Leenie Brown fell in love with Jane Austen's works when she first read Sense and Sensibility followed immediately by Pride and Prejudice in her early teens. As the second of five daughters and an avid reader, she has always loved to see where her imagination takes her and to play with and write about the characters she meets along the way. In 2013, these two loves collided when she stumbled upon the world of Jane Austen Fan Fiction. A year later, in 2014, she began writing her own Austen-inspired stories and began publishing them in 2015. Leenie lives in Nova Scotia, Canada with her two teenage boys and her very own Mr. Brown (a wonderful mix of all the best of Darcy, Bingley and Edmund with healthy dose of the teasing Mr. Tillney and just a dash of the scolding Mr. Knightley).
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.
If you’ve read the first three books of my Touches of Austen series, you will have met Felicity Love, and you probably really don’t like her. She’s not nice in those stories. I did a good job of making her unlikable if I do say so myself. And then, while writing book three, I knew that I was going to have to write a story for her. I didn’t really want to. I knew it wouldn’t be easy to make her likeable. But it simply had to be done.
Her Convenient Forever is that story.
It is set near the sea in Kent where Mr. And Mrs. Love have rented a cottage for the summer and where Felicity is coming to terms with the mess she has made of her life through selfish living. In fact, the opening chapter shows her in the very deepest kind of despair. This somewhat lengthy excerpt is from that first chapter.
Sweet Solitude. Edmund Leighton, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
When I saw this painting I thought of the heroine inHis Beautiful Bea. She likes quiet escapes and books. So, I chose an excerpt from that book to share today, but it’s not from her perspective. It’s from the hero’s point of view.
This is the hero:
For those who don’t know:
His Beautiful Bea is book 1 in my Touches of Austen series of original sweet Regency romances with deliberate nods to Jane’s novels. This book pairs long-time friends and neighbors as the romantic interests. The heroine lost her father in the war, and his friend, the hero’s father, has promised to care for the heroine’s family.
Those sound like they could be things that nod to possibly Sense and Sensibility or Emma, but in fact, when I wrote this story, the nods I had in mind were to Mansfield Park. After all, our quiet and bookish heroine is infatuated with the younger son of her neighbour’s two sons, but he doesn’t see her as anything other than a friend. Does that sound a bit like a Fanny/Edmund situation?
There are other nods as well, but as you can see from the details that I have given, this is not a retelling or a variation. This story, while inspired by various bits of Austen stories, is completely original — characters, setting, and plot.
