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.