’s in Spanish and English ), and one copy of BBC’s Emma with Romola Garai (Blue-ray)
• Kaitlin Saunders
  Blog: Kaitlin Saunders
  Giveaway: one copy of A Modern Day Persuasion
• Becky Rhodehouse
  Blog: One Literature Nut
  Giveaway: selection of Austenesque Reads
• Patrice Sarath
  Blog: Patrice Sarath
  Giveaway: one copy of The Unexpected Miss Bennet
• Adriana Zardini
  Site: Jane Austen Brasil
  Giveaway: DVD – Sense and Sensibility (1995) – English / Portuguese subtitles
• Jane Odiwe
  Blog: Jane Austen Sequels 
  Giveaway: one mug with one of Jane Odiwe’s illustrations and one copy of Mr. Darcy’s Secret
• Courtney Webb
  Blog: Stiletto Storytime
  Giveaway: one copy of Noble Satyr by Lucinda Brant (Regency Romance)
• Jennifer Becton
  Blog: Jennifer W. Becton
  Giveaway: one copy of the eBook of the Personages of Pride and Prejudice Collection, which contains Charlotte Collins, “Maria Lucas,” and Caroline Bingley. Open internationally.
• Vera Nazarian
  Blog: Urban Girl Takes Vermont
  Giveaway: a copy of Vera Nazarian’s gift hardcover edition of her inspirational calendar and diary, The Perpetual Calendar of Inspiration
• Abigail Reynolds
  Blog: Pemberley Variations
  Giveaway: one signed copy of Mr. Darcy’s Undoing
• Blog: AustenAuthors
  Giveaway: one copy of Georgette Heyer’s Regency World, by Jennifer Kloester
• Katherine Cox
  Blog: November’s Autumn
  Giveaway: one $10 B&N Gift-card (US only)
• Maria Grazia
  Blog: My Jane Austen Book Club
  Giveaway: A selection of Austenesque reads

One of the questions I get asked most often is “I’m a fan of [insert author here].  What books and resources should I read to find out more?”

When I wrote The Heroine’s Bookshelf, I very deliberately decided to make the book as accessible as possible…which meant excluding a bibliography or academic footnotes.  However, the history major in me demanded a very rigorous research process, and I consulted multiple books and primary sources for each chapter.

Rather than bore you with my long, snarled list of primary sources and books, I’d like to recommend some great further reading to serve as an entree into the lives of my literary heroines.  Please bear in mind that I could have written an entire book on the research materials alone, so this represents a very truncated list!

Jane Austen: If you’re looking for a comprehensive guide to all things Jane, by all means start at The Republic of Pemberley’s most impressive Selective Jane Austen Bibliography.  Great starting places include Jane’s Fame:  How Jane Austen Conquered the World by Claire Harman and A Memoir of Jane Austen: And Other Family Recollections, by James Edward Austen-Leigh, a great period document that informs Jane bios to this day.

Zora Neale Hurston: Nobody wrote about Zora’s life quite as well as Zora herself, notably in Dust Tracks on a Road, but I particularly enjoyed Valerie Boyd’s Wrapped In Rainbows: The Life of Zora Neale Hurston and Zora Neale Hurston: A Biography of the Spirit by Deborah G. Plant.

Lucy Maud Montgomery: Maud scholarship is making huge strides, thanks in part to the L.M. Montgomery Institute and the Lucy Maud Montgomery Literary Society.  I found true inspiration and great information in Irene Gammel’s Looking for Anne of Green Gables, Mary Henley Rubio’s Lucy Maud Montgomery: The Gift of Wings, and the lovely Annotated Anne of Green Gables edited by Wendy Elizabeth Barry, Margaret Anne Doody, and Mary Doody Jones and published in a gorgeous edition by the Oxford University Press.

Alice Walker: Alice Walker is still living out her own biography.  I enjoyed Alice Walker: A Life by Evelyn C. White and Alice Walker: Critical perspectives past and present, edited by Henry Louis Gates, Jr. and K.A. Appiah.

Betty Smith: I was disappointed at the dearth of biography on this amazing figure of literature, and hope that more authors take up the call to document Betty’s life in greater detail.  That said, I devoured Valerie Raleigh Yow’s Betty Smith: Life of the Author of A Tree Grows in Brooklyn and found Carol Siri Johnson’s online dissertation on Betty Smith to be quite helpful.

Colette: Though she was a formidable, fascinating figure indeed, Americans don’t tend to pay too much attention to Sidonie-Gabrielle Colette, and many of her biographies are out of print.  I enjoyed Secrets of the Flesh: A Life of Colette by Judith Thurman and found interesting information in Michele Sarde’s Colette and Colette: A Life by Herbert R. Lottman.  If anything, any book on Colette is worth peeking into for ravishing photos of the famously beautiful Colette!

Margaret Mitchell: Peggy Mitchell was notoriously…unreliable when it came to relating her own biography.  That said, Ellen Firsching Brown and John Wiley have done a stunning job with their recently-released Margaret Mitchell’s Gone With the Wind: A Bestseller’s Odyssey from Atlanta to Hollywood. Darden Asbury Pyron’s Southern Daughter is an entertaining starting point for more biography on Peg as opposed to the book for which she is famous.

Harper Lee: Nelle was the only other living author featured in my book, and she is notoriously private about her life to the chagrin of her fans and the detriment of her biographers.  That said, it is hard to find a biography as lovingly researched and thorough as Charles J. Sheilds’s Mockingbird: A Portrait of Harper Lee.

Laura Ingalls Wilder: Laura’s another writer who is currently undergoing a scholarship renaissance, helped along by the amazing folks at Beyond Little House and Laurati who are doing interesting work nationwide and even worldwide.  I was particularly entranced by Laura Ingalls Wilder: A Writer’s Life by Pamela Smith Hill, which is hands-down my favorite Laura biography.  Other great bios include John E. Miller’s Becoming Laura Ingalls Wilder, Anita Clair Fellman’s Little House, Long Shadow, and the ever-controversial The Ghost In the Little House by William Holtz, which chronicles the life and work of Rose Wilder Lane.  As far as Laura expertise, you can’t be savvier or more well-informed than the legendary William Anderson, who has made a place for himself as THE Laura expert of the ages.  Click here for a bibliography of his books and pamphlets on Laura.

Charlotte Brontë: Charlotte’s one of those women who has had books written on the books about her…there’s that much incredible information about the Brontë family.  I personally love Elizabeth Gaskell’s warm, chatty memoir about her friend, The Life of Charlotte Brontë, though it’s been criticized for its insistence that Charlotte was proper rather than passionate.   In case you care to read a biography on Charlotte not written in the nineteenth century, you can’t go wrong with Rebecca Fraser’s The Brontës or Lyndall Gordon’s Charlotte Brontë: A Passionate Life.

Louisa May Alcott: On last count, I personally own over 10 books about Louy.  My favorites include the very innocent, anachronistic yet informative Invincible Louisa by Cornelia Meigs and John Matteson’s unforgettable, Pulitzer-prize-winning double biography of Louisa and her father, Bronson…Eden’s Outcasts gets special mention as one of the only biographies that has both made me cry and that I have dreamt about.  Highly recommended.  That said, 2010 was a banner year for Alcott scholarship, producing both Harriet Reisen’s Louisa May Alcott:  The Woman Behind Little Women and Susan Cheever’s Louisa May Alcott:  A Personal Biography.

Frances Hodgson Burnett: “Fluffy” Burnett was another woman I found it hard to research, since she has been shunted off to the kidlit category by many dismissive biographers.  Her lovely autobiography, The One I Knew Best of All, is barely worth mentioning for its obvious unreliability.  That said, we must content ourselves with Anne Thwaite’s dual Frances bios and Gretchen Gerzina’s Frances Hodgson Burnett, and with Gerzina’s perceptive biographical notes in the W.W. Norton Annotated Secret Garden.

One of the best and weirdest parts of becoming a published author is being asked to speak.

If you’ve read The Heroine’s Bookshelf, you’ll know that I come from San Diego, CA. I never felt self-conscious about my speaking voice until I started my first year at Smith College in Massachusetts (I shall leave out the period of time I lived in Germany, which was another kind of speaking anxiety altogether). When I got to Smith, I didn’t just hear a bunch of new accents…I realized I had one, and that it had a kind of class/intelligence implication to some of my schoolmates and teachers. I started to feel really nervous about the sound of my own voice, even though I’ve always been a big talker.

A decade later, I’m a bit more accepting of my voice. I’ve worked hard to eliminate “like” from anything but casual conversation. Cue many opportunities to speak. From book clubs to conferences to groups of interested parties (I just did a really fun workshop at the Boulder Writers Meetup and am thrilled to have been invited to speak to the Denver/Boulder Jane Austen Society tomorrow) to interviews (this just in from Blackstone Audio…a conversation with the narrator of my book, Tavia Gilbert), I am called upon not only to say something, but to have something to say. And I find that I really like it.

In a way, this is all about layers, self-confidence, and security. Speaking to a group is just as thrilling, terrifying and instructive as writing, and I always learn something about myself along the way. Something else I’ve learned, though, not only from a career of counseling and training clients, is that effective speaking is also about listening, so don’t be surprised if I ask you some questions during my talks.

I guess I never realized that I might have something interesting to say!

I could probably write three books on crappy mothers in literature (not to mention the angelic ones like Caroline Ingalls or Marmee), but a simple blog post will have to suffice as I reflect on a few of literature’s most insufficient, yet appealing, moms.  Who would you add to this  list?

Scarlett O’Hara, Gone With the Wind:  Scarlett is not beautiful, nor is she a good mother at all.  We can barely chasten Rhett Butler for telling her a cat is a better mother than she, for Mrs. Hamilton/Kennedy/Butler extravagantly neglects the sheepish son and the ugly daughter who precede lovely little Bonnie Blue.  (Side note:  Margaret Mitchell’s portrayal of Wade Hampton Hamilton’s reaction to the events of the siege of Atlanta are brilliant and well worth rereading for anyone looking to learn a great lesson about conveying terror, the sweep of historical events, and the plot intricacies of main characters)  Though Scarlett gets punished for her neglectful motherhood in the end, we can’t help but wonder how her own angelic mom’s lessons never managed to wear off on her…and somehow manage to identify with her all the same.

Joan Crawford, Mommie Dearest: Okay, so Joan isn’t exactly a fictional character, though God only knows how fictitious her daughter’s famous tell-all memoir really is.  One fact, however, is abundantly clear:  JOAN CRAWFORD WAS AN EVIL MOTHER.  Attempted stranglings?  Throwing her daughter’s adopted status in her face?  Wire-hangered beatings?  Yeah.  Chalk it up to old Joan, who really knew how to bring the drama to her trainwreck family.

Mrs. Bennet, Pride and Prejudice: Our next selection is not so much a terrible mother as a very…misguided one.  Burdened with the cross of five daughters to marry off, Mrs. Bennet has many pressing worries.  But worse than her bumbling around all matrimonial affairs is a complete disregard of her daughters’ feelings that we have to admit seems excessive, even for the turn of the nineteenth century.  Mrs. Bennet is also…clueless.  “My poor nerves, you tear them to pieces! But I never complain.”

Ingrid Magnussen, White Oleander: Cruelty, neglect, abandonment, and even murder are all on good old Ingrid’s plate at some point, but once again the emotional aspects of the relationship between this anti-heroine and her daughter are of the most interest to me.  It isn’t that Ingrid is evil (she is)…it’s that she is utterly unable to identify with the daughter she gave birth to, and Janet Fitch explores the fallout of a mother’s failure in a pulpy, poignant read.

It’s Friday, and my Google Image Search obsession is as strong as ever.  Since Friday is a day for fun, I hereby bring you the first in a series of Friday blogs about covers of books included in The Heroine’s Bookshelf.  First installment:  Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, originally published in 1813.  Click to enlarge these gems!

From left to right, top to bottom:

1)  First, a bit of history.  Here’s the original front page (they didn’t do fancy artsy covers in the early 1800s).

2)  is kind of a swinging late 60sish take on P&P (reminds me of the exquisite Fairy Alphabet on Sesame Street).

3) has to be in the running for Lamest Cover Ever, right?

4) This illustration by Reuben Toledo brings a bit of fashion to Meryton.

5) and 6) Marvel recently put out a comic version of P&P that deserves two postings for its amazing covers by Sonny Liew.  I’ve included the first cover and the fourth.  Make sure to click to enlarge…they’re exquisite. 

7) Harper recently released a version of P&P styled after the Sparkly Vampire Series That Cannot Be Named…eek!

For another cool roundup of P&P covers, check out Belle of the Books’ recent post, which features tons of international Pride and Prejudice flava.

I have of course neglected to post the many, many covers that include a classic portrait of a woman on them.  Zzz.  What’s your favorite of these covers?  Got a favorite P&P cover you’d like to share?