Confessions of a Jane Austen Addict by Laurie Viera Rigler.
Title: Confessions of a Jane Austen Addict.
Author: Laurie Viera Rigler.
Genre: Fiction, fantasy, romance.
Country: U.S.
Language: English.
Publication Date: 2007.
Summary: A young woman named Courtney is transported in her sleep out of her apartment in Los Angeles, and into the body of an English woman in the year 1813. As a ravenous fan of Austen's work in her own life, she quickly assimilates into the world around her. Her love for the romantic ideals of her new-found environment clashes, however, with the reality of everyday life in 19th-century England, stock full of chamber pots and economically-driven marriages.
My rating: 7/10
♥ Blind dates and setups of all kinds are completely useless, I long ago decided. Most intelligent men and women like to go forth into the world and stalk their own prey, choose their own mirrors of dysfunction, and repeat their own patterns of abusive relationships, without the well-meaning but futile efforts of friends.
♥ He looks away, his other hand quickly swiping at his eye. Was that a tear?
I fight the urge to gather him in my arms and cradle his head against my breasts. And rip off his clothes.
♥ As my bedside candles illuminate a page in the precious first edition I hold in my hands, I understand, as I have long understood through my own insatiable appetite for reading and rereadings of Jane Austen's six novels, why children want the same stories read to them a thousand times. There is comfort in the familiarity of it all, in the knowledge that all will turn out well, that Elizabeth and Darcy will end up together in Pemberley, that Anne Eliot will pierce Captain Wentworth's soul, and that Mr. Elton will be stuck with his caro sposa for the rest of his life. It is so unlike the unpredictability and unfairness of real-life endings and the half-life stasis I inhabit.
♥ We walk on for another minute while I contemplate the prudishness of a society that can hardly admit to the means by which the human species reproduces itself, let alone that those same humans actually participate in the process.
♥ The candlelight casts a flattering glow on everyone in the room, from the servants and old gentlemen in their powdered wigs and the young men with their hair au naturel, to the women, octogenarians and rosy-cheeked teenagers alike, clad in the uniform empire waistlines and long gloves, necks glittering with diamonds, gold, and pearls. This is the perfect light for a woman forced to appear in public without makeup.
Even the smell of the body odor has lost its usual overpowering quality tonight, heavily laced as it is with the mingled scents of soaps, perfumes, and the wax of a thousand melting candles. I can almost understand for a second, even in all my twenty-first-century fastidiousness, that one could come to like the scent of a ballroom. Is that Jane's sensibility, I wonder, that's responding to this particular mélange of scents? Or am I, my real self, responding to something else? Certainly I don't need a nineteenth-century frame of reference to pick up the erotic charge underlying the formality of the curtseys, bows, and nods of this elaborately stylized mating ritual.
♥ Every time he faces me, every time he turns me by the hand or crosses shoulders with me or performs any of the figures of the dance with me, it is with an unbroken gaze into my eyes. At first I feel almost too exposed, and I find myself breaking his gaze, only to be drawn into it again. And then I realize this is the way it is supposed to be done, for the gentleman standing diagonally across from me smiles and makes eye contact whenever the dance requires him to turn me or change places with me. But of course it is not the penetrating, I-know-everything-about-you way that Edgeworth looks at me. I can feel him watching me as the other man turns me. I am conscious of displaying the movement of my body as Edgeworth watches. And I observe him with equal intensity as he turns the lady diagonally across from him; she too smiles into his eyes. I am as heated by Edgeworth’s gaze as I am by the exertions of the dance itself.
Here is an unbroken space in which a woman and a man may, with the full sanction of society, practically make love to each other with their eyes, their fleeting touch, and the display of their bodies.
♥ Even if I confronted him with what I or Jane saw, and even if he came up with the best explanation in the world, it would still be his word against my fears, his promises against my experience with the most accomplished liars and cheaters in the world.
♥ “I just want you to know that I don’t want to put any spells or whatever on anyone else, like that man who was in here before.”
“Oh, him.” She rolls her eyes. “I gave the poor creature exactly what he wanted. A powder that will do no harm to the man he wishes to harm. So he can keep on blaming someone other than himself for how miserable he is. Those who want the truth, get truth. Those who want lies, get lies no matter what I say.”
♥ "There is no old life or new life. There is only life. And I can tell you only what you can hear."
♥ One of the maids buttons and laces me into my dress with lightning speed while I try to slow my breathing. Casual, just be casual. He has no power over you, I tell my reflection as I give it a once-over in the mirror. What's with the blue-and-white checks on this fabric? Why am I wearing a tablecloth instead of a dress?
...I begin to make my way toward the drawing room, gripping the banister and steadying myself inwardly with the thought that wearing table linen more than makes up for any hint of color I might now have summoned to my lips and cheeks, and therefore I have little chance of appearing alluring or looking like I wish to appear alluring.
♥ Granted, the private parlor is tidier and less rancid-smelling than the dining room, and instead of Rumplestiltskin's brother serving us our meal, we have a moderately clean-looking maidservant who doesn't scratch herself once.
♥ And then it hits me. Regardless of what era I’m in right now, or how I’m supposed to fulfill my so-called destiny, I refuse to make my destiny a lifetime of nights in the arms of yet another man I don’t care about but want to care about because the alternative is being alone, or even worse, a man I care about even though I know he can never give me what I really want. I’m tired of settling for two strange bodies fumbling with buttons and zippers and each other to reach the momentary high of sexual release only to have that replaced by the inevitable abyss I fall into afterward. I will not settle for that kind of destiny. Not here. Not anywhere.