Short Stories – Leenie Brown

A Meeting by the Stile (Heywood Hardy)

Isn’t this a beautiful picture. I love this artist’s painting of horses and people. I could sit and look at them, admiring the details and dreaming up stories, for quite some time. 🙂

I thought that the name of this painting made it perfect to pair with the first chapter of Two Days in November since there is a gentleman on horseback and a meeting at a stile.

Two Days in November is a story that takes place over two days in November. They are the days after Jane and Elizabeth have left Netherfield, when Collins comes to Longbourn, and when Darcy and Elizabeth meet on the street in Meryton.

But it is Darcy’s discovering Elizabeth at the stile and hearing her sister’s tragic story of a love that was lost which turns his mind in a better direction than it was set upon going. I hope you enjoy reading about how this meeting at the stile begins. (It doesn’t finish until the end of chapter 2. 🙂 )

Enjoy!

PS. If you wish to read the full novelette, you can purchase a copy of it at your favourite retailer, or you can follow me on reamstories.com/leeniebrown or patreon.com/LeenieBrown and read it for free this month.

A Summer Shower (Charles Edward Perugini)

Three young women standing under a tree to stay out of the rain. — FER96213 A Summer Shower, 1888 (oil on canvas) by Perugini, Charles Edward (1839-1918); 115.6×76.5 cm; Ferens Art Gallery, Hull Museums, UK; English, out of copyright. via Charles Edward Perugini, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

When I was scrolling through pictures on Wikimedia today, I came across this one and my mind immediately went to the scene below for Morning Mist — even if in that scene there are only two young ladies standing under a tree during a rain shower. 🙂

Morning Mist is one of my Nature’s Fury and Delights novelettes. This one, as you will see, is a variation on Sense and Sensibility. In this short, six-chapter variation, which tells how Marianne falls in love with the colonel, Marianne meets Colonel Brandon before she meets Mr. Willoughby, and she meets him in just the sort of setting to make her imagine him as a brave and noble knight. So, by the time she and her younger sister Margaret meet Mr. Willoughby, the colonel has already taken up a place of admiration in Marianne’s mind.

Archers (after a drawing by Adam Buck)

“Archers”, an April 1799 “pin-up” type print, engraved after a drawing by Adam Buck, and with a dedication to the Prince Regent. At the time, archery was one of the few competitive sports that adult women of the “genteel” classes could respectably engage in (others were battledore/shuttlecock — a precursor to badminton — and for a tiny social elite, old-fashioned “court tennis”). Engraved after a drawing by Adam Buck, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

Do you know what was one of my most favourite times of the day back when I was in elementary school? No, it wasn’t recess or lunch. It was when we would come in from lunch recess and our teacher would read a chapter or two from a book while we settled back into our desks and got our minds ready to finish our classes.

When I was teaching, reading to my class, like my teachers had done, was one of the things I loved to do.

With that in mind, let me tell you that I have been working on a reading project which taps into memories of that loved activity from years gone by. It’s a project that I have wanted to do for some time, but then, right after I began it, I got long covid and had to abandon it for a while.

Austen Couples – I Knew I Loved You (Savage Garden)

A new month = a new music theme on Mondays. 🙂 For the month of April, all the music videos will be fan-created music homages to stories that have been put on film or were written for film. We’re starting with a montage of Austen characters. Therefore, I picked a line from a story of mine which pairs the same characters as Austen did in her work.

My choices were Darcy and Lizzy, Jane and Bingley, Lydia and Wickham, Marrianne and Colonel Brandon. I chose…

These four lines are from a novelette I wrote called Morning Mist which began with the questions: “What if Marianne met the colonel before she met Willoughby and what if the setting where they met played into Marianne’s love of the romantic?” The lines above are from that first meeting in a misty meadow one morning.

Morning Mist is currently only available in the anthology Thunder, Mist, and Frost. However, I have been contemplating breaking the anthology apart and making each title available separately, and I think this might happen later this year since it would give readers more options.

MAILING LIST PATREON

Music Monday: Siúil a Rúin (Ella Roberts)

PUBLISHED TO YOUTUBE BY ELLA ROBERTS ON FEBRUARY 25, 2020.

“Siúil a Rún” is a traditional Irish song, sung from the point of view of a woman lamenting a lover who has embarked on a military career, and indicating her willingness to support him. The song has English language verses and an Irish language chorus, a style known as macaronic. (source: Wikipedia)

The same Wikipedia article later said that some say the lover in this song was given a choice to either choose a military career or permanent exile, and he chose exile.

No matter what the reason, this song is about separated lovers and is a beautiful (though sad) piece of music.

I have chosen to pair this song with a story that might be very familiar to you if you read my Sweet Tuesday stories or read this story as a Thursday’s Three Hundred when I first began doing those stories.

In “Hope at Dawn”, the hero (Nicholas) and heroine (Kathleen) have been separated for a year. His suit was refused by her father and brother, and she was taken to Ireland, along with the match her father hoped she would settle on, while the hero remained behind in England.

I would imagine Kathleen’s heart cry during her separation from Nicholas sounded something like this song — beautiful and sad. However, Kathleen and Nicholas’s story does not remain sad — I write happily ever afters, you know. 😉

Hope at Dawn, Ch. 1

Hope at Dawn is one of four novelettes included in my *First Blooms and Second Chances* anthology.

As the sun slipped below the horizon, leaving its fiery glow resting upon the gently rolling black waters, Nicholas Sidemore spotted the boat for which he had been waiting, bobbing just on the edge of the sea ─ where the water dropped away and could be seen no longer. His heart raced at the sight of her, and he swallowed the fear that rose inside him as the vessel drew closer. It would not be long now ─ a few hours or perhaps a day ─ until he knew his fate.

Using the glow of his lantern to light the way, he carefully picked his way around the rocks lining the shore. Choosing a large one with a smooth top, he sat down. From this vantage point, he could easily see the entrance to the harbour and past it to the sea beyond.