Category: Jane Austen

Belated Happy Halloween!

Updated on January 10, 2013 by Elena Greene

Besides anxiety about Sandy, Halloween has obsessed me for much of this week. This past weekend I helped to run a Halloween Party for my UU church, complete with a Haunted House put on by some of the older youth including one of my daughters, who played her role to creepy perfection.

While waiting for Sandy to hit, we finished carving our pumpkins in accordance with this year’s theme, Lord of the Rings. (My daughters dressed up as Elven maidens in medieval-style gowns and their ever-useful Vulcan ears.) Here’s my pumpkin, carved with the head of a Balrog, the fire demon that the wizard Gandalf battles in the mines of Moria.

Carving vegetables into scary shapes was already a custom during the Regency, although potatoes and turnips were often used. If you want to learn more, check out my post about Jack-o-Lanterns from a few years ago.

We were fortunate enough not to lose power, so I was able to toast the pumpkin seeds the next day. This year, we experimented with a Mexican-inspired version. They were quite yummy. Those that I didn’t spill on the kitchen floor while transferring from pan to storage container, that is!

Here’s my recipe should you care to try it:

Ingredients: pumpkin seeds, olive oil, chili powder, cumin, salt.

Rinse pumpkin seeds. Remove all pulp. Drain and spread on a cookie sheet to dry overnight.

Preheat oven to 250F. Line baking sheet with foil.

Toss pumpkin seeds in enough olive oil, salt, cumin and chili powder (about twice as much chili powder as the cumin) to lightly coat them.

Bake for about 1 hour, tossing every 15 minutes, until golden brown.

Cool. Store in airtight container at room temperature for up to 3 months.

Lastly, I was browsing around Youtube and found this clip of Northanger Abbey as if it really were a Gothic horror novel.

I hope you all enjoyed or will enjoy your Halloween, if you live in an area where it has been rescheduled. I think it’s important for the children (all of us, really) to maintain fun traditions even during scary, troubling times.

So what did you do for Halloween or what are you planning?

Elena
www.elenagreene.com
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Posted in Frivolity, Jane Austen, Research | Tagged halloween, Northanger Abbey, pumpkins | 3 Replies

It All Comes Back To Jane Austen

Updated on January 9, 2013 by Diane Gaston

Welcome to our new home! We expect our new home to be ever more comfortable. I watch a lot of HGTV – House Hunters, Property Virgins, Property Brothers, Love It or List It – so I see lots of new homes. Let me assure you, the Riskies have moved in to space that is more “open concept” and all of our appliances are stainless steel and our counters, granite….Or the Regency equivalent.

And who better to invite to our new home but Jane Austen, who will stay with us until her birthday December 16. In honor of Jane, we thought we would each take turns discussing What Jane Austen Has Meant to Me.

There will be prizes – including a grand prize of a $50 Amazon gift card! My prize today is the British Library Writers Lives edition of Jane Austen by Deirdre Le Faye. Eventually we will be using Rafflecopter for giveaways, but I don’t quite know how yet, so I’ll randomly choose a winner from the comments on this blog.

I’ve mentioned before that I came late to loving the Regency, not until I started writing in 1995. I’d read Pride and Prejudice and Sense and Sensibility in some English class along the way, but it wasn’t until my writing pals Helen and Julie introduced me to Georgette Heyer and Regency Romance (the Signets and Zebras) that I began to really fall in love with the Regency.

One event clinched it.

Helen, Julie, and I went to see the 1995 Amanda Root/Ciaran Hinds movie Persuasion, which had been a BBC TV production in the UK but released in theaters in the US. It was this movie adaptation of a Jane Austen book I’d never read that made the Regency come alive for me.

From the country house of the Elliots to the chic rooms in Bath to the simple seaside abode of the Harviles, the Regency world the move depicted seemed so real to me. Maybe it was because the whole movie was filmed on location, but, even so, the details were not prettied up for film. The livery of the Elliot footmen looked a bit shabby, as it would have for a baronet whose fortunes were dwindling. Skirts and boots got muddy during country walks, as they would have in a time without paved walkways. The dancing was boisterous but not polished and practices, as professional dancers would have performed. The hero and heroine were attractive but not “beautiful people.”

The Regency people in the story also acted in ways I believed were true to the period. The emphasis on status, on honor and obligation seemed genuine to me. There were bored privileged young women, proud impoverished ones, scheming social climbers. There were also “normal” people, like the Musgroves and the Crofts. And Ann and Wentworth, of course.

Jane Austen may have been exploring the role of persuasion throughout the story, but she also crafted a lovely, satisfying romance, with familiar Romance themes. Persuasion is both a reunion story (Ann and Captain Wentworth were once betrothed) and a Cinderella story (Ann, the put-upon sister finds great love in the end). The conflict was poignant – Ann regretted breaking her betrothal to Wentworth; Wentworth remained bitter that she threw him off in order to seek better prospects.

There’s a lovely villain in Ann’s cousin, William Elliot, who becomes intent on courting her, and more complications ensue when Wentworth considers himself obligated to marry the injured Louisa Musgrove. The steps Ann and Wentworth each make to find their way back to each other are subtle, but very satisfying and very typical of romance novels of today.

After seeing the movie, I had a picture in my mind that was my Regency. I read Persuasion and Pride and Prejudice and all of Jane Austen’s books, even Lady Susan. The social attitudes from Jane Austen’s books seeped into my brain, as did the language, the rhythm of the conversation.

So you might say Jane Austen helped create my Regency world!

Have you seen this version of Persuasion? What do you think of it? Comment for a chance to win today’s contest.

Holiday Giveaway! And also remember to enter the Harlequin Historical Authors Holiday Giveaway. Today’s day is Sarah Mallory’s. For more details, go here.

Posted in Giveaways, Jane Austen | Tagged Jane Austen, Persuasion | 26 Replies

Your “first”

Updated on January 9, 2013 by Amanda McCabe/Laurel McKee

I always love Jane Austen week here! (And not just because it reminds me that my mom’s birthday is also December 16 and I need to remember to get her a gift…) It gives me a chance to revisit these books that mean so much to me, and maybe do a little re-reading and reminiscing.

My “first” was Emma. I found an old, yellowed paperback copy at my grandmother’s house, it had a girl in a pretty dress on the cover so I decided to give it a try. I had already read some Heyer and a few Barbara Cartlands, so I knew a little about the Regency period (enough to know I loved it and wanted to live in that world, though not at that point much “real” history). I love, love, loved the story, and immediately ran to the library to find the rest of the Austen novels, plus a bio! I was amazed to find out the author had been dead over 200 years and wasn’t a writer working right then, her characters seemed so real and vivid to me. Some of their concerns were different from mine (marrying asap and to the right man, since there is no other choice!), some I could relate to (parents can be sooo annoying!), but the characters at their core seemed like people I knew and wanted to spend time with, and that has never changed.

Last night I went to a jazz concert, and listened to a 15-minute version of a song I love (“Take the A Train”), and heard things in it I never had before, and realized Austen has much in common with this other love of mine, jazz music. There are always variations on a theme in Austen, things that keep popping up on re-reading that I never saw before, things that resonate with me at different ages, and that means her books always repay revisiting. That’s her rare genius. And since I’m getting ready to get married on Saturday (a core concern of all Austen characters!) I am thinking I need to re-read some Pride & Prejudice or Persuasion to make sure I’m ready…

All commenters on today’s blog get put in the drawing for our grand prize (a $50 Amazon giftcard!), but I am also giving away an adorable Jane Austen puzzle! It would make a great holiday gift if you have an Austen fan in your life (or a great gift to yourself!). How did you get hooked on Austen? What was your “first”? (You never forget your first!!)

Posted in Giveaways, Jane Austen | Tagged Jane Austen | 17 Replies

Thank you, Jane Austen

Updated on January 9, 2013 by Janet Mullany

There are many reasons to thank Jane Austen. Hours of escapism reading or watching movie adaptations, hours of pondering or discussing what she was really saying. She’s a great artist whose work is forever open to interpretations–thoughtful, controversial, or just plain wacko–and she will stay with you for a lifetime, changing as you do.

It’s interesting that for a woman whose private life was so very private–thanks in part to Cassandra’s scissors–that she writes so convincingly and with such authority about love.

Her books are about courtship and love, yes, but she deflects her happy endings, leaving her couples on the way to the altar. Her depictions of marriage are not always great–relationships gone stale (the Bennets), marriages that you know are just going to be trouble (the Wickhams). We have the particularly lifeless Gardiners of P&P who are surely there to push the plot forward (sorry, Miss Austen, I’ve always suspected they’re there for that reason). The Crofts are happy but childless, unusual in an age when marriage = children. Is Mrs. Croft’s year ashore, sick and missing her husband, really a reference to a pregnancy that went badly wrong?

Furthermore, there is the evidence in the letters (and sorry, I can’t quote you a reference because then this post would be even later) that falling in love is a woman’s choice; that she can and should allow herself to do so. The implication is that falling in love–an uncontrollable thoughtless impulse–is doomed. (Marianne Dashwood, we’re talking about you.) Love is a power a woman holds in check until the suitable prospect appears, a man of virtue (Edward Bertram, zzzzz), of wealth (Darcy, who is probably not Colin Firth in a wet shirt), or even one who can comfortably provide for you (Mr. Collins. Try not to think about it).

The evidence is in the novels: that not one of her heroines makes a marriage that would in any way defy the social norms. Not even Lizzy and Darcy. Sure, he has a bunch of money and huge tracts o land but she’s gentry, possibly from a family like Austen’s that had some aristocratic connections a few generations ago.His aristocratic connections are too close for comfort.

Check out that first proposal scene again (in the book, not the movie adaptations):

In vain I have struggled. It will not do. My feelings will not be repressed. You must allow me to tell you how ardently I admire and love you.

(Wowsa)

But remember, we’re in Lizzy’s point of view. Austen does not allow us to hear Darcy’s proposal in his words. Instead, we get Lizzy’s interpretation:

… you chose to tell me that you liked me against your will, against your reason, and even against your character?

And that’s what makes Austen so brilliant, by leaving us guessing. And guessing. And talking about it. Her control of point of view, what the reader needs to know and when, if ever, is what I admire most about Austen’s writing.

What do you like most about Austen’s writing? And what do you think is impossible to translate into a movie script?

Prizes: Today I’ll give away a couple of copies of Jane Austen Made Me Do It, a collection of short stories edited by Laurel Ann Nattress of Austenprose chosen from among those of you who comment on today’s post. That will automatically enter you into our grand drawing of a $50 amazon gift certificate!

Thanks for joining us to celebrate Austen’s birthday this week.

Posted in Giveaways, Jane Austen | 17 Replies

Jane made it real

Updated on January 9, 2013 by Elena Greene

I hope I won’t be drummed out of the Risky Regencies for this, but I have to confess it took me a while to warm to Jane Austen.

My introduction to the Regency wasn’t Jane Austen, but Georgette Heyer and the stacks and stacks of Regency romances by other authors lying around our house. I read them voraciously as a child, getting in trouble with the nuns at my elementary school for having one in my book-bag.

I think I was about twelve when, having read enough book blurbs that said, “in the tradition of Jane Austen”, I decided to pick up Pride and Prejudice. And embarrassing as it is to admit, I found it slow going. At the time, I was a lonely, nerdy kid and I craved the escape of fantasy, preferring the Chronicles of Narnia to realistic fiction like Beverly Cleary’s Ramona books (even though I now recognize how wonderful they are). The same thing happened with Jane Austen, since she wrote realistic contemporary fiction, using events and settings (“three of four families in a country village”) that seemed less glamorous than the glittering ton parties, duels and adventures I found in Regencies by Georgette Heyer and other authors.

As I’ve gotten older and possibly a bit wiser, I’ve come to know that reality can be as powerful, maybe more so—than fantasy. I recognize the brilliance of Jane Austen’s characterizations and the skill with which she crafted her stories on “the little bit (two inches wide) of ivory on which I work with so fine a brush.” I’ve come to love her portrayal of her times and I know this has affected my own writing. I enjoy rural settings very much and I don’t feel the need for all my heroes and heroines to be aristocrats.

My own daughters are learning to appreciate Jane Austen at an earlier age. We’ve read the books together, but seeing the movies does help. I didn’t see any of the Jane Austen adaptations that were available when I was growing up, which is probably just as well, as I’ve been disappointed in the 70s versions I’ve seen. But any of the more recent productions, like the 1995 Colin Firth/Jennifer Ehle P&P would have provided enough visual beauty—the costumes, the settings—to satisfy my craving for fantasy. I’m sure I would have read the book with different eyes.

So how do you see Jane Austen—as the realistic fiction, as fantasy, or something else? Can you forgive me my youthful foolishness in not recognizing her brilliance on first reading? Comment for the chance to win this “Amiable Rancor” calendar from The Republic of Pemberley.