| A Cottage by the Sea |
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 Part Two of my Jane Austen project has begun. I am reading an annotated edition of Pride and Prejudice. Eventually I’ll get a CD of the book but for now, as I drive around, I’m listening to Longbourn, by Jo Baker, a novel about the life of the servants at the Bennet household. Someone had to wash all those dresses and polish all that silver!
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 Here’s what’s new from my silent, solitary and simple home. Thank goodness my husband and I fit well with this. We both like it.
1) I love my new washing machine, but am also delighted with my old dryer. I had ordered a new one to go along with my new washer, but cancelled the purchase when it wouldn’t fit in the door. I can’t believe that I was sucked into thinking that washers and dryers have to be bought and discarded as a team. After all, they don’t die at the same time! My twenty year old dryer is still tossing the clothes around, and since I hang most of my laundry out to dry, I figure it should last my life time—even if I live to be 101 like my mom. 2) Speaking of Mom, the memoir is about ready to be mailed to my friend Carolyn for developmental editing. Next there’s the copy editing, cover design, formatting for print copy on demand and for e-book, and then the launch of Very Grateful on Amazon—hopefully by the end of the year. 3) The Jane Austen project has slowed down a bit because I just received an annotated edition of Sense and Sensibility from interlibrary loan. 400 pages of text, notes, photographs and paintings. So I’m rereading but I haven’t given up the e-book, which I must say is an extremely different experience. All good—including the audio edition in 10 compact discs.  Here’s an update on my Jane Austin project. I’m still living with Sense and Sensibility and the Dashwoods. I’m taking it slowly, savoring, reading only a couple of chapters a day—am up to Chapter 17. I purchased all of Jane’s (we’re on a first name basis) works for $.99 cents for my Kindle. It’s the simple way to go for this kind of reading. I just click on and am right at the page where I left off. Spending less than a dollar satisfies another one of my criteria for simplicity—be intentional about how I spend my money. The CDs just arrived from inter-library load, so I’m getting ready to listen, always at least a few chapters behind my reading.
The characters are forming more and more clearly in my mind. Although each conforms to the times in which Jane lived and wrote about, each personality is distinctive. I’m reminded of my family, of all families. Am I Elinor, Marianne, Margaret? Definitely not any of the other women I’ve met so far. I’ll have to ask my sisters who they’d pick for themselves. I wouldn’t be surprise if we’re all variation of Elinor. |
