Following Austen

New address for this blog

This blog can now be reached at www.followingausten.com.  Not a redesign or anything, just a much easier address to remember.  Bookmark it, or subscribe to the feed.

Also, there are new categories, so everything's easier to find.  All the book reviews and endorsements are in one place, all the info about Becoming Jane and Tom Lefroy, and book excerpts.

The quotes blog is now at www.austenquotes.com.  Trying to make everything easier to find.

happy reading!

Redecorating

Welcome to the new Following Austen blog!  I'll be updating and reorganizing over the next week, so bear with me.  I can't decide on the colors.  Let me know what you think.

Austen stationery

Bonnie sent me a link to a wonderful site, Small Meadows Press, with gorgeous stationery and note cards and business cards, with literary themes.  It's lovely.

A daily dose of Jane

I have started a new blog so you can get your daily JA fix.  Enjoy!

Jane's pic

I wanted to post this with my riff on beauty, but the National Portrait Gallery in London makes you fill out a form and pay some kind of fee to use their images, so here it is.

Dear Lady Grey

My friend Kristine mentioned the other day that companies are paying bloggers to write about their products. So, I feel compelled to tell you about one of my absolute favorite things. (And if anyone out there from Twinings is listening, well, there's more where this came from, as I am looking for creative ways to pay for my health insurance--see post below.)

Lady Grey tea just makes me happy. On the days when I'm settling in to write, to try to get a lot done, I brew a whole pot and take it out on my back deck in the sun, with my notes or my word processor. I can't explain why I love it so much, it's just comforting. Kind of citrusy-flowery, but not too strong.

I first had it at C.S. Lewis's house, The Kilns, in Oxford. We stopped by for a brief tour and they served us tea and biscuits in the library where Lewis did his writing. We were amazed, and the tea was lovely.

Amazon has it in both regular and decaf, at a great price.  (I've never seen decaf before!)

Anyway, happy 300th birthday, Twinings.  And thanks for the Lady Grey.

Squidooooooo!

I've launched a new Squidoo lens about Following Austen. It's in rough form right now, but check it out! (Because if you go look at it, it will drive my rankings up, and then MORE people will look at it, and come to the blog. ;-)

I'll be posting pictures there from the trip, and will let you know when they're up. I've not been able to get their Flickr module to work yet, though it sounds very cool.

Hold it gently...

I feel compelled to say something about the nature of blogging and what's been happening here.  I began to write, thinking I had something that might be publishable and might have legs. It's hard for me to tell until I get a good bit of writing done, and this one proved stronger the further I got into it.  Then I thought I would post it online, to help generate an audience for it and help find a publisher or create enough enthusiasm to sustain a self-published title.  The response has been positive and not so small as to be insignificant.  (Actually, the numbers look good.)

What has surprised me is how deeply personal it's all become.  I suppose that shouldn't have been a surprise--it's a memoir, after all, including a story about something like falling in love.  It's about romance in a surprisingly Austen-esque sort of fashion, because this relationship grew quietly, largely out of conversation and character.

So I've been sharing some of those intimate conversations and thoughts, because that is the stuff this was made of.  I think good books--and good blogs--have to be personal.  But somehow, the blog feels much more personal, makes me feel more vulnerable.

There are a few classes of readers:  my dear friends, those who don't know me at all, and those I know but would never share this amount of detail with.  The first two don't bother me.  My friends will love me no matter what, and those I don't know are safe at a distance.  It's the third group that has been giving me occasional panic attacks.

I hope you'll know that this is my heart, and hold it gently.

Our Austen Adorations

This article just went up on BreakPoint yesterday:

Austen's Good Sense:  Classic Works Inspiring Modern Sensibility Forgive me if I evaluate the current dating market, think ho-hum, and put in an Austen movie. Most girls I know would take Darcy any day (of the Firth or MacFayden variety) but probably can’t put into words what Darcy has that they’re missing.

When I started the blog, a friend, John, asked me what motivated the devotion to Austen.  He's never understood it.  Was it just the fairytale romance, or was there something more redemptive about it?  Which got me to thinking, and worked itself out a bit in the BreakPoint piece.

I do think it's significant that while Austen essentially created the chick lit genre, her characters were not the bumbling idiots of today's stories.  I mean, I'm a huge Bridget Jones fan, but as a book reviewer, I have to say that I'm sick of chick lit heroines who are completely inept.  When you pick up a chick lit book today, you pretty much expect the heroine to be daft, to eat too much, to stick her tongue out at people, to sleep with her boss, to be rewarded in some sense for her failings instead of for recognizing them and being willing to change.  It was a fun little formula for a while, but enough already!

I keep hoping to put up more of the Oxford writing and keep holding off on it.  I went to Greenberry's again this afternoon and read through it and just think it could be so much better.  We'll see... I had hoped to work on it this week, but there have been a series of deadlines, and there was a peeping Tom at my house last week, which has necessitated putting up a fence, which has meant having to deal with the Architectural Committee (argh!), all of which has meant that I haven't had the peaceful week I thought I would to immerse myself in Oxford.  Maybe this weekend...

Glory, love, and honour...

Last Friday, December 16, most of the Jane Austen societies in North America (and perhaps around the world) had their annual meetings in honor of the anniversary of Jane's birthday.

I would love to have gone to the local meeting, but I was in the West Indies on a little cruise with my family. (Okay, technically it was the Bahamas and not the West Indies -- as Mrs. Croft would say, "We do not call Bermuda or Bahama the West Indies, you know." I just like saying that.)

But in honor of Jane's birthday (if a bit belated), here are a few lines on Jane from Rudyard Kipling:

Jane lies in Winchester--
Blessed be her shade!
Praise the Lord for making her,
And her for all she made!

And while the stones of Winchester,
Or Milsom Street, remain,
Glory, love, and honour
Unto England's Jane!

Love this, but Kipling was unfortunately rather free with the exclamation points.  (Can't stand exclamation points!)

Jane is buried in Winchester, of course, and Milsom Street was (and still is) one of the fashionable shopping streets in Bath. Anne, Elizabeth, and Mrs. Clay in Persuasion are in Milsom Street when they duck into Molland's to escape the rain and Anne spots Captain Wentworth for the first time since the tragedy at Lyme. 

Like Jane, I found the fashionable Bath shops too expensive for more than window shopping.  (Although I did find a fantastic bead store that helped me make a necklace with a cross I bought at Alton Abbey.  It's called Bijoux Beads on 2 Abbey Street just a stone's throw from the Roman Baths. I highly recommend it!)

Hoping to post more of the Oxford writing later this week.