VICTORIA GROSSACK, IN DEFENSE OF LADY CATHERINE

The older I get, the more I like Lady Catherine. This is partly because, as an ageing woman, I have more sympathy for other older women. Older women are often mocked in fiction: dismissed as silly, no longer beautiful, and frequently poor. Even Jane Austen was not beyond ridiculing them – think of Miss Bates and of Lady Bertram – but Austen also treated many with respect, even when her characters do not (Marianne Dashwood is extremely rude to Mrs. Jenkinson, and Emma is impatient with Miss Bates).

Lady Catherine may be proud, but that is something to be expected of a woman who is the daughter of an earl and the mistress of Rosings Park. And she has, in my opinion, many admirable character traits.

LONGBOURN, FOR REALZ!

Canadian author, Tara Rout,  launches an ambitious Kickstarter campaign to buy Longbourn, or Luckington Court, which is up for sale in the U.K. The property is famous for its appearance in the BBC miniseries Pride and Prejudice. The property may have captured the attention of Prince Harry, who is believed to have an interest in buying the home.

MARIA GRACE: PRIDE, PREJUDICE & BRITISH MYTHOLOGY + GIVEAWAY

Two of my favorite books as a child were a huge illustrated book of world mythology and an equally huge anthology of fairy tales. I read those stories over and over despite the fact that many of them were rather gruesome with less than happy endings. (Hmmm … That just might be the source of my penchant for happily-ever-afters in my own writing.) So it shouldn’t be surprising that fantastical creatures have always run rampant in my imagination.

JUST OUT! THE BEST LAID FLIGHT PLANS BY LEIGH DREYER. AUTHOR INTERVIEW AND GIVEAWAY

Would Mr Darcy with any other name - not Fitzwilliam,  I mean - be the fascinating hero he is? Today's guest, Leigh Dreyer, author of a Pride and Prejudice modern retelling thinks so. In her version of our beloved story, Darcy and Elizabeth form their bond while flying high in the sky. Read her answers to my questions and discover more about The Best Laid Flight Plans. Don't forget to try your luck in the giveaway contest below!

ROSE FAIRBANKS PRESENTS THE SECRETS OF PEMBERLEY BLOG TOUR & GIVEAWAY

Vignette: Outtake, Elizabeth Bennet’s Diary #3 Seeing Darcy in London

Thanks so much for hosting me, Maria Grazia! The Secrets of Pemberley is told entirely from Mr. Darcy’s perspective. In the book, Elizabeth’s diary becomes important, and as a long-time fan of The Lizzie Bennet Diaries, I decided to do video entries for each of diary entry I’ll be sharing on the blog tour. I hope you enjoy as we get a bit of insight on what Elizabeth Bennet felt when seeing Darcy again for the first time after his proposal and reading his very different letter.

BLOG TOUR LAUNCH - LOVER'S KNOT BY JENETTA JAMES: AUTHOR GUEST POST + GIVEAWAY

The one where Mr. Darcy turns detective: non JAFF detective fiction influencing Lover’s Knot (or Regency Sleuths whom I have loved…)

Thank you to Maria Grazia for having me back at My Jane Austen Book Club. It is a pleasure and an honour to visit with my new book, “Lover’s Knot”.

“Detective” is not an epithet that fits particularly well on the shoulders of Mr. Fitzwilliam Darcy. At least, not at first sight. The Regency is not the right period for a start, being well before the heyday of crime fiction and prior to the literary evolution of the “gentleman detective”. The formation of the police as we know and understand them had only just begun. What is more, fighting crime just isn’t what everyone’s favourite hero is about. Mr. Darcy’s world view was likely narrower than that of your average sleuth. He is, after all, a gentleman of the landed classes, a reluctant character of the ton, a man of means and a man of his age. His focus is family, home, close friends, dependants. He doesn’t look too hard at the wider world and nobody asks that he does.

THE LADIES OF ROSINGS BLOG TOUR - AUTHOR SHANNON WINSLOW'S MEETING WITH ONE OF THE LADIES

Several months ago, when author Shannon Winslow was still in the research phase of her just-released novel, she sat down with one of the principle subjects of her story. As it turned out, the lady was less that fully cooperative.

  

Winslow:  Thank you for meeting with me, Lady Catherine. As you know, I am writing a novel entitled The Ladies of Rosings Park, and so naturally I wanted to speak to you, among others – to get your opinions and some background information. You understand.

LC:  You are wise to come to me first, for I can save you a great deal of time. You shall find there is no need to speak to anybody else afterwards, because I can tell you what you need to know. I am very well informed.

Winslow:  I don’t doubt that for a minute.

LC:  Now, to begin with, I will set you straight about your title. What do you mean by ‘the ladies’ of Rosings Park, as if there were more than one? I am the mistress here. Certainly your title should more correctly be The Lady of Rosings Park or perhaps Portrait of an Illustrious Lady. That has a nice ring to it.

THE CHILD BLOG TOUR - AUTHOR JAN HAHN'S GUEST POST + GIVEAWAY

What a great place to begin the blog tour for my latest book! Thank you, Maria Grazia, for hosting me. I enjoy visiting your book club and discovering what you’re reading.

Most of my previous books have been written in Elizabeth Bennet’s voice, but I’ve ventured into new territory in The Child. It’s written strictly from Darcy’s viewpoint. Today, I thought we might start where he does, on the steps of St. George’s Church in London.

MONICA FAIRVIEW, MY TOP 3 PRIDE AND PREJUDICE MOVIE MOMENTS

It’s such a pleasure to appear once again on My Jane Austen Book Club. It’s very kind of you, Maria Grazia, to allow me to stop by on my Mysterious Mr. Darcy blog tour today, especially when I was held up by the flu and had to delay my visit.

Maria asked me if I could talk about my preferred scenes from Pride and Prejudice. I must admit I found it difficult to narrow them down – well, I love anything and everything to do with P&P! However, in the end, I realised I did have some particular ones I love to watch, so I have chosen three of them. Okay, they are not necessarily the top three, since obviously there are more major scenes like the proposals that are the top. However, these are the scenes that really linger in my mind, for better or for worse.

MEET JOHN KESSEL, AUTHOR OF PRIDE AND PROMETHEUS

Hello John and welcome to My Jane Austen Book Club. I’d like to start our chat with a question that came to my mind as soon as I read you were publishing, Pride and Prometheus ,  a mash-up tale based on Jane Austen’s  Pride and Prejudice and Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. Do you think Jane and Mary could have ever been friends? (time lap apart)

I think that it would be unlikely that they would be friends, if only because of their different life choices. Jane was the conservative daughter of a clergyman and was raised in polite upperclass British society. She cared about the strictures of society and what was and was not proper behavior.

Mary was the daughter of two radicals; her mother Mary Wollstonecraft wrote one of the first arguments for women's equality,  A Vindication of the Rights of Women and her father William Godwin was a supporter of the French Revolution. Mary ran off with the poet Percy Shelley when she was seventeen while Shelley was still married to his first wife. Shelley abandoned his wife and son to go off with her. If Mary were a character in a Jane Austen novel, she would be the "bad girl" or the "ruined woman" who violated every rule of society, like Maria Bertram in Mansfield Park.

BLOG TOUR & GIVEAWAY - THE EXILE: THE COUNTESS VISITS LONGBOURN BY DON JACOBSON

The Language of the Back Cover

By Don Jacobson

With the advent of e-books, readers now no longer have to go to the bookstore or library to pull their favorite author’s work off the shelf. All they need to do is download a copy and immediately start flipping pages.

Oh, yes…and that flipping invariably happens on the first item nested in the Table of Contents. In most cases, that is Chapter 1. What is rarely seen is the front cover.

Well, not exactly. The reader certainly saw the cover when visiting the website from which the book was obtained. And, yes, the cover does appear in a thumbnail form in the e-book reader library. However, the postage stamp’s worth of color art does little to provide anything more than the barest sense of theme and message.

THE SWEETEST RUIN BLOG TOUR - READ AN EXCERPT & WIN A COPY

Good morning, Maria Grazia! Thank you for hosting me at your blog, My Jane Austen Book Club. It’s a pleasure to be here to share an excerpt with your readers from my latest JAFF release, “The Sweetest Ruin,” which is a “Pride & Prejudice” modernization that’s set in Las Vegas, Nevada and London, England.

This excerpt takes place after a certain couple has spent some time together getting to know one another, wink, wink. I hope your readers enjoy this sneak peek into “The Sweetest Ruin...”

Amy George

MARIA GRACE, THREE CHRISTMASES - BLOG TOUR & GIVEAWAY

Thanks so much for having me Maria Grazia! I’m so excited about this Christmas season! It’s been a doozy of a year in these parts with Hurricane Harvey just being the icing on the cake. So much has happened that it calls for not one, but two Christmas books.  The two books go along with The Darcys’ First Christmas, kind of forming bookends to the story. Darcy and Elizabeth: Christmas 1811 tells the behind the scenes story of what might have happened during the Christmastide Darcy spent in London, while the militia (and Wickham!) wintered in Meryton. From Admiration to Love tells the story of the Darcys’ second Christmas as they try to hold Georgiana’s coming out at the Twelfth Night ball as Lady Catherine and Anne de Bourgh descend as very unwelcome guests. (The story was such fun to write, I hope you love it as much as I do!)

ALL THE THINGS I KNOW BLOG TOUR: AUDREY RYAN ON WRITING PRIDE AND PREJUDICE FOR THE MILLENIALS

 I’ve chosen an excerpt to feature in this post that’s related to finding the perfect job. Why is this important? Because there some very unique trends in the current job market.

     There is no more glass ceiling. This means climbing the ladder doesn’t really exist anymore. Instead, we career hop. It’s rare and frowned upon to be in a role longer than 4 years. People wonder why you haven’t tried anything new. They think you’re lazy if you don’t move around. Where’s your ambition?

2   40-hour work week is becoming obsolete. Instead, flexible hours are the thing. While this seems awesome (I can travel as much as I want?!), this also means you’re constantly on the clock. Canceling plans last minute so you can finish a presentation for your 9PM meeting with New Zealand office is not unusual. It just is. Going to a coffee shop and seeing other people on a work computer, also normal. As is the person on their laptop on the bus, working during the commute home. God forbid if you have to travel for work the plane doesn’t have Wi-Fi.

THE MARRIAGE OF MISS JANE AUSTEN VOLUME III IS OUT! INTERVIEW WITH AUTHOR COLLINS HEMINGWAY + GIVEAWAY

Welcome back to My Jane Austen Book Club, Collins! Congratulations on your latest release and thanks for accepting to answer a few questions. Here's the first one: most of the authors writing in the Jane Austen world are doing sequels to her books or variations on her plots and characters. You chose to write about Austen herself. Why?

I had two different ideas come together. The first is that I wanted to tell a serious story of what life was like for women in the early 1800s. This was a time when everything was against them, from society to biology. I wanted to test the heart and soul of an intelligent, sensitive woman. As I began the early scenes, the voice that kept coming to me was that remarkable voice. Also, I had a literature professor at university, long ago, who encouraged me to see the depth of Austen’s writing as well as its brilliance. The literary constraints on a woman of that day limited Jane to courtship novels and forced her to deal with important issues in the background or in passing, with secondary characters.

Through the years, I kept asking myself: What would have happened if Jane Austen had been able to put her talents toward the serious issues of life after marriage? What if she had been able to write directly about some of the big social issues of the day? What if she herself had faced the good and bad of married life, as most women of that era did? How would all that come together in a story involving a man very much her equal—though unsuitable, perhaps, to her family.

DANGEROUS TO KNOW BLOG TOUR - AMY D'ORAZIO, CAPTAIN TILNEY vs MR DARCY

Was Captain Tilney the Darcy of Northanger Abbey?

 Ok, stay with me here.

I was really excited to have the opportunity to write Captain’s Tilney’s story for my recent project with Christina Boyd’s Dangerousto Know: Jane Austen’s Rakes and Gentleman Rogues. He’s always intrigued me — strange, I know, but I guess I like a bad boy. Sure, I know his younger brother Henry is supposed to be the real hero of the story but if I’m being completely honest here, I would have to say that squeaky-clean Henry and sweet-but-silly Catherine don’t really fascinate me.

LONA MANNING & KYRA KRAMER: FANNY VS MARY - GUEST POST + GIVEAWAY

Hello, I'm Lona Manning, author of A Contrary Wind: a variation on Mansfield Park.  and author of true crime articles available at http://www.crimemagazine.com/category/authors/lona-manning.

And I'm Kyra Kramer, author of  Mansfield Parsonage and the nonfictional historical books, Blood Will Tell, The Jezebel Effect, Henry VIII’s Health in a Nutshell, and Edward VI in a Nutshell.

Lona: Please join us for the knock-down drag-out (maybe) Fanny versus Mary debate of the decade/epoch/millennium. We will take turns posing each other questions. Please feel free to join in, in the comments!

Kyra: Everyone who comments will be entered in a draw to win a gift pack of Austen goodies from Bath, England. 

PRESIDENT DARCY BLOG TOUR & GIVEAWAY - VICTORIA KINCAID, WHITE HOUSE SECRETS

White House Secrets

All right, I’ll confess that this title is somewhat misleading.  Everything I will discuss is publicly available information.  But it is information that I personally didn’t know before I started doing research for my new modern Pride and Prejudice variation, President Darcy.  I live near Washington D.C. and I knew a fair amount about the presidency and the White House in general, but in order to write a book with several scenes set in the White House, I needed to do a lot of in depth research.  In the process I learned some interesting and new facts about the president’s home.

The White House is divided into three parts.  The West Wing is the most famous part of the White House.  This is where the president and his staff conduct the business of government—and is home to the Oval Office, the press room, and the cabinet room.  The East Wing houses the first lady’s offices.  The center part of the White House has multiple floors.  The bottom two floors have public rooms like the State Dining Room and the East Room as well as functional rooms for the staff like the kitchen.  There’s also a chocolate shop, bowling alley, and a very large flower shop.  Who knew? 

The top two floors of the main building are called the Residence and comprises the top two floors of the main part of the White House.  This is where the president and his family live.  The most famous part of the residence is the Lincoln Bedroom, which has hosted some of the White House’s most prestigious guests.  As you can see from the floor plan, the Lincoln Bedroom is adjacent the Treaty Room, so called because in 1898 William McKinley presided over the signing of a peace treaty in this room which ended the Spanish-American War.  Today it’s used as the president’s personal study. 

A MOST HANDSOME GENTLEMAN BLOG TOUR - SUZAN LAUDER INTERVIEWS ELIZABETH BENNET + GIVEAWAY

I’m delighted to begin the blog tour for A Most Handsome Gentleman at the same site that hosted my first blog tour stops for my other two published novels, Letter from Ramsgate and Alias Thomas Bennet, both of which are now on sale for $1.99. Here at My Jane Austen Book Club, you’ll be treated to an interview with Elizabeth Bennet and an excerpt from the new book, which is a comedy mini-novel suitable for all readers of Pride and Prejudice.

Suzan Lauder

VICTORIA GROSSACK, LIES & LIARS IN JANE AUSTEN

(by Victoria Grossack)

 In Jane Austen’s works, the bad guys lie.  A lot.

In fact, dishonesty in both word and deed frequently propels the plot.  Let’s take a tour through the deceptions in Jane Austen’s six novels and then discuss her depictions of lies, liars, and those who believe them.

Northanger Abbey.  One of the things I like about this novel is that much of the plot turns on the lies that characters tell about each other.  Most are delivered by John Thorpe, who tells many lies to General Tilney about Catherine Morland, the novel’s protagonist.  Northanger Abbey is, as many people know, Austen’s riposte to the over-the-top melodrama of the gothic novels that were so popular in the late 1700s.  And although Austen incorporated some gothic imaginings, she was able to devise a lovely little novel with prosaic lies.