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Posts from the “Random Acts of Austen” Category

Somewhere in Chawton my fingerprint mars a centuries-old stain finish. I’m sorry.

Posted on June 29, 2009

Three inches from Jane Austen’s writing table and I’ve got to be the one to touch it despite the fact that there’s a tour guide with her arms crossed standing three inches from it on the other side advising in very specific terms against this. She turns her back. My finger extends. It’s a small table, as big a round as a child’s arms in an embrace. It’s scratched in places but polished to a gleam. Poised on top – an ink well and a quill. Gah! To have to write like that, scrunched up to a tiny table with an implement that can only eek out a few words at a time in the light pushing through Coke-bottle windows like mud in a sieve. That’s what I’m thinking while I impress my fingerprint on the very edge of the table, hoping briefly for some transference of … is it creative genius? I’m not sure what to call Jane Austen or my fascination with her. She wrote basically the same story over and over, her characters exhibiting flashes of high-spiritedness only to settle into the status quo and a proper marriage. I asked a room full of young female students once how many of them would prefer to be Austen. Nearly all of them raised their hands. “Really?” I asked with snarling surprise. “You don’t want any rights? Or the opportunity to see your ambitions realized regardless of your gender? Or to hope for something in life besides a husband?” They just shrugged. I suppose there’s just something more alluring to Austen, her writing, and even her era. And three inches away, suddenly the mere fact that Austen wrote in a time in which women weren’t exactly welcome to is rebellion enough for me to stand in her drawing room in Chawton and angle to touch her writing table when no one else is looking. With a suspicious sniff the tour guide glances back over her shoulder just as my finger retreats with stealth-like speed and I become very, very engrossed with all the little buttons down my raincoat.

Categories: Random Acts of Austen

Advisements, Part I

Posted on May 25, 2009

I. If the children of the household cannot be dispatched to the care of a governess, the lady novelist must first equip the young charges with any manner of diverting trinket such as a disassembled pocket-watch or a tin of buttons and imagine the young charges to be in a remote location such as Malta or Zanzibar so that the lady novelist may create for herself a moment’s refuge for the task of writing.

II. On the occasions that the lady novelist finds her literary landscapes suddenly overwrought with effeminate trappings such as lovelorn missives, dithering matriarchs, or maidens suffering lovelorn-missive-induced consumption in the care of dithering matriarchs, it is surely time for the lady novelist to set aside her plume, push up her sleeves, and educate herself in the ways of masculine folly – skeet shooting, fisticuffs, nether-regional adjustments, and the like – for the sake of broadening the lady writer’s literary appeal.

III. There will undoubtedly come a time when the lady novelist, after securing diversions for the household youth and deepening her well-spring of experience from which to draw, will put her pen to page to find it pressing against the same spot on the paper for a good hour or so with a painful deficiency of ideas or thoughts with which to encourage the pen onward – in which case the lady novelist shall indulge in writing excrement for the mere sake of maintaining the habit of writing anything at all. In other words, she shall keep a blog.

Categories: Random Acts of Austen

  

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