Hello #Janeites and welcome to My Jane Austen Book Club! I'm so glad to be opening a new great event here at our online club. Aren't you thrilled too? There aren't so many Northanger Abbey-inspired novels out there so this is a truly special event.
The Doyenne of
Austenesque fiction, Diana Birchall, tours the blogosphere starting today October 28 through
November 15 to share her latest release, The
Bride of Northanger. I'm in truly good company in this adventure: thirty popular bloggers specializing in historical and
Austenesque fiction will feature guest blogs, interviews, excerpts, and book
reviews of this acclaimed continuation of Jane Austen’s Gothic parody, Northanger
Abbey.
INTERVIEW WITH DIANA BIRCHALL
Hello Diana and welcome back to My Jane Austen Book Club. You were one the first
Jane Austen Fan Fiction writers in the 1990s. Can you share your inspiration
to become an Austenesque writer and your career journey so far?
“Think
only of the past as its remembrance gives you pleasure,” as Elizabeth told
Darcy, and it does give me pleasure, Maria Grazia, for you to invite me to talk
about the past! My Jane Austen adventure began when I won a contest in the
JASNA journal Persuasions, as long ago as 1984, writing Austen style
dialogue, a little sketch of the chatter of Miss Bates, in Emma. It was
so much fun, and I was so pleased at winning, that I decided to do more. Over
the next few years I wrote lots of what I thought of as pastiche (the terms
Austenesque and fan fic hadn’t yet been invented!), and this led to my writing
a full-length novel: Mrs. Darcy’s Dilemma was written in 1992. At the
time there had not been a Pride and Prejudice sequel since the 1940s,
and I thought it was an idea whose time had come. Two other authors had the
same brain wave simultaneously, and there was a fierce competition. I had an
excited New York literary agent and was told to expect a bidding war – but no.
The others (Emma Tennant with Pemberley and Julia Barrett with Presumption)
were better known, I was as yet unpublished, and the publishing world decreed
that there was no ROOM for a third Pride and Prejudice sequel, if you
can believe that, in a world where there are now hundreds!