Beth Massey lives in Chicago with her husband of forty plus years. Her first love as a child was the theatre. A voracious reader, she devoured plays and novels with an eye toward imagining how she would play certain characters. Beth was recruited to the Chattanooga Little Theatre's youth troupe at age eight. At Barnard College in NYC, Beth threw herself into the struggle against war, racism, the emerging women's liberation movement and the Columbia University student strike of 1968. While there, she met her husband Bill. Together they have devoted their lives to political activism.
Now that both are retired from their day jobs, Ms Massey spends her days in the company of her well-informed best friend and the two are free to engage in a great deal of conversation. Jane Austen would approve, and Beth is quite certain that like Dawsey and Juliet they have had a discussion that encompassed Jonathan Swift, pigs and the Nuremberg trials.
Beth may have left a life in the theatre behind, but the desire for a creative outlet and a need to sketch the human character is still fervent.
Please welcome Beth on My Jane Austen Book Club and check out the giveaway details below to win her
I am an oddity in
the world of Jane Austen inspired literature.
To me, my favorite author neither wrote nor began the genre of romance
novels. Yes, she felt the need to
provide a happy ending for her women protagonists. Happy, if you assume marriage is the most
fortuitous life for gently-bred females.
In real life, Jane did the unthinkable and followed a different drummer
and has been inspiring many for the last 200 years to take another path—even
when it was so very difficult. Still I
am no fool. It is a truth universally
acknowledged that the majority of her female devotees spend their time repining
for Mr. Darcy and his many film iterations and pay scant attention to her
literary legacy.
