It occurs to me - or rather it was just now shoved up through my subconscious, which is snickering madly at the idea of my setting up as a pop-cult snob - that the cult surrounding Jane Austen is in a lot of ways the hi-brow equivalent of the whole pretty pink tween experience. Granted, there's a lot more snark and a lot fewer ballads, but when you ( Read more... )

The current audiobook is Jane and the Stillroom Maid, one of the series by Stephanie Barron and read by Kate Reading, and it comes highly recommended indeed.

I'm not ordinarily a huge fan of novelists that use real historical figures. Even if the author is skilled enough - which is very skilled indeed - to incorporate fact into fiction without ( Read more... )