Ah, holiday customs. At my house, we’ve developed a new one over the last few years: after exchanging presents and eating Christmas dinner and pulling crackers (we lurrrrve Christmas crackers!) and nibbling at dessert, we usually play a rollicking game … Continue reading
Jane Austen wrote horror novels. Don’t get me wrong. I think Jane Austen wrote great books, ones that show us so much of the detail and truth about the lives of some women in Regency England that it feels like … Continue reading
Of the versions of Jane Austen’s classic novel there are no end. But I could not resist taking in NextStop Theatre Company‘s staging this autumn. A new script, 21st century casting and a good couple spoonfuls of added modernity are … Continue reading
by Brenda W. Clough Oh, you’ve heard of ‘Calamity’ Jane Austin. She was a native of Texas, a noted women’s author in the early 19th Century. She even has a web page, summarizing her corpus of novels. Surely you have … Continue reading
by Brenda W. Clough By this point the works of Jane Austen have had a great deal of screen time. They are also making inroads upon the stage, and I went to the Folger Shakespeare Theater‘s production of Sense and … Continue reading
Across genres, we accept the importance of bonds between brothers; I would argue that in speculative fiction, at least, we give less weight to the loyalty and emotional intimacy between sisters. This may be due to the domestic setting for … Continue reading
In my own particular mental map of the modern novel’s river, the watershed is Jane Austen. Her books were romantic, but she was not writing romance as it was soon understood. Within a very few years after her death one … Continue reading
I don’t know if anyone else shared my interest in writing advice from the greats. Some writers, like Henry James, wrote books about writing (his ideas on what he thought the modern novel would be in the twentieth century is … Continue reading
The Spiral Path: A Tale of Ritual Magic, by Katharine Eliska Kimbriel (Book View Café, 2015). In this third book of “Night Calls,” the adventures of Alfreda Sorensson, Katharine Eliska Kimbriel has brought originality and insightfulness to the series. Set … Continue reading
A literary ramble through England: “We’re being haunted by Jane Austen,” my husband Thor declared by the midpoint of our recent two-week jaunt through the midlands and southern England. It seemed that every town or village where we lighted had … Continue reading
