Who will she meet, besides the Wilberforce’s, of course. Why, the abolitionist Thomas Clarkson, and Clarkson’s dear friends in the Lake Country, William Wordsworth, his wife Mary, and his sister Dorothy. What will the events of the turbulent early years of the 19th century bring to our dear heroine and her family and friends?

While I was researching for my newest novel, “The Making of Margaret Dashwood,” I ran across authors who influenced Jane Austen’s writings.

Frances Burney was an influential writer during Jane’s lifetime. She is considered a pioneer of novels of manners, witty satires of the foibles of British Georgian society. When only twenty six, Burney wrote her popular novel, “Evelina: or, the History of a Young Ladies’ Entrance into the World,” published in 1778. “Cecilia,” followed in 1782, and “Camilla,” in 1796. The theme of these novels dealt with young ladies’ making their way in society, as does Austen’s own novels. So the great Jane Austen was influenced by the great writers of her time. A novel thought. Just as she influences other authors even more than two hundred years after her own time. Like me.

No one writes or creates in any medium in a vacuum. All are influenced by each other. There is a connecting power in creativity. It is like the wind passing through the air, like musical strains reaching the ear and passing on. Through the whole world and across time. Creativity connects us to each other. That is wondrous.

I’ve been looking up words Austen uses in her novels that I don’t know the meaning of:

Coxcomb: a vain and conceited man, a dandy

Bilious: nausea or vomiting

Piquet: a card game with two players

Tippet: a long fur scarf or shawl worn around the neck and shoulders

Sanguine: optimistic or positive

Cara sposo: a dear husband

Pertinacity: sticking to an opinion or purpose, stubbornly tenacious

Verdure: fresh green color and vegetation

Segacity: discernment, foresight

And this is just the beginning…..

August 24, 2022

When historical fiction author Carol Pratt Bradley submitted her newest novel to WiDo Publishing, Managing Editor Karen Gowen was surprised to see such a departure from her usual genre. Gowen, instrumental in bringing four of Bradley’s works to publication and herself a huge fan of Jane Austen’s books, chose to personally review the recent submission.

“It was such a change for Carol yet it made sense, given her knowledge of England and her love of history. I wondered how she would handle lighter subject matter, how near to Austen’s voice and approach she could get.”  

Gowen admits to feeling doubtful as well as curious, which soon gave way to excited enthusiasm. “It’s Jane Austen with the added depth and historical details of Carol Pratt Bradley. I devoured ‘The Making of Margaret Dashwood’, read it right through. It felt like I had discovered a new Austen novel I had somehow missed.”

Bradley discusses how she chose to incorporate historical background into the story: “Most times I compartmentalize history. I never thought to put together the historical time in which Austen wrote her books, just enjoyed the compelling way she wove a story, and the romance, of course, and the happy endings after it looked like all was lost. At the time I got the idea for this novel, I was reading a book about William Wilberforce and the fight for abolition in Britain. I realized, wait a minute, this is during that same time.

“Austen placed her characters in the center of village life. But lurking on the edges of the stories is the larger world in which she lived, full of wars and the blight of the slave trade and other social injustices. After Pride and Prejudice was published, Austen wrote to her sister Cassandra: ‘The work is rather too light, and bright, and sparkling; it wants shade….’ She said perhaps she should have put in more ‘things of substance….the history of Bonaparte…or anything that would form a contrast.’ The time in which Austen wrote her works was crammed with drama and conflict. So, in writing about the character of Margaret Dashwood from Sense and Sensibility, I determined that I would add some shade.”

Bradley’s previous approach to her work has been to write about real characters from history. “This book about Margaret Dashwood would be a different way to write and it intrigued me. I could place a fictional character from a beloved novel with some of the people who lived during that time period and put Margaret inside the historical events. What may have happened to Margaret after the marriages of her sisters, Marianne and Elinor, could happen alongside real-life people of that time, such as William and Barbara Wilberforce and abolition and education activist Hannah More. My imagination could weave her story alongside history. What could be more fun!”

The author found she couldn’t get the words down fast enough, every writer’s dream. “It just flowed out of me like it had always been inside waiting for me to let it out. I adore Margaret and want to return to her story in a sequel. But first I’m writing the story of another Jane Austen character.”

“Carol most definitely should continue with the Austen fan fiction genre,” Gowen says. “I think she’s come across a niche that has real potential to be very successful for her.”

Bradley happened to write the book almost by accident. “I got the idea during the Covid pandemic in 2020. I’d published my fourth novel earlier that year, Daughter of Anne-Hoeck, and was itching to write another one. Since everything shut down, I certainly had more time on my hands. One afternoon I re-watched an adaptation of Sense and Sensibility. I turned it off and sat quietly. What about the younger sister Margaret? What happened to her? How did she respond to the events that happened to her sisters? How would that have shaped her?

“I kept on wondering. Over the next several days, I got out my big book of Jane Austen works and read all of Sense and Sensibility, probably for the first time. Austen portrayed Margaret as a young girl who was not very promising. But that didn’t seem fair at all. Why should Margaret get short shrift? She wrote that Margaret had imbibed much of her sister Marianne’s sensibility and over-emotion and her romantic ideas about life and love. How would Jane Austen portray her as she grew older and came out into society? Would she still think her to be not very promising? The only mention she gets at the end of the book is that she had reached the age where, according to Mrs. Jennings and Sir John Middleton, she might be supposed to have a lover. Did she? Jane can never tell us and that is unfortunate. So I had a thought–maybe I could write Margaret’s story. Did I dare? I closed the book. I would do it.”

The folks at WiDo Publishing are glad she did. “We have become much more selective about the books we acquire through our traditional imprint,” states Gowen. “We were happy to say a quick yes to this one.”

I didn’t discover L.M. Montgomery’s works until the 1985 miniseries by Kevin Sullivan came out, my response being: How could I have spent my whole childhood without her books?! I promptly got her books and devoured them. I also read her diaries. What a luminous, sensitive soul she was! You can see it in her expression. Her prose breathes with her love of life. She saw beyond what most people see. What a vivid imagination!

From Anne of Avonlea:

“I wonder what a soul…a person’s soul…would look like,’ said Priscilla dreamily.
‘Like that, I should think,’ answered Anne, pointing to a radiance of sifted sunlight streaming through a birch tree. ‘Only with shape and features of course. I like to fancy souls as being made of light. And some are all shot through with rosy stains and quivers…and some have a soft glitter like moonlight on the sea…and some are pale and transparent like mist at dawn.”

All of her characters have strengths. All of them have weaknesses. Austen captures them all with biting wit. She tells her readers straight out as well as showing through dialogue and action what they are like. Sir Walter Eliot in Persuasion: “Vanity was the beginning and end of Sir Walter Eliot’s character: vanity of person and of situation.” I don’t mind being told. Show don’t tell is drummed into an aspiring writer’s head. Never ever tell. Yet Austen does it. Brilliantly. Satisfactorily. I like it.

Sir Walter’s vanity is revealed even more by the dialogue. After a diatribe against those ordinary men who achieve distinction and riches in the navy while ruining their complexions, appearance being the thing that he most prizes, he says: “Then I take it for granted…that his face is about as orange as the cuffs and capes of my livery.” Austen’s greatest wit comes in the telling. Of the Eliot’s reduced circumstances, Austen states: “Both father and daughter seemed to expect that something should be struck out by one or the other to remove their embarrassments and reduce their expenditure, without involving the loss of any indulgence of taste or pride.”

Jane Austen is a master storyteller, getting her characters into hopeless situations where all is looked to be lost and then in unexpected ways, gets them out again and into perfect happiness. Her books read almost like mysteries, as she reveals bit by bit and turn of page. After the satisfying resolution, when the reader learns all and is assured of a beloved character’s happy future, the book does not end. Austen liked to have detailed conversations between the two lovers where they “clear the air,” a play by play concerning all the misunderstandings that had kept them apart. Persuasion again, as Anne Eliot and Captain Wentworth strolled through the streets of Bath, now certain of their union: “…they could indulge in those explanations of what had directly proceeded the present moment, which were so poignant and so ceaseless in interest. All the little variations of the last week were gone through; and of yesterday and to-day there could scarcely be an end.”

At the conclusion of Persuasion, Austen sums up the situation with her biting wit: “Sir Walter, indeed, though he had no affection for Anne, had no vanity flattered, to make him really happy on the occasion, was very far from thinking it a bad match for her. On the contrary, when he saw more of Captain Wentworth, saw him repeatedly by daylight, and eyed him well, he was very much struck by his personal claims, and felt that his superiority of appearance might not be unfairly balanced against her superiority of rank; and all of this, assisted by his well-sounding name, enabled Sir Walter, at last to prepare his pen, with a very good grace, for the insertion of the marriage in the volume of honour.” I almost see Jane tap her pen upon the period at the end of that sentence in great satisfaction, pick up her paper and read it over again.

In his book, “On Fairy-stories,” Tolkien said: “History often resembles myth, because they are both ultimately of the same stuff.” That helped answer my question about why, as an historical author, I’m currently writing a story that includes both historical and fantasy elements. Imaginative stories, he wrote, “…open a door on Other Time, and if we pass through, though only for a moment, we stand outside our own time, outside Time itself, maybe.”

That is also what historical novels do. To me, these two genres are not far apart, but interconnected. In my book, “Light of the Candle,” it seemed natural for me to write about Daniel’s dreams of the future, of the giant image that haunted a king’s own dreams, of him flying through the air to hover over Jerusalem, or seeing a vision of Sarai as he sat in Babylon. Bible stories are filled with the mystical. Author Madeleine L’Engle reflected: “In art we are able to walk on water; we speak to the angels who call us; we move, unfettered, among the stars.”

Fantasy stories are not only for children, both these authors say, and I believe them. When I was a little girl, I was certain that little fairies lived in the flower beds, that my stuffed animals were alive and could talk to me, that the world contained countless wondrous things that I could not see. I spent many imaginative hours believing in the reality of magic. L’Engle lamented: “We are…taught that fairy tales and myths are to be discarded as soon as we are old enough to understand “reality.” Story, she said, “helped me to learn to live.” Tolkien said: “The association of children and fairy-stories is an accident of our domestic history.” It is a false assumption that we must “grow up” and out of fantasy and myth. Adults, too, need stories of the fantastical.

Tolkien perfectly described fantasy: “The realm of fairy-story is wide and deep and high and filled with many things: all manner of beasts and birds are found there; shoreless seas and stars uncounted; beauty that is an enchantment, and an ever-present peril; both joy and sorrow as sharp as swords….[A fairy-story] contains many things besides elves and fays, and besides dwarfs, witches, trolls, giants, or dragons; it holds the seas, the sun, the moon, the sky; and the earth, and all things that are in it: tree and bird, water and stone, wine and bread, and ourselves, mortal men, when we are enchanted.”

So I will write of times gone by and of whimsy and revel in it.

During this pandemic shutdown, with daily life slowed down and simplified, my inner creative life has not followed suit. I spend my morning hours in my writing loft. Just before the world altered, my fourth historical novel, Daughter of Anne-Hoeck, was released. I am ready to write a new novel. Ideas came and I played around with a few, only to lose my enthusiasm and put them aside for another time. Early one morning I woke with the thought to resurrect a project I began ten years ago after I graduated with my MFA. A bit of a departure from my chosen genre of biographical novels. I’d set it aside and returned to it several times over the past decade, finally abandoning it in 2017. I love the story and really want to make it work. That morning I determined that no matter what, I had to try.

The manuscript is a historical fantasy set during the English Civil war in the 1640’s. Part of the story concerns the recurring outbreaks of the plague that brought terror and death, decimating communities. What would it be like to live always under the threat that it would return, I wondered, and when it did happen, knowing how to endure it? My decision to return to the story proved timely, for now we are experiencing a plague in our own time.

Recently I read a news article about an ancient flour mill in North Dorset, England, that ground flour for the locals since 1016 A.D. In the 1970’s, it closed, becoming a museum. The ancient machinery continued to grind flour a couple of days a week for the tours. During the world shutdown of the COVID-19 pandemic, flour has become more difficult to purchase in the stores. The mill owners decided to return to full-time flour milling to help supply the need for flour, grinding over a ton of grain just in the last several weeks.

We share so much with the people and circumstances of the past. What goes around, really does come round again.

In the afterword of “Daughter of Anne-Hoeck,” I reflected on what I learned from studying the unusual life of Susanna Hutchinson. It seems particularly applicable to the time in which I find my own self living. It is too easy to feel the angst over circumstances I cannot control: the day to day grinding of political upheaval and warring of opinions, injustice and suffering, and now a world pandemic. How much the sun shines and how much it rains. Any yet I must remember:

“Men and women live inside a social and political world which affects their circumstances. But our lives are much more than world events, social mores, or the interpretations of current government and religious authorities. We choose our own beliefs and opinions and actions, deciding for ourselves the truths we will follow. In doing so, we build a world of our own creation inside of our larger world. Isn’t that what the designer of earth and mankind desires for each of us? Like Susanna, we choose and shape our own “space between.”