Hey Louisa Cornell. You’ve won the Jane Austen Amiable Rancor Calendar. And just in time for the new year. Email your mailing address to me at myretta -at- gmail -dot- com.
Hey Louisa Cornell. You’ve won the Jane Austen Amiable Rancor Calendar. And just in time for the new year. Email your mailing address to me at myretta -at- gmail -dot- com.
It is too late for me to put anything on my Christmas list–Christmas is only two days away, yipes–but there is nothing to stop me from dreaming, is there?
So I might as well dream about receiving Regency gifts.
One item I would love to have is a Regency era nightgown. A reproduction of one, I mean. The nice thing is, I could probably get one of these someday. Here’s a particularly lovely one, from White Nightie.
I once had a nightgown something like this one. A college friend gave it to me. It had been her grandmother’s. I loved that nightgown and wore it for years until it wore out.
I’ve always wanted a piece of Regency era furniture. A pretty chest of drawers or something. This piece on ebay would do very nicely, I think. It would be lovely to furnish a home with such furniture, although I’d opt for modern beds and sofas. And electric lighting.
What Christmas list would be complete without jewelry? I’ve always wanted a genuine antique cameo. This one, also on ebay, is lovely.
What I should be doing, rather than dreaming of Regency gifts is wrapping some!
What do you wish for for Christmas this year? What do you have left to do?
Look on my website for the grand prize winner of the Harlequin Historical Authors Holiday Giveaway.
Maureen, you’re the winner of two Jane Austen board books! Please email me at susannamfraser AT gmail DOT com to collect your prize.
Happy Birthday, Jane!
It’s amazing that just six books from one woman, writing over two hundred years ago, could so profoundly affect us still–but she was writing universal truths, after all, and those truths don’t go away just because we’ve got lattes, and the internet, and horseless carriages.
Jane, to her credit, did not settle. She persevered in her work in private, only able to grab times to write here and there. She did not get to announce to her family that she had a deadline, and therefore they had to leave her alone and eat mac and cheese for the next few weeks.
She had the chance for a married life, but turned it down. I’m not on top of any scholarship about why she might have said yes, then taken it back twenty-four hours later, but I’m guessing she didn’t want to settle just for the comfort of being a married woman in her own home. It’s heartbreaking to think that Jane–who defined romantic love for many of us in her books–wasn’t able to find it for herself, but at least she didn’t have to pull a Charlotte Lucas and marry out of necessity, as opposed to love.
In that, Jane was a true kick-ass heroine, a woman who did what she wanted to despite the strictures of her situation and society. She wrote, she made her own life choices, and her definitions of life, love, family, and society remain vital guides to readers and writers today.
Happy Birthday, Jane!
