Leenie Brown fell in love with Jane Austen's works when she first read Sense and Sensibility followed immediately by Pride and Prejudice in her early teens. As the second of five daughters and an avid reader, she has always loved to see where her imagination takes her and to play with and write about the characters she meets along the way. In 2013, these two loves collided when she stumbled upon the world of Jane Austen Fan Fiction. A year later, in 2014, she began writing her own Austen-inspired stories and began publishing them in 2015. Leenie lives in Nova Scotia, Canada with her two teenage boys and her very own Mr. Brown (a wonderful mix of all the best of Darcy, Bingley and Edmund with healthy dose of the teasing Mr. Tillney and just a dash of the scolding Mr. Knightley).
“Archers”, an April 1799 “pin-up” type print, engraved after a drawing by Adam Buck, and with a dedication to the Prince Regent. At the time, archery was one of the few competitive sports that adult women of the “genteel” classes could respectably engage in (others were battledore/shuttlecock — a precursor to badminton — and for a tiny social elite, old-fashioned “court tennis”). Engraved after a drawing by Adam Buck, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.
Do you know what was one of my most favourite times of the day back when I was in elementary school? No, it wasn’t recess or lunch. It was when we would come in from lunch recess and our teacher would read a chapter or two from a book while we settled back into our desks and got our minds ready to finish our classes.
When I was teaching, reading to my class, like my teachers had done, was one of the things I loved to do.
With that in mind, let me tell you that I have been working on a reading project which taps into memories of that loved activity from years gone by. It’s a project that I have wanted to do for some time, but then, right after I began it, I got long covid and had to abandon it for a while.
Some time ago, when Enticing Miss Darcy was just being published, I created a set of “scrapbook” pages for a post I did about it at Austen Authors. I came across those pages in my computer files and thought I’d share them here today. Sorry, there is no excerpt, but I think each page will give you a good bit of information about the story.
At the end of Enticing Miss Darcy, you will find a short story sequel included in the book. 🙂
*whispers* The hero of the story is a Fitzwilliam brother. The third and youngest.
And a bonus image
Jack is one of the original characters I have created, so I’m going to include his “Meet the Main Character” card here for you to get to know a little about him. 🙂 (Oh, and in case you are wondering, Alistair is the fellow who married Anne in Becoming Entangled and another original character. 🙂 )
Remember this book and all the other Dash of Darcy and Companion books are on sale now and moving to Kindle Unlimited in April. I really do hope you’ll take a chance on this book and meet Jack.
Travelling Coach and Pair, Henry Bunbury, CC0, via Wikimedia Commons
This drawing is the sort that will make me enlarge the image just to look at all the little lines that comprise the details in it. I also enjoy that it almost looks as if it could be moving.
I chose to share it today because Pretending to Love Mary begins in travelling coach, and I wanted to share the first few paragraphs of that story with you.
If you’re on my mailing list, you may have already read this story because I sent out an email with a link to download a copy yesterday. If you’re a Booksprout reviewer, you might have picked up a copy of the novelette to review. (Twenty out of the thirty-five review copies were claimed the last time I looked.)
If you’d like to join my mailing list, and you do so before March 7th (which is the release day for Pretending to Love Mary, you could also get a copy of this story for free.
