Celebrating Jane Austen: Re-imagining Jane by Sarah Todd Taylor

Please welcome Sarah who's going to tell us all about writing in Jane Austen's world!

A few weeks ago when my niece was telling me about the My Little Pony fan fiction she was writing (did you know My Little Pony is back?) I realised that, although I thought I’d never done fan fiction, I actually had.

Years ago, in 2011, I did a spot of Jane Austen fan fiction.

Chawton House Library, which houses the early manuscripts of many of Austen’s works, ran a competition to find short stories for a collection inspired by Austen heroes and villains, and I entered a story based on one of my favourite characters – Catherine Morland.

I’ve always loved how Catherine completely inhabits a book. She really is the ideal reader if you’re a writer - someone willing to throw themselves into the world of your book. Catherine is the person we all write for. It got me thinking – what would Catherine and Henry’s marriage have been like if she never quite lost that habit of imagining herself in everything she read. What would it be like for Henry to weather the storms of Byron, Shelley and the Brontes? What would have happened if Catherine discovered feminist writings? Out of all this grew ‘Henry Tilney attempts to cure his wife’, a short story that I had immense fun writing. I’d never considered it fan fiction, but it was, really. It was a chance to pick up some characters I loved and imagine what happened to them after the novel ended, to spend some more time with Henry and Catherine.

I think this explains the lure of fan fiction. When we find characters whom we fall in love with we don’t want their stories to end when the final page is turned. We want to follow their story onwards, to make ourselves at home in their lives and find out ‘what happens next.’

The story ended up in the Honno Press collection ‘Wooing Mr Wickham.’ Some of the other pieces, like mine, worked with the original characters of the novels, but others took their stories and wove them anew for characters in other time periods and countries. It was wonderful to see how different writers were inspired in different ways, often by the same works.

So next time I’m asked whether I’ve ever done fan fiction, I shall have to say yes, and I had a blast and I recommend it to anyone. Pick up your favourite Austen, grab a notebook and pen and ask yourself this – what do you think happened after the endpapers?

Sarah Todd Taylor is a children's writer living in Wales. Her first book, Arthur and Me, a time-slip comedy with King Arthur and his round table, won the Firefly Children's Book Prize and was published in 2014. She has also had short stories published in various Honno anthologies and a monologue produced on Radio 5 live. You can find Sarah on Twitter as @scraphamster or read more about her on her blog at https://sarahtoddtaylor.wordpress.com

Thanks so much, Sarah!

Sophie

Celebrating Jane Austen: Alexia Casale on Persuasion

The very lovely Alexia Casale, author of The Bone Dragon and House of Windows, is going to be sharing her love for Persuasion today! I have to say that it’s my favourite too.

Persuasion, Austen’s last novel, was completed just before her death – indeed, although she died in late 1817, the manuscript is dated 1818, presumably to mark when she expected to have finished revising the manuscript. She never got the chance and many critics view Persuasion as her least polished work, but I’d argue that it’s by far her most sophisticated and accomplished. A short book, there is little ‘slack’ and few points where the story drags – a marked difference from most of her other work. Her development as a writer shines through and at every level there is a sense of maturity, not just of style but of concept and conception of the world and how it works.

Is Persuasion Austen’s most mature work because the protagonist, Anne, is also the oldest? Or is it that Austen is finally ready and able to write about a woman, not just girls – young adults in or just past their teens. Anne is old enough to have regrets. These regrets hinge on the fact that, as a young woman, she allowed her family and friends to persuade her not to marry the man she loved. The story follows her as she finds her way back to ‘the path not taken’, to second changes and finally to happiness. But it’s also the story of a woman who has lived and learnt enough to know who she is and what she wants. It is this sense of self that drives Anne’s growing agency as she finally learns how to negotiate the demands of the relationships in her life so that others do not dictate her path.

In Anne, Austen shows a woman who has become independent in her own mind. And it is in the context of this independence that she embarks on marriage, begging the question whether Anne would have been happy if she’d married Captain Wentworth as a girl. If she had maybe, instead of being governed by her father and godmother, she would have been governed by her husband. And what of Captain Wentworth? Did Anne’s refusal as a girl drive his subsequent success? During the interim, he too has become an independent man: sure of himself with a career and financial security. Here are two people who know who they are and can consent to marry each other in a different way to the other couples in Austen’s oeuvre. This marriage is not just chosen: it is chosen freely and on an informed, mature basis.

In this light, is it any surprise that Persuasion shows more happily married couples (the Harvilles, the Crofts and the Musgroves) than in any of Austen’s other works? In the case of the Crofts’ marriage, there are interesting elements of role reversal that show marriage as a partnership. It’s also in Persuasion that we see the only example of a married couple (the Musgroves) calling each other by their first names. All other wives call their husbands by their title and surname, adding endearments sometimes but still reinforcing the difference in their status. There is a nascent recognition that happy marriages are those in which there is greater equality.

Austen never married and there is a sense that Persuasion is a journey that reconciles her own decisions, regrets and also hopes as a woman who also has lived and learned enough to know what she wants. For all these reasons, it’s far and away my favourite of Austen’s books.

Lexi can be found at @AlexiaCasale on Twitter and her website here: http://www.alexiacasale.com/

Thank you for the wonderful post, Lexi!

Sophie 

Announcement: Celebrating Jane Austen

Hello! Happy Thursday!

I have a very exciting announcement for you today, well, it is for me, and I hope you’ll be excited too.

During the week of 14-19^th December, So Many Books, So Little Time will be dedicated to all things Jane Austen! December 17^th marks Jane’s 240^th birthday and I thought it’d be the perfect time to give her some love in the blogosphere as I rarely hear her discussed in this parts which makes me sad.

Over the week there will be guest posts from authors Natasha Farrant and Alexia Casale, snippets from bloggers and readers about their favourite Austen novel, a post on Austen fan fiction and a lot at the cultural legacy she's left behind.

I really hope you’ll join me for a jump back into Regency England next week! And maybe you’ll be inspired to reread your favourite or finally pick up your first Austen novel.

Sophie 

Oblivion, Jennifer L Armentrout

Pages: 368

Publisher: Hodder and Stoughton

Release Date: 3^rd December 2015

Edition: UK e-book, purchased

Other Titles by this Author: Lux series, Covenant series, Dark Elements series, Wicked, Obsession, The Return, The Power, Cursed, Don’t Look Back, The Dead List

The hotly anticipated follow-up to New York Times bestselling author Jennifer L Armentrout’s megaselling Lux series, written from the point of view of Daemon Black.

I knew the moment Katy Swartz moved in next door, there was going to be trouble. Lots of it. And trouble’s the last thing I need, since I’m not exactly from around. My people arrived on Earth from Lux, a planet thirteen billion light years away. Plus, if there’s one thing I know, it’s that humans can't be trusted. We can do thing they only dream about, and honestly, we make them look weak as hell. ‘Cuz they are.

But Kat is getting to me in ways no one else has, and I can't stop wanting her – or wanting to use my powers to protect her. She makes me weak, and I’m the strongest of our kind, tasked with protecting us all. So this one simple girl…she can mean the end of us. Because the Luxen have an even bigger enemy – the Arum, and I need to stay on my game.

Falling for Katy – a human – won't just place her in danger. It could get us all killed, and that’s one thing I won't ever let happen…

I have such a strange relationship with Jennifer L Armentrout’s books…

The Lux series was one I binged in a week when I wasn’t feeling great and I became a little addicted, even if I had some issues with it. The same happened with Oblivion. Being in Daemon’s point of view, the sexism and misogyny that rubbed up the wrong way in the early Lux books was even stronger this time around. He’s so arrogant and it's not even in a charming way! He got on my nerves for at least the first third of his version of Obsidian with how vile he is to Katy, even to ‘keep her safe’. Oh yeah, and Oblivion is actually Obsidian, Onyx AND Opal in Daemon’s point of view! I had thought it was just book one so I was pretty chuffed considering it only cost me 99p on Kindle!

It had been around two years since I read this series so I was able to go into Oblivion with a fairly blank slate; I only really remembered the huge plot points from each novel, though I recognised everything as it came up. I actually really enjoyed being back in the world. It’s nice to revisit an old story from a new angle, especially considering how much we didn’t know about Daemon and what was going on with him and the others for a large part of Obsidian.

Once again, mixed feelings about a Jennifer L Armentrout book, and once again, I devoured it in two days. I’m just going to go with it and hope that we get Origin and Opposition in Daemon’s POV too as, against my better judgement, I do have a huge crush on him…

Sophie   

Blast From the Past: We Have Always Lived in the Castle

Originally published in 1962 by The Viking Press

My edition: the Penguin Modern Classics paperback! I’d never seen this PMC cover until it arrived.

What's it about?

Living in the Blackwood family home with only her sister Constance and her Uncle Julian for company, Merricat just wants to preserve their delicate way of life. But ever since Constance was acquitted of murdering the rest of the family, the world isn’t leaving the Blackwoods alone. And when Cousin Charles arrives, armed with overtures of friendship and a desperate need to get into the safe, Merricat must do everything in her power to protect the remaining family.

In her final, greatest novel, Shirley Jackson draws us into a dark, unsettling world of family rivalries, suspense and exquisite black comedy.

Why now?

This time of year screams for dark, creepy novels and We Have Always Lives in the Castle also boasts of being nice and short which is what I need this month!

The verdict:

It’s hard to hear even a word about Shirley Jackson’s work without a flood of praise and fangirling coming afterwards so I was nervous about diving into We Have Always Lived in the Castle, but now I’ll be joining the legions of fangirls.

I went into this novel knowing very little about the plot or Jackson’s style and themes and it was a bit of a surprise really! This little novel is intense, unsettling and relentlessly compelling. The first half is our narrator Merricat teasing, taunting and leaving drips of information behind her which creates a delicious sense of mystery? Why do the villagers hate the Blackwoods? What happened to the family? Did she do it?

All of these questions were embedded in interactions between sisters Merricat and Constance that were super unnerving and just plain weird actually. The atmosphere of We Have Always Lived in the Castle is electric. It’s tense and cloying and impossible to pull yourself out of. And then Cousin Charles arrives and disrupts the solitary, routine life of the sisters and suddenly everything gets darker, more sinister and the sense of impending doom intensifies. I hated Charles violently. It was so obvious to the reader, and to Merricat, what he was after and it was almost painful to watch him manipulate Constance.

It all came to a dramatic, startling head and I couldn’t turn the pages faster. It almost had a fairytale feel to it, something that would have become the thing of myth and legend in the village. The way Jackson mixes genre is so impressive: mystery, thriller, Gothic, fairytale – even though I’ve only read one of her books, I get the feeling she could have written anything.

We Have Always Lived in the Castle is dark, twisted and utterly brilliant. I loved it and can't recommend it enough. I now want to read everything Shirley Jackson wrote.  

Still not convinced?

- It’s said to be Shirley Jackson’s masterpiece.

- At only 146 pages it’s a quick read; I devoured it in two sittings. 

Sophie