I am wondering whether I need a tag line:
A little Austen in your everyday life
because, whether intentionally or not, she keeps popping up in my writing. People tell me it vaguely resembles hers, I borrow characters, concepts, plot lines. Being so immersed in Austen it makes sense that she would appear; she’s been a huge influence in my life.
If you read Alison’s the Sensible One then read Beautiful Abomination you may be asking “where’s the Austen?” There is one big intentional Austen reference, though there may be others even I didn’t pick up on.
At the end of Mansfield Park when Edmund finally breaks it off with Mary Crawford he realizes he’d never been in love with her, who she really was, but with the person he’d wanted her to be. He tells Fanny he would rather have all the pain of parting from Mary than the pain of knowing that she didn’t exist, so he could still hold on to a small part of her. There is something so beautiful, so vulnerable in this.
Who among us hasn’t been misled, or misled themselves, on the character of a partner or friend?
I think there’s nothing wrong with a little Austen, and being likened to her sounds like a thing I’d be shouting from the rooftops 🙂 She was a master of her craft. And consider the stories she told in the time she told them, well… etc. The tagline sounds like it’s worth rolling the dice on 🙂