DEBBIE COWENS, MOTHERS IN AUSTEN'S NOVELS - GUEST POST + EBOOK GIVEAWAY (INT.)

Mrs Bennet is my favourite of all the mother characters in Jane Austen’s novels. I do not think she is the sort of person that I, or anyone else for that matter, would ever wish to have for a mother, but there is something delightful in her complete lack of self-awareness and her inexhaustible capacity to embarrass her daughters. Most of us had moments growing up when we cringed in mortification at something said or done by parents unintentionally or perhaps, as in the case of my mother showing my boyfriend a family photo album including a picture of my eight-year-old self dressed up as Madonna, intentionally. However, few of us would have suffered much in comparison to Lizzie Bennet.

I wonder how any of the other Jane Austen heroines would have coped with a mother like Mrs Bennet. Many of Austen’s novels do not feature the heroines’ mothers. Emma Woodhouse and Anne Elliot have lost theirs. Fanny Price and Catherine Norwood travel away from their mothers for the duration of Mansfield Park and Northanger Abbey. Mrs Dashwood in Sense and Sensibility is a loving and attentive mother to her daughters. Only Mrs Bennet manages to make Elizabeth’s life more difficult and complicated through her interference.

SUDDENLY MRS DARCY BLOG TOUR - JENETTA JAMES, THE BIRTHING OF A JAFF FAN GIRL. WIN AN EBOOK COPY (INTERNATIONAL)

2 years ago I hadn’t even heard of fan fiction, let alone Jane Austen fan fiction. If I had seen the acronym JAFF written down, I might have thought it was one of those error messages I don’t understand that pop up on my computer screen from time to time. I had always been a voracious reader, but somehow this was a landscape that had passed me by, a path that I didn’t even know was there.

Then I found myself pregnant with our second child when our first was only 7 months old and somehow, as well as making me feel pretty sick, it stirred up the old romantic in me. Up went the feet and out came the self-pity chocolates. On a whim, I dusted off my DVD of the old 1995 Pride & Prejudice mini-series. It wasn’t long before I was as hooked as I had been when it was first broadcast, aged 14. It occurred to me that it wouldn’t hurt to re-read the novel, and so I did that as well.

Before I knew where I was, I was living with Lizzy and Darcy. I just couldn’t get them out of my head. What happened next? What became of them? The possibilities danced around my mind. Jane Austen is famous for having written perfectly of “two inches of ivory”, so what about the rest of the fabric? What about the character’s lives behind closed doors? What about the world below stairs? What about the male friendships which go unexamined in the original? The permutations seemed endless.

LISA PLISCOU, WHAT JANE AUSTEN CAN TELL US ABOUT CREATIVITY, INSPIRATION AND SUCCESS - GUEST POST & GIVEAWAY

I came to real admiration of Jane Austen later, rather than sooner, in life. In high school I found her books boring, irrelevant, and impenetrable, and in college I was a Chaucer-and-Shakespeare kind of English major along with getting into modernists like Mary Robison and Raymond Carver, so I really skimmed over the Georgian and Regency periods of English literature.

As was true for many women in the 1990s, it was the seminal A&E version of Pride and Prejudice, along with the lovely film version of Persuasion that came out the same year, which encouraged me to start reading Austen again.

I was a lot more comfortable with the slightly archaic language by then, and I was pleasantly surprised by Austen’s wit and cleverness. Her six novels are, on one level, what we might think of as fairly conventional love stories, but as Austen fans know well, they’re also deeply concerned with an understanding of the self, the realities of money and class, and the vagaries (both funny and troubling) of social interaction.

After rediscovering Austen’s works, I got really curious about her, and launched into a binge-read of Austen biographies. This was even more eye-opening. And my enjoyment of her work deepened into a powerful sense of admiration.

A PECULIAR CONNECTION BLOG TOUR - AUTHOR'S GUEST POST AND GIVEAWAY: JAN HAHN, APRIL FOOL!

April Fool!

Thank you, Maria Grazia, for allowing me to be a guest today on your lovely blog.  In honor of April Fool’s or All Fool’s Day, I’ve been looking at Jane Austen’s inclusion of foolish people in her works.   I’m sure we can agree that our esteemed author has a penchant for creating some delightfully silly characters.

I love Emma’s father, Mr. Woodhouse!  His eccentricities define him.  I thought I was a worry-wart of a mother, but Mr. Woodhouse puts me in the shade.   Emma has been confined to Highbury since childhood because of her father’s fear of traveling. He refuses to serve cake because of its ill effects.  And let’s not get started on the danger of drafts!  We laugh at him, but we find him loveable anyway.