I love Jane Austen. I know she’s not for everyone, but I definitely have a soft spot for the author. Due to this soft spot I limit what I partake of in the Austen companion materials, no matter how long they’ve been a part of the Austen experience. The one that seems to have the most is Pride and Prejudice. I read Mr. Darcy’s Diary for Cannonball Read IV, but that experience and reading less than stellar reviews has kept me from reading Death Comes […]
“It was a horrible time to be alive”
In her Letters to Alice on First Reading Jane Austen, author Fay Weldon calls the Regency era “by our standards, a horrible time to be alive.” She also writes that the class society was “fair enough if you were Jane Austen, but supposing you were the maid?” That is what Jo Baker’s Longbourn does: supposes you were the maid. And it does the supposing brilliantly. For me, this was one of those books where the reading experience is so emotionally magnificent, it seems like a […]
Mr. Wickham was so much worse than I ever imagined.
I’ve read Pride & Prejudice a handful of times, and am, in general, a big fan of Jane Austen (my personal favorite is Persuasion). And yes, I’ve fallen into the trap of reading prequels and sequels and spinoffs of varied quality. So I wasn’t in a huge hurry to read Longbourn. But I saw it at the library, and then remembered a CBR review from last year written by popcultureboy that convinced me to read it. And I’m so glad I did. Easily the best of the […]