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
Here’s the question – do cats understand Christmas? Perhaps they’ve heard stories of Santa Claus, a jolly old elf who flies around making mischief delivering gifts. “But what does it do for me?” one might ask. Linus, for example, pictured above, does not get why this weird creature astride a goose is perched on his shoulder. “And what does it have to do with Pride and Prejudice?” We will explore this question in future blog posts, but it appears to us that Pride and Prejudice and Kitties and Christmas can all fit into one picture. … Read on
It’s fascinating how we look at TV and books as small children. Even when we understand them only partially, or barely at all, they become a part us and the meaning we make of the world. I was fairly strict about how much TV my daughter could watch when she was growing up. But whenever she was home sick, I let her watch the full BBC Pride and Prejudice – nearly six blessed hours of respite for both of us! Annelise was born in 1994 – a year before the P&P TV mini-series was made, so she started watching fairly young. She’s is a sophomore in college now and recently, when rewatching the series together, she reminded me about how I had explained one aspect of the film that puzzled her. It was the scene at the inn in Lampton where Darcy finds Elizabeth distraught over the news that Lydia has run off with Wickham: Darcy: You are not … Read on
Until now, we’ve generally referred to the query letter that sold our book, Pride and Prejudice and Kitties, as having been sent to “X” number of agents. But now, thanks to Galley Cat at Media Bistro, the word is out that our query letter was rejected by 75 agents well – 74 because we did finally sell the book. You can read our query here. Actually, during the submission process we did manage to capture the attention of several agents. The problem was that most were daunted by the logistics of taking 100 funny photographs of cats in Regency settings. Also, to be honest, it took Debbie and me several years to clarify and define our concept for the book. … Read on
Dear Pride and Prejudice and Kitties – I am a lonely cat looking for my own Mr. Darcy, and I had hoped to find him in your book. But then I took a look and become very confused. Is Mr. Darcy this dyspeptic fellow? (Bet you thought I didn’t know that word!) Or this one, who frankly looks a little scary: I can hardly believe that this is how my dream-cat proposes to Elizabeth Bennet: I’m beginning to think that whether he’s a classic tabby, a black-and-white, or a marmalade tom, he’s not all that great a guy! But wait – here he looks kind of sweet: And what about here? I’m so susceptible to soft belly fur! So what I want to know is, which one is the REAL Mr. Darcy – the one who’ll let me settle down with him in his beautiful grounds at Pemberly? I’m rooting for the stripey guy in the picture frame. Or wait, … Read on
I remember the day I got the idea of Pride and Prejudice illustrated by photos of cats. It came to me, no doubt, when talking piffle to my own cat, Mittens. The idea of cats playing human roles, especially in a great novel, struck me as delightfully absurd, precisely because it is so improbable. Cats are, always and incorrigibly, themselves. (We cat-lovers understand the joke is on us, but we’re a breed who can laugh at ourselves.) The idea may have been helped along by the fact that one of my favorite diminutives for the now-late Mittens was “kitlit” as in “little cat.” It probably occurred to me at some point that “kitlit” sounded a bit like “chick lit.” Thus, a new genre, or a new name for an existing genre, was born in my mind. I called my friend Debbie, in Portland, that morning, breathless with excitement. (See the impressive history of our collaboration.) “I have this unbelievable idea!” … Read on
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