We’re always deriding her, but how would you feel if not only your income but your house AND its furnishings were entailed? And, as we know, Mrs. B. “would be ashamed of having [an estate] that was only entailed on me.” … Read on
I have no idea why or how I came up with idea of Pride and Prejudice and Kitties – a thoroughly ridiculous idea at best! But then, Jane herself has an appreciation of the ridiculous. And I like having fantasies about my cat’s pursuits and preoccupations. Isn’t that what cat-lovers do, have fantasies about their cats? Dog-lovers don’t have fantasies because dogs act out everything and leave no room for the imagined. When our book came out, my coauthor, Debbie and I, were roundly accused of copying Pride and Prejudice and Zombies.. But the (unhappy) truth was we’d had been working on our concept and honing our query for over six years. Not to mention that it took almost eighty agents before we found one who sold the book. Originally the publisher asked for 100,000 words to go with the photos – almost as many words as in Pride and Prejudice itself! We got them down to 30,000 but even now … Read on
Note: This post was originally published in a slightly altered form at womensmemoirs.com. My late kitty, Mittens, didn’t have much personality. As my friend and co-author, Debbie, once observed, “he’s one notch above a stuffed animal.” I argued for two notches, but she had a point. Poor guy. It wasn’t his fault that he was born with no street-smarts or even house-smarts, and slept 23-3/4 hours a day. He was also terribly timid and ran away meowing if he even saw an ant. The most dangerous thing he ever attacked was a Starbucks straw. So imagine my shock and amazement when Mittens caught and killed a mouse in our living room, just a few weeks before he died. It goes to show, you never know what someone is capable of. Furthermore, “what someone is capable of” is not fixed or finite; it changes and shifts as we evolve. I’ve seen this truth play out (to one mouse’s misfortune) in many … Read on
I brought this hat back from Venice when we were living in Florence a few years ago. I know – it’s more of a Henry James than a Jane Austen thing. Mittens has that world-weary look of the perpetual traveler. Maybe it’s Mr. Wickham on one of his post-marital sojourns while Lydia visits Pemberley. Jane Austen mentions London and Bath but he could have taken a quick jaunt to Venice. He definitely looks like he may have had too much of a good thing. Poor Mittens; he was not a terribly excitable kitty. His main response to our taking him to live with us in Florence was to yawn. … Read on
I fell asleep listening to Emma the other night on my iPod, and woke up listening to Hitler. Struggled to wake myself up and out of the nightmare but didn’t quite succeed. I realized in the morning that Emma had morphed into Explaining Hitler* (the books are arranged alphabetically). Last month Middlemarch leapt into Moscow 1941. The history books are great for walking but not for sleeping. The trouble is, books can switch in the middle of the night. The way around this is to make a playlist of the book you want to listen to during the night, so it just keeps circling. What books you listen to at night are important. For me, only Jane Austen and George Eliot’s Middlemarch pass the test because I know and love Austen’s novels and Eliot’s masterpiece intimately and trust them completely. (Sometimes Sense and Sensibility is hard to take at night though, because Marianne’s grief and panic in London are so … Read on
Jane Austen is one of the ten reasons I’m glad I’m alive. Or maybe even one of five, right up there with love, the silliness of cats, and morning light in the trees. When I think about Jane Austen I feel gratitude for her wisdom, wit, and genius; her stories are about all of us, and her characters are all of us. (Have you ever caught yourself sounding horrifyingly like foolish, vulgar Mrs. Bennet or pedantic Mary? And haven’t we all been Emma Woodhouse at her very worst moment?) Jane, being Jane, understood the part gratitude plays in love: “But above all, above respect and esteem, there was a motive within her of goodwill which could not be overlooked. It was gratitude; gratitude, not merely for having once loved her, but for loving her still well enough to forgive all the petulance and acrimony of her manner in rejecting him, and all the unjust accusations accompanying her rejection.…Such a change … Read on
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