As previously indicated, I am interpreting the main body of Mansfield Park’s plot as happening in 1796-1797. However, the age indicators for most of the characters in this essay are very vague. Tom Bertram is apparently 25 during the main body of the plot, and I have randomly assumed that Henry Crawford is around that age, and that his sister Mary Crawford and their acquaintance John Yates are rather younger.
Continue reading “Austenian: The Parents of Mansfield Park, Part 2”Category: history
Austenian: The Parents of Mansfield Park, Part 1
Ellen Moody admits that only 1796-1797 fully works with the two strongly given dates in the text (Thursday, December 22 for the ball at Mansfield, and a “particularly late” Easter the following spring) but goes with R. W. Chapman’s 1808-1809 dates for the main body of the story, with a bit of handwaving about how the novel is obviously pieced together from partial drafts written at different times, and the “particularly late Easter” is merely an artifact of that process. Here, I am going with the 1796-1797 timeframe for the main plot, which I consider to start with the arrival of the Crawfords and the testing of Edmund and Fanny, and backdating accordingly. But the calendar of the book is heavily debated by scholars, and if you’re doing some sort of crossover work with the elder generation of another Austen novel, you have a lot of room to fudge the timeframes with this one.
This novel is comparatively easy, in that we have three sisters and their husbands and maybe two other, basically offscreen, sets of parents to keep track of. We start with the fabulous Miss Wards: Miss Elizabeth(1) Ward, Miss Maria Ward and Miss Frances Ward. They were apparently all three of them very good-looking, possibly blonde(1.5) with seven thousand pounds apiece(2) which translates to 350 pounds a year or 87.5 pounds a quarter.
Continue reading “Austenian: The Parents of Mansfield Park, Part 1”State of the Author, 3Q2025
This really should have been “State of the Author, Mid-Year,” but I was dealing with health issues for most of June (nothing serious, just distracting) and then July was kind of busy at work, so here we are…
Continue reading “State of the Author, 3Q2025”Gee, Thanks, You BBC Turkeys
Not content with trying to create a miniseries about Mary Bennet, the virtue-signaling Regency hipster beloved by virtue-signaling modern-day hipsters everywhere who think that Jane Austen was soooo mean to their alter ego, the makers have cast Richard E. Grant as Mr. Bennet. I have no particular beef with Mr. Grant, although to judge by the clips I’ve seen, his take on Sir Walter Elliot in Netflix Persuasion would have benefited from a bit more of the silly fop schtick he brought to the Scarlet Pimpernel. And yes, it’s a bit disheartening to think that in The Other Bennet Sister he may once again be called upon to play a humorously absurd and irresponsible Jane Austen dad character as a generic jerk.
More importantly from my point of view, he put in an appearance as a minor baddie in Star Wars: Rise of Skywalker, which is just a teensy bit inconvenient
Continue reading “Gee, Thanks, You BBC Turkeys”Friday Fragments: Who Will Be Emperor?
This is a tricky sequence to write in the third Hunter Healer King book, because a similar conversation foreshadowing it occurs towards the end of the second Hunter Healer King book. The bit of dialogue below was cut when I reworked the conversation in the WIP and it went in a different direction:
“I agree that Father Feuerbach is a good man to have at your back in a crisis,” Maxim went on, “But the Imperial throne does not, in its current form, attract that kind of crisis.”
Pope Francis I: Requiescat in Pace
To be honest, I was not an admirer of his papacy. He struck me as a shallow man, enacting the will of the faction that elected him, and doing no good at all for urgent issues such as the sex abuse and financial corruption scandals in the Church. But too many of the Pope’s detractors tended to talk as though he were some kind of uniquely bad prelate who came out of nowhere, or whom perhaps his electors had summoned from the Plane of Torment. In actuality, “Papa Bergoglio” was a symptom rather than a cause of the problems in the Church. His poor formation as a priest and repeated promotions beyond his level of competence were due to bad administrative and pastoral decisions, going back generations, by previous popes and the Church hierarchy. Somehow, his critics tend to be unwilling to address that.
In any case, please pray for the repose of his soul, if you are the praying kind. If you are the kind who obsesses about papal conclaves, this website tries to provide a relatively neutral guide (although the webmaster’s own preferences are plain enough) to the current cardinals and their stances on certain hot-button issues. Also, this news article from The Pillar offers a pretty clear view of the procedural stuff related to the passing of the Pope and what comes afterwards.
250th Anniversary of the Midnight Ride of Paul Revere
So, reposting the best thing I got out of Suno when I fed it the abridged version of the Longfellow poem.
Weird Wednesday: The Unfinished First Drafts of Jane Austen
The Watsons and Sanditon are generally published in a volume with either Jane Austen’s Lady Susan or her Juvenilia, but aren’t actually very much like either of them. The Juvenilia is a group of short, intentionally ridiculous pieces written “for the fun of it.” They don’t do much for me, but I find them easier to follow than what survives of the Brontes’ early fantasy worlds: Glass Town, Angria and Gondal. Lady Susan, on the other hand, is a complete novella, told mostly through letters, which was apparently circulated within the family for entertainment but not intended for publication.
The Watsons, meanwhile, is the opening of an unfinished novel,
Continue reading “Weird Wednesday: The Unfinished First Drafts of Jane Austen”Adapting Jane Austen: Sense and Sensibility, the Story in London
It’s been a few months since I’ve done one of these, so here’s the previous posts as a refresher course. New thoughts below the cut.
The Novels of Marie Belloc Lowndes: The Lodger
There’s a famous quote by Alfred Hitchcock, about how (paraphrasing) a bomb going off in a scene with no buildup is surprise, while watching the buildup to a bomb going off, knowing there is a bomb about to go off, is suspense. I’ve been reading a bunch of Marie Belloc Lowndes lately, and it seems safe to say that Hilaire Belloc’s sister was a suspense writer, when she wasn’t writing flat-out soap opera. Her best-known novel is The Lodger,(1) which is available for free on Gutenberg or very cheaply on Amazon (basically you’re paying to spare yourself the hassle of getting the book into kindle by yourself).
Essentially, this is the story of Mr. and Mrs. Bunting,(2) a former butler and his very prim second wife, who have gone into business for themselves, subletting rooms in their rental house with the understanding that they will feed the lodgers and clean up after them etc. Business has been bad, and the husband, a true-crime buff, has been distracting himself by following the exploits of a Ripper-like serial killer called the Avenger, who seems to specialize in killing formerly respectable women who’ve gone off the skids due to alcoholism(3). A young policeman acquaintance keeps Mr. Bunting supplied with all the latest news on the case, including some tidbits that he really should keep to himself. By the merest of accidents, Mrs. Bunting ends up being the one who answers the door when a gaunt, nervous gentleman shows up asking for lodgings.
Continue reading “The Novels of Marie Belloc Lowndes: The Lodger”
Jaglion Press 