I saw this picture and thought of two little girls who end up becoming the responsibility of their uncle in Sketches and Secrets of Summer. Maggie is the oldest and five. Rose is the youngest and three. Rose is also the more cautious of the pair, while Maggie is a good bit more independent.
Both of them adore Miss Bennet (aka Mary), and so does their uncle, though he hasn’t figured that out by the time they make this call at Pemberley in the story.
When I was scrolling through pictures on Wikimedia today, I came across this one and my mind immediately went to the scene below for Morning Mist — even if in that scene there are only two young ladies standing under a tree during a rain shower. 🙂
Morning Mist is one of my Nature’s Fury and Delights novelettes. This one, as you will see, is a variation on Sense and Sensibility. In this short, six-chapter variation, which tells how Marianne falls in love with the colonel, Marianne meets Colonel Brandon before she meets Mr. Willoughby, and she meets him in just the sort of setting to make her imagine him as a brave and noble knight. So, by the time she and her younger sister Margaret meet Mr. Willoughby, the colonel has already taken up a place of admiration in Marianne’s mind.
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.