Mary Brunton: Discipline

Miss Ellen Percy is spoiled rotten and takes for granted her family.  With the early moralistic stirrings of pre-Victoriania*  Mary Brunton sets her heroine down a brutal series of trials and tribulations that remind me a little of the bleakness of Nathaniel Hawthorne mixed with a tamer vanilla Story of O.  There is a touch … Continue reading →

Jane Austen’s Contemporaries

Janeites and hist-ro fans undoubtedly have wished at least once (if not many, many times) that there were more Austens to read and absorb, to soak in during a long hot soak, to curl up to at bedtime. And almost having exhausted Heyer’s most excellent body of hist-ro works, I began to seriously wish this … Continue reading →