Story Connections – Page 7

Cottage at Le Pouldu (Władysław Ślewiński)

Cottage at Le Pouldu, ca. 1892. Władysław Ślewiński, CC BY-SA 4.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Her Convenient Forever is on sale this month, so I thought that today, I’d share an image that goes along with an excerpt from that book.

If you’ve read the first three books of my Touches of Austen series, you will have met Felicity Love, and you probably really don’t like her. She’s not nice in those stories. I did a good job of making her unlikable if I do say so myself. And then, while writing book three, I knew that I was going to have to write a story for her. I didn’t really want to. I knew it wouldn’t be easy to make her likeable. But it simply had to be done.

Her Convenient Forever is that story.

It is set near the sea in Kent where Mr. And Mrs. Love have rented a cottage for the summer and where Felicity is coming to terms with the mess she has made of her life through selfish living. In fact, the opening chapter shows her in the very deepest kind of despair. This somewhat lengthy excerpt is from that first chapter.

Sweet Solitude (Edmund Blair Leighton)

Sweet Solitude. Edmund Leighton, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

When I saw this painting I thought of the heroine in His Beautiful Bea. She likes quiet escapes and books. So, I chose an excerpt from that book to share today, but it’s not from her perspective. It’s from the hero’s point of view.

This is the hero:

For those who don’t know:

His Beautiful Bea is book 1 in my Touches of Austen series of original sweet Regency romances with deliberate nods to Jane’s novels. This book pairs long-time friends and neighbors as the romantic interests. The heroine lost her father in the war, and his friend, the hero’s father, has promised to care for the heroine’s family.

Those sound like they could be things that nod to possibly Sense and Sensibility or Emma, but in fact, when I wrote this story, the nods I had in mind were to Mansfield Park. After all, our quiet and bookish heroine is infatuated with the younger son of her neighbour’s two sons, but he doesn’t see her as anything other than a friend. Does that sound a bit like a Fanny/Edmund situation?

There are other nods as well, but as you can see from the details that I have given, this is not a retelling or a variation. This story, while inspired by various bits of Austen stories, is completely original — characters, setting, and plot.

“Dance in the City” by Renoir

“Dance in the CIty” by Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons. The woman is identified as artist Suzanne Valadon. Original is in Musée d’Orsay, Paris, France.

Ok, so I know that this is not a Regency era painting and that the couple is neither dressed or dancing as as a Regency era couple would be. How anachronistic!

Now that we have that out of the way 😉 let me tell you why I picked this image to share today with an excerpt from Delighting Mrs. Bennet. My reasons are pretty basic. First, the couple seems to be enjoying their dance very much, and second, her dress is blue. I know, not exceptionally deep reasons to match this with the excerpt below, but there you have it. 😀 By this point in the series, Darcy has learned to be rather swoony, so I hope you enjoy this snippet from Chapter 8.

[FYI for those who do not yet own this book, the ebook edition is on sale everywhere this month (May 2023). See the book promo page for a link and details, or click the book cover image below to find links to various stores.] Continue reading “Dance in the City” by Renoir

Portrait of a lady in a white dress (Marie Wandscheer)

This young lady looks ready to spend the evening at some soiree, but her expression is not one of delight. I think both of those things are fitting to pair with my book A Scandal in Springtime.

In this book, Kitty is spending time at her aunt and uncles home in town and attending some of the events of the season with her sister, Elizabeth (aka Mrs. Darcy). As she goes through her short season in town, Kitty is not always cheerful — mostly due to the excessive amount of talent that the always-proper-until-he-met-her Mr. Linton has for saying or doing something wrong. 🙂 (The poor man has Darcy beat in the how to offend a Bennet lady category!)

The excerpt I chose to share below is one of those times when Mr. Linton is making Kitty irritated, to say the least. I chose this time of his doing that because the lady in the painting is holding a rolled up paper, and Kitty has just attended a literary reading.

Oh, and one more thing before you read the excerpt: The Mr. Crawford who is mentioned is Henry Crawford (from my Other Pens series), who happens to be engaged to Mr. Linton’s sister.

Enjoy!

The Next Ten Minutes Ago (Jeremy Jordan and Laura Osnes)

Yesterday, I was talking with a couple of people about Finally Mrs. Darcy, and afterward, the song “Ten Minutes Ago” from Rogers and Hammerstein’s Cinderella popped into my mind as I was thinking about Darcy and Elizabeth’s whirlwind reunion to married story in that little novella of mine. It seemed to be a good pairing, and I decided I would share that song and novella today as my story connections post.

As you can see (and hear), between making that decision and creating this post, I changed my mind about what song I was going to share.

I went to YouTube, typed in my search info, listened to a recording studio sort of video of the song I was looking for, and then saw the title for this song. I suffer from excessive curiosity at times — today was one of those times. 🙂 I clicked on the video and by the time the song was half over, I had changed my mind that this song might be an even better fit for Finally Mrs. Darcy, since both the song and the story play with the idea of time — looking forward and back.

And I think it still captures the elation and hope that Darcy and Elizabeth feel mere moments after meeting again at a ball and beginning, though never finishing, a dance.