Driving with Jane Austen

What? Among the many weird and off-the-wall things that cross my mind, I often play a mental game when I drive. It goes something like this: I pretend Jane Austen is riding shotgun with me, and I get to explain to her the workings of the automobile, traffic, commuting, and we discuss the improvements in …

Writing to Write

  As Jane Austen famously said: I am not at all in a humour for writing; I must write on till I am. Having trouble getting into the groove here so I thought I'd warm up with a blog post. Maybe it's the terrible weather we've been having. Almost every day for the last three …

Looking Back, and Ahead

So. Trying to get back into the groove here and get something posted. I imagine most of us are still reeling from Friday's events in Newtown, Connecticut. I've found it hard to think about much else, myself. So this afternoon I indulged in some escapism and watched "Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince." Not one …

Happy Birthday, Jane Austen!

She even got her own Google doodle! Although it's apparently only on Google's UK site. I think she has enough of an international appeal to warrant putting it up in the U.S. as well. :::sniff::: Author of six of the greatest novels in the English language, today is the 235th anniversary of her birth. With …

Clean Cup! Move Down!

Ok, that line isn't in the book, it's from the Disney movie Alice in Wonderland from 1951. But it is from the tea party scene. With the coming release of the Tim Burton movie, “Alice in Wonderland” many of us are feeling some Alice-fever. Based on this idea, Gypsyscarlett has posted a very intriguing list …

A few little discoveries which quickened my heart

I ran across this by accident yesterday on Amazon. There is a new BBC adaptation of Jane Austen's Emma, starring Romola Garai (pronounced "ro-MO-la Garry"). This was a television mini-series, and although it does not appear to have aired in the U.S., it has already aired in the U.K. The reviews on Amazon are very …

Fanfic gone wild?

As some people know, I am an unabashed Janeite. For the uninitiated, that means I adore Jane Austen's writing. She was brilliant, witty, comical, insightful, a master of the language and vastly underappreciated by modern readers. So when I saw Pride and Prejudice and Zombies at an online bookseller's site, I had to see what …

Reading Good Writing

Just some high level musings about reading classic literature, vs. whatever is on the best seller list. I've been on a classics kick lately, probably because I didn't read them in school, or not enough of them anyway. I remember a short course on Shakespeare in high school, and I took a semester of Shakespeare in college, …

Favorite Authors

My favorite authors, the ones I really admire, are the ones who write (or wrote) about ordinary life in such a way that they brought their worlds to life so clearly and compellingly that you feel as if you could step right into their characters' world, their very living room, and interact with them in …