Author Valentine and Give-away

By Cindy Jones

As the person responsible for my book’s promotion, I speak to book clubs and library groups about my book, the creative process, and the journey to publication.  After such a talk where I had gone on for 40 minutes, sacrificing my husband and children for a laugh, baring my rejection history for a little sympathy, and explaining how my creative technique evolved from watching Gilligan’s Island as a child, someone raised their hand.  (I’m embarrassed to admit this).  The gentle book clubber asked, “What is your book about?”

I told her.

And then I went home and wrote on my note cards:  TELL THEM WHAT THE BOOK IS ABOUT.

Along these same lines, I realized I had gone on and on about Jane Austen, but I’d never bothered to say what I love about her nor why I devoted five years of my life and a book to her.  To correct this oversight, I have made new note cards for future book talks and next time, immediately following the elevator pitch* (the 90 second synopsis of my book), I’ll explain exactly why I love Jane Austen.

And since today is Valentine's Day I decided to share my reasons with you.  Here are five things I love about Jane Austen:

1. Jane Austen is an underdog.  She did not attend the Iowa Writers Workshop or the Bread Loaf Writer’s Conference.  She was poor and homeless, dependent upon her brother’s charity.  With almost no formal education, she read her way through her father’s library and wrote three novels by age 23.  She achieved supernova success with absolutely no advantages and articulated the question that resonates as powerfully today as it did in her time: what chance do the heart and mind have in a world dominated by money?  If she were alive now, I’m afraid she’d be stalked by paparazzi and featured on the cover of super market tabloids that I’d have to scan while pretending to look the other way.
2. Her dry wit cracks me up!   In her letters to her sister Cassandra, she says things like, “I shall not tell you anything more of William Digweed’s china, as your silence on the subject makes you unworthy of it.”  And, “You express so little anxiety about my being murdered under Ash Park Copse…that I have a great mind not to tell you whether I was or not.”   Her language is so precise, her insights sharp, and her wit so quick.  I foster no illusions about my own place at the sharp end of her pen.
3. She takes no prisoners.  Each of her six novels is lavished with excellent villains and when they meet their sorry fates it is with the most gratifying turn of the screw.  No quick and painless dispatch but a terribly personalized hell.  One of my favorite villains' fate is to spend her old age witnessing her spoiled niece’s disgrace.  Imagine the torture of living in close quarters with a whiner!
4. She didn’t marry the guy she didn't love.  I consider Jane Austen the Champion of Bookish Women.  She believed that intelligent women should marry for love, and told her niece, “nothing can be compared to the misery of being bound without Love…”  She didn’t love the one guy who proposed and rather than marry him and be assured of food and shelter for life, she remained true to her principles.  She walked the talk.
5. My heroine is unknowable.  A scholar has suggested that the hundreds of letters her sister burned after her death, and the posthumous re-branding of Aunt Jane by her nephew's biography left a blank slate upon which we can project our personal hopes and dreams.  Which may be why I feel that Jane Austen speaks to me from between the lines of her prose--and we agree on almost everything.  

I'm giving away a signed copy of My Jane Austen Summer as well as a package of Lily Berry's Pink Rose Tea in celebration of Valentine's Day.  Please tell--who is your Author Valentine and why do you love them?  One small reason will get your name entered in the drawing.  Open till midnight February 14.    

*Cindy Jones is the author of My Jane Austen Summer, the story of a young woman who thinks she may have realized her dream of living in a novel when she is invited to participate in a Jane Austen Literary Festival.  Her problems follow her to England where she must change her ways or face the fate of so many of Jane Austen’s secondary characters, destined to repeat the same mistakes over and over again.

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