influences

Dear Miss Austen

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This post by Kat Flannery originally appeared on Indie Chicks Cafe on 2/22/14.

We have never met, and with the many years between us, you being born in 1775 and me in 1977, the likelihood of this occurring is slim. However, I have admired you since I was sixteen years old, when I read Pride and Prejudice for the first time. You were talented beyond your time, and as I researched your life more, I was saddened to learn that you never received acclaimed status or rave reviews for your work as an author while living.

The early 1800s were not ready for women to be raising their fists while demanding recognition and a place in society, but you thought it so. You were eager and honest for women to be held in some form of esteem other than the mere whisper from behind their men.

You lived during the French Revolution, the Napoleonic wars and the Industrial Revolution, and yet there is never any mention of them in your novels. These historic events seemed to have passed you by without notice. When I open your books, I’m transported back to a time where none of this existed. Instead, romance, common sense and reason are woven into your words.
 

Click here to read the full post on Indie Chicks Cafe.

 

Reading Lessons of a Religious Upbringing Without Modern Books

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This post by Sarah Perry originally appeared on The Guardian.

I was raised by Strict Baptists, so I was deprived of any recent literature, but blessed from very early on by a huge library of classics.

When I was eight I searched for something to read and found a white-jacketed book full of illustrations. It was about a bullied orphan who left boarding school to live in a haunted house and marry a black-haired man, and though now and then I had to ask my mother to decipher a word, I was enthralled. No one told me I was too young for Jane Eyre.

My parents are devoutly Christian, members of one of the few Strict Baptist chapels left in Essex. It’s hard to explain how it was to be brought up in that chapel and that home: often I say, laughingly, “I grew up in 1895”, because it seems the best way of evoking the Bible readings and Beethoven, the Victorian hymns and the print of Pilgrim’s Progress, and the sunday school seaside outings when we all sang grace before our sausage and chips in three-part harmony.

Though we by no means resembled an Amish cult, there was an almost complete absence of contemporary culture in the house. God’s people were to be “In the world, but not of the world”, and the difference between those two little prepositions banished television and pop music, school discos and Smash Hits, cinema and nail polish, and so many other cultural signifiers I feel no nostalgia for the 80s and 90s: they had nothing to do with me.

 

Click here to read the full post on The Guardian.