The Secret Dreamworld of a Jane Austen Fan

I promised I’d write down the answers to which books I quoted in my previous post. So here they are.

1. Jane Eyre (Charlotte Brontë)
2. David Copperfield (Charles Dickens)
3. Little Women (Louisa May Alcott)
4. Middlemarch (George Eliot)
5. North and South (Elizabeth Gaskell)
6. A Tale of Two Cities (Charles Dickens)

7. Anne of Green Gables (L.M. Montgomery)
8. The [...]

”It is a truth universally acknowledged that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife”. That is probably one of (if not the) most famous opening sentences ever. We all know where it comes from, and it’s been quoted again and again and again.
I was thinking about [...]

I just came back from a walk to discover a package had arrived for me from Amazon! What a lovely surprise! I love getting packages from them, somehow it feels like getting presents, even though I know I’ve paid for it myself… (oh yes, all of £0.01!)
The book I got was Our Mutual [...]

The reason I haven’t written anything about the Dickens adaptations we bough a little while back is because I haven’t yet seen many of them. But one of them we’ve just finished watching. The six hour long The Pickwick Papers.

I’ve never seen a screen adaptation of this book before, but I have read the book. [...]

Not too long ago I was in a bookshop, browsing through the classics section (my favourite part) when I spotted these two books on the shelf. They were new versions of Pride and Prejudice and Wuthering Heights (from Harper Teen, I think…?) but they looked like they were supposed to be a part of the [...]

One of my all-time absolute favourite movies is Little Women (the one from 1994)! I remember the first time I saw it, it was many years ago and my mother had rented it from the video rental store. I hardly spoke any English at the time, and even though it had subtitles I didn’t understand [...]

This morning I reread Jane Austen’s history “book” once again. It is such a very short and wonderfully written history! And so funny!
Even though it is such a short piece of work I think it deserves more attention than, unfortunately, it is given. Sure you can finish it in about 15 minutes, but those, for [...]

In this months newsletter from the Jane Austen Center they recommended this book, A Truth Universally Acknowledged by Susannah Carson.

It appears to be a collection of essays on Jane Austen from 33 great writers. Most of those writers are modern ones that I have never heard of, but there were some I was more familiar [...]

We came across an article about classical books in a magazine yesterday. A couple of years ago The Guardian published a list of the top 100 books that their readers had voted as the ones “you can’t live without”. And that whole list was featured in the article we found.
It was really interesting to read! [...]

This poem from Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women is one which I very much like. In the book it is in the second to last chapter, the one entitled Under the Umbrella. I like it because I think it is such a sweet and beautiful poem. And it shows so clearly the different personalities of [...]