About That Taylor Swift/Jane Austen Connection... NOTE: I’d like to start by pointing out that idea for this post pre-dates my last post, my not-review of The Darcy Myth by Rachel Feder, and in fact at least half this I had already written before I even started reading that book. But in one chapter of The Darcy Myth, Feder … Continue reading Did Anyone Ever Try Telling Marianne Dashwood to Shake It Off?
A Not-Review of Rachel Feder's 'The Darcy Myth' When a TikTok user asked me a little over a year ago what the opposite of a Manic Pixie Dream Girl would be, I responded with a video about the Depressed Goblin Nightmare Boy. The label is obviously reverse-engineered in response to the MPDG, but the archetype has … Continue reading Sexy Vampyres, Literary Fuccbois, and the Unbuilt Trope
Jane Austen, Gilmore Girls, and the Social Microcosm of the Small Town Paris: Worship Kerouac and Bukowski. God forbid you pick up anything by Jane Austen. Jess: Hey, I’ve read Jane Austen. And I think she would have liked Bukowski. –Gilmore Girls, S2E16: “There’s the Rub” I recently began my annual Gilmore Girls rewatch, a show that … Continue reading “A Neighbourhood of Voluntary Spies”
It has been 48 hours since I saw Barbie and I have spent at least six of those hours watching fan reaction videos on TikTok and weeping at both the joy and the pain of the shared experiences of girlhood and womanhood in a world run by men that the movie explores. I’m doing fine! I’ve seen … Continue reading Books You Should Read if You Loved ‘Barbie’
Because I participate at varying levels of involvement in online fandoms for several franchises/media works, I often see fans posing questions like "who would win in a fight, [insert character] or [insert other character]?" Basically, discussions that are overwhelmingly concerned with powerscaling and/or combat skills as if they're playing League of Legends or something. Like … Continue reading The Best & Worst Fictional Characters to Invite to Your Book Club
It is the middle of summer and many of us are travelling–or dreaming of travelling!–and looking for a good book to read on the plane or the train, on the beach or by the pool, or an audiobook for that family road trip. But what exactly do we look for in a vacation read? Do … Continue reading What Makes a Good Vacation Read?
I’ve always had a harder time with Persuasion than other Austen novels. Every time I reread it, I get this sense that Anne has been placed in this box by everyone around her, by her society and time, and even by the narrative itself, and she can’t break out. It frustrated me because I could … Continue reading Un-Persuaded: Who is the Real Anne Elliot?
The title of this post comes from a comment by TikTok user @dramaticsonglyrics on one of my recent videos. I had never heard this phrase before, but thought for sure it must be from a famous quote. But strategic googling shows that, no, in fact, it is not very common. The phrase "delicate feminism" got … Continue reading The Delicate* Feminism of Jane Austen
If I could only describe my reading taste in two terms, they would be "Jane Austen" and "fantasy." This is a totally hypothetical and unlikely scenario, but the point is that I love Jane Austen and I love fantasy fiction, almost (well, not really, I'd say about half-way) to the exclusion of any other reading … Continue reading Jane Austen, Mother of Dragons: A Lady’s Influence in Modern Speculative Fiction
This post is a stop on the Blog Tour for Kingdom of Sea and Stone, book two of the Crown of Coral and Pearl duology. Be sure to check out the other stops on the tour here, and find more information on the book at the end of this post. Thanks to TBR and Beyond … Continue reading Fairy Tale Echoes in Mara Rutherford’s “Crown of Coral and Pearl” Duology
Rhonda With A Book 