All Things Austen - Guest Austen Author and Giveaway - Cecilia Gray

Please turn off all mobile phones for the duration of the program, thank you.

*the stage is dark, a lone figure stands center stage*

*one beam of light illuminates this figure*

Welcome Austen Author Cecilia Gray everyone!

Cecilia Gray is the author of Fall for You and So Into You the first 2 novels in the Jane Austen Academy Series. Fall for You being the re-telling of Pride and Prejudice and So Into You being Sense and Sensibilities turn. You can check out the very cool trailer for the book series here

 


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I did not set out to write a series of Jane Austen retellings. I set out to write a series set in an exclusive all-girl’s boarding school that becomes co-ed to the delight and despair of its female students.

I wanted the new guys to challenge my heroines who would also be challenged by each other. I wanted each girl to be very different.

There had to be a driven leader, a shy wallflower, a popular girl. As I began sketching the characters I found myself having thoughts like, “This girl will be spunky…you know…like Elizabeth Bennet.” It wasn’t long before Jane Austen was officially integrated into the series.

Reimagining Jane Austen’s heroines as modern-day high school girls is not new. Most famously, Amy Heckerling’s 1995 teen film Clueless gave us Cher Horowitz – a supernatural fashion queen who, like her source material Emma, engages in well-intentioned if misguided matchmaking.

Here are several of my modern interpretations:

Lizzie (Elizabeth from Pride and Prejudice)

Sassy, intelligent and a tad judgemental? Lizzie had to be an opinionated, budding journalist – one who hadn’t learned to keep to the facts instead of her feelings. In FALL FOR YOU (Book #1 – The Jane Austen Academy Series) Lizzie protests the changes to the school and despises the incoming boys – especially Dante (Mr. Darcy) who is too rich and too superior for her taste.

Ellie (Elinor from Sense and Sensibility)

Sensible and reserved, Ellie always hides her feelings. It made sense to me that Ellie from SO INTO YOU (Book #2) would be a Santa Cruz surfer girl whose go-with-the-flow attitude is challenged when her parents decide to stop paying her tuition.

Anne (Anne from Persuasion)

Anne, by far my favorite Jane Austen heroine, is intelligent but easily persuaded to ignore her better judgement and regrets her decisions while in the throes of losing her home. My Anne has just lost her school – the Academy, to be precise - which was her family’s legacy until it was mismanaged. To make matters worse, one of the new male students is her ex-boyfriend who she broke up with when he moved away to military academy. He’s back, as hot as ever, and rich to boot.

Almost every character from the series is re-imagined although to keep the cast small, I’ve doubled up on roles.

Josh Wickham, a Hollywood heartthrob attending the school in my series, serves as my villain for the Pride and Prejudice retelling but is right back to being the bad boy for Willoughby’s role in the Sense and Sensibility story. I didn’t want any of the characters to have siblings at the school, so when sensible Ellie (Elinor/Eleanor) needed her dramatic Marianne, I let my Emma fill the role.

I’ve always loved Jane Austen, but developing and writing this series has exponentially increased my respect for the author and the enduring universality of her themes and characters.

Plus Jane Austen never shied away from giving her heroines “the win” – a cute guy and newfound self-respect. I hope I’ve able to do the same.

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You can find out all about Cecilia at her ----

Website

Facebook

Twitter

Keep these in mind guys they are going to come in handy later on...

You can also sign up for her newsletter here

About Cecilia

Cecilia Gray lives in Oakland where she reads, writes and breaks for food. She also pens her biographies in the third person. Like this. As if to trick you into thinking someone else wrote it because she is important. Alas, this is not the case.

Cecilia has been praised for “instilling a warmth and weight into her characters”  (Romancing The Book Reviews) and her books have been praised for being “well-written, original, realistic and witty” (Quills & Zebras Reviews).

Several of her titles - including A Delightful Arrangement (The Gentlemen Next Door #1) and An Illicit Engagement (The Gentlemen Next Door #2) - have spent, in her view, a shocking amount of time on bestseller lists for romance, historical romance and regency romance in the US, UK, Italy and Spain.

Her latest release, FALL FOR YOU, the first in a series of young-adult contemporary Jane Austen retellings received a starred Kirkus review and was praised for being a “unique twist on a classic” and offering “a compelling action of action, drama and love.”

She’s rather enamored of being contacted by readers and hopes you’ll oblige.

Giveaway Time!!
Cecilia has been kind enough to offer her 2 books - see above - for a giveaway! Yaaaaaay.

This will be international and the giveaway will be for e-books.

Fill out the pretty rafflecopter below and good luck!
a Rafflecopter giveaway

All Things Austen - Guest Post - Top 5 Favourite Austen Adaptations

Once again thank you to Alex (it is so weird thanking an Alex when I am an Alex...moving on) from A Girl, Books and Other Things.

Top 5 favorite Austen Adaptations.

It’s a truth universally acknowledged that this little blogger loves writing up lists!

And in the spirit of the Seven Weeks of Austen I decided to put together a list of my favorite adaptations of Ms. Austen’s works.

I ‘ve tried to put a little bit of everything and this is all my humble opinion.

So, onto the list!

Pride and Prejudice (1995) BBC/Masterpiece

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0112130

Okay, I’m going start with the absolute obvious choice. I absolutely love Colin Firth and Jennifer Ehle as Darcy and Lizzie. They have great chemistry together to be sure, but they also look the part - they have a very British look in my opinion - plus I think the actors and director got the essence of the sisters right. Little as Kitty and Mary’s screen time is, I remember them. And Lydia is annoying and vain but also kind of fun. 

I believe this series is so well loved it has almost become cannon - like the Darcy -swimming scene.

Persuade Me by Juliet Archer (2011)   

http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/11690220-persuade-me

Persuasion is one of those stories that I feel often gets overlooked, even by Austen fans but it has always been a favorite of mine mostly because it’s a story of second chances. And I think Persuade Me is a lovely modern retelling, because it gets the essence of the characters, their flaws, and yet it makes you connect with them. It’s hard to forgive someone when there are 10 years of misunderstandings in between, and Persuade Me shows that. Also, it manages to mirror a lot of the events in the original book in a way that makes sense in this day and age.

Sense and Sensibility (2008) BBC/Masterpiece

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0847150/ 

One of the things I love the most about this adaptation is that they got the ages of the characters right. If you read the book, Marianne is about 17 and Elinor about 19 - something you totally don’t get from Emma Thompson’s version, though I admit I kind of like that one too, but not as much as I like this version. Also, Edward doesn’t look like he goes around being constipated all the time - I’m looking at you Hugh Grant!

Sure, this version doesn’t have Alan Rickman or Greg Wise but it doesn’t actually suffer for it.

Clueless (1995)

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0112697/

I was only about 11 years old when Clueless came out but I still love watching it. It actually took me a while to work out it was an Emma retelling and I actually like that. Because of the setting and the way the argument was updated you feel just like you are watching a very fun story, no a retelling, and I love that.

Northanger Abbey (2007)

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0844794/

I admit that until I saw this movie, Northanger Abbey was probably the Jane Austen story that I was least familiar with, but I was so charmed that I of course went and bought the book and read it and loved it even more. The story is silly and fun and I loved Felicity Jones as Catherine (she’s one of my favorite young Brit actresses), and how incorporated her dreams into the movie. For me it actually turned into a feel good movie

Shout Out to:

The Lizzie Benet Diaries (2012) You Tube

http://www.youtube.com/playlist?annotation_id=annotation_208531&feature=iv&list=PL6690D980D8A65D08&src_vid=kobsKwCbXHY

I’m a bit on the fence about this because the more time it passes the less I like Lizzie - which actually made me realize she is very judgmental and has less-than-stellar parts to her personality (she’s not very nice toward her sisters other than Jane - even in the original) but because of the medium, it kind of jumped at me this time. In this version I like Caroline B. a lot more than Lizzie (at least so far) so go figure!  On the other hand, it’s a pretty clever idea to tell P & P through vlog entries, and I don’t even mind the Americanization of the story… that much.

  

Northanger Abbey - Guest Review - Northanger Abbey by Jane Austen

Many thanks to Alex from A Girl, Books and Other Things for sharing her thought on Northanger Abbey

A wonderfully entertaining coming-of-age story, Northanger Abbey is often referred to as Jane Austen’s “Gothic parody.” Decrepit castles, locked rooms, mysterious chests, cryptic notes, and tyrannical fathers give the story an uncanny air, but one with a decidedly satirical twist.

The story’s unlikely heroine is Catherine Morland, a remarkably innocent seventeen-year-old woman from a country parsonage. While spending a few weeks in Bath with a family friend, Catherine meets and falls in love with Henry Tilney, who invites her to visit his family estate, Northanger Abbey. Once there, Catherine, a great reader of Gothic thrillers, lets the shadowy atmosphere of the old mansion fill her mind with terrible suspicions. What is the mystery surrounding the death of Henry’s mother? Is the family concealing a terrible secret within the elegant rooms of the Abbey? Can she trust Henry, or is he part of an evil conspiracy? Catherine finds dreadful portents in the most prosaic events, until Henry persuades her to see the peril in confusing life with art.

The Deal:

Catherine Morland didn’t always look like she was going to be a heroine - her being rather tomboyish, one in a family with 10 children - but such was her path and, at the age of 17 she gets her chance for adventure when her neighbors, the Allens, invite her to go with them to Bath.

At first, things at Bath aren’t as fun as she expected, because she doesn’t really know anyone there, but she soon meets Henry Tilney, a kind young man with whom she becomes friendly.

My Thoughts:

I found Northanger Abbey to be a funny, silly, lighthearted story, it has the tone of a parody and it does poke a bit of fun at the Gothic stories that Catherine enjoys reading, but it’s not rude about it.

There are a few misunderstandings and all, but it’s all in good fun for the most part.

I did notice two things about this book: First, the voice of the narrator is felt heavily, almost as if this omnipresent narrator were a character also. Usually, when I’m reading a book in third person, I can get lost in the story but in Northanger Abbey I never stopped feeling like someone was telling me a story rather than me discovering it on my own.

And second, this feels like a younger book than any of the others I’ve read by Jane Austen. Both Catherine and Henry read very young; their mistakes are those of very young people. They are charming and nice but naïve in a way I don’t think many heroes and heroines in the Austen universe are. 

Pride and Prejudice - Guest Austen Author - Sharon Lathan

*curtain rises*

Say hello to Austen Author Sharon Lathan everyone! 

*clap, clap, clap*

Austen and the Romance Novel

by Sharon Lathan

For all that some refuse to label Jane Austen’s novels as “romance” (and indeed they are more than simply that) there is no doubt that finding one’s “true love” was a large part of the plot line. Elizabeth Bennet, Anne Elliot, Catherine Morland, Emma Woodhouse, the Dashwood sisters, and Fanny Price ended their respective novels with mates perfect for a host of reasons, but with love a prime factor.

Was Austen writing of a popular notion for the era?

Historically in England, once out in Society a woman had one duty to fulfill: Find a suitable match. By “suitable” the objective was not a man who one loved but one who possessed wealth and rank. A woman who did not secure a good marriage would forever be reliant upon her family or the charity of others to survive. While this may have worked out well for some, in general marriage was the only hope, thus requiring her to make a very wise choice.

This concept is foreign to us yet for the lady of the past it was the way of things. Most women of the gentry class or aristocracy gave scant consideration to choosing out of deep passion. Of course, women are by nature sensitive creatures so emotions often got in the way! Hence the “wisdom” of allowing rational parents to become involved, the daughter knowing that her future security was at stake and thus trusting that a potential husband’s pedigree and wealth was thoroughly examined before he was offered. Indeed this was the whole point of staying within the ton and meeting at places like Almack’s Assembly where only those who were of the best quality and had passed inspection hung out!

Yet by the 18th century the idea of marrying with love as an incentive was gaining ground. Both males and females were deciding that this could add to the union in a positive way. Go figure! However, while this notion advanced and was desirable, practicality did not quickly disappear. Parental approval was necessary for the woman under 21 to marry and although a man certainly had greater freedom in his choices, he too may be beholden to a parent’s pocketbook or Society’s favor. Dashing off to Gretna Green solved the problem of marrying without approval but in most cases only led to worse complications.

By the way, Gretna Green was not the Las Vegas of historic Britain! It was simply the first town over the Scotland border. Scotland and England were not united at this time and did not share the same laws, so a marriage could be conducted anywhere in Scotland without parental consent or proper reading of the banns.

The Regency was an era of high romanticism to be sure, but it followed closely on the heels of the previous eras where ideals were quite different. Strict rules of conduct between the sexes were rigidly enforced in large part because of the rise in romantic sensibilities. You see this in the response of Mrs. Bennet to Lizzy refusing Mr. Collins. To her mother, a woman from the previous generation, marriage to a man with a career and who was heir to Longbourn was far more valuable then waiting for love or passion as a deciding factor. Conversely the effect upon the family by Lydia’s actions (if Mr. Darcy had not saved the day) reveal the penalty for behaving with passionate emotions reigning.

Thus the answer to my question - Was Austen writing of a popular notion for the era? - is yes. However, in each of her novels she tempered the belief in marrying for great love and passion with pragmatism. Each of her heroines married men out of love but they were also well established or as in the case of Mr. Darcy fabulously rich!

That definitely sounds like a romance novel to me! What do you think? And of the Austen lovers, which couple is your favorite and why?

Sharon Lathan bio--

Sharon Lathan is the best-selling author of The Darcy Saga seven volume sequel series to Jane Austen’s Pride & Prejudice. Sharon began writing in 2005 and her first

novel, Mr. and Mrs. Fitzwilliam Darcy: Two Shall Become One was published by

Sourcebooks Landmark in 2009. Her eighth novel will be released in April 2013, The Passions of Dr. Darcy an epic tale of an English physician in Georgian Era India.

For more information about Sharon, the Regency Era, and her novels, visit her website/blog at: www.sharonlathan.net or search for her on Facebook and Twitter. She also invites you to join her and other Austen novelists at Austen Authors: www.austenauthors.com