Tag: Member Mondays

Fun, Interviews

Member Mondays: Elizabeth Bennet . . . Brink!

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Photo Courtesy of Elizabeth Brink.

Welcome to another installment of Member Mondays! Every so often, we will share a profile of a region member, featuring answers from our questionnaire. If you would like to participate, please email Jane at jasna.ewanidsm@gmail.com! We want to hear about everyone!

This week our featured region member is Elizabeth Bennet . . . we mean, Elizabeth Brink!!!

Name: Elizabeth Bennet . . . I mean Brink
Location: Spokane, Washington

  • How did you become a Jane Austen fan? How long have you been one? I went to see a play of Pride and Prejudice in high school (age 16) and loved it! That sealed my fate.
  • Favorite Jane Austen novel: Persuasion, Pride and Prejudice
  • Favorite Jane Austen character: Anne Elliot
  • Favorite Jane Austen couple: Mr. Darcy and Georgiana Darcy, such a good older brother!
  • Which Jane Austen location would you most want to visit? The Lake district, even though Lizzy didn’t make it all the way there
  • Favorite JA Adaptation: 1995 Pride and Prejudice AND the 2009 Emma is SO GOOD!
  • Special Jane Austen items in your in collection? A picture of me on the Cobb in Lyme Regis pretending to be Louisa Musgrove, though not actually falling! (Editor’s note: a screenshot of the photo with caption and location is featured above!)
  • Any little Jane Austen rituals you associate with the books or movies, etc.? Not really, but what a great idea!
  • Favorite Jane Austen quote? “For what do we live, but to make sport for our neighbors, and to laugh at them in our turn?”
    -Mr. Bennet, P&P
  • Best part about being a Jane Austen fan? The connection with my dad, he quotes Pride and Prejudice and then I jump in and finish the line.
Elizabeth and her father at the JASNA EWANID 2018 Jane Austen Birthday Tea at the Roosevelt Inn, Coeur d’Alene, Idaho.
  • If you could invite Jane Austen or some of her characters to a meal/tea, what would you serve? Who would you invite? What question would you want to ask Jane or a character? Tea and homemade gingerbread. NOT Mr. Collins! What enneagram number are you?
  • Biggest villain in a JA novel? Henry Crawford
  • Favorite JASNA EWANID events so far? The very first tea was so fun and the food was delicious! My napkin kept slithering off my lap like Harriet Vane’s in Gaudy Night.
  • Favorite place to read? Drink? Snack? The back deck in summer. Assam loose leaf tea. Any homemade bread.
  • Are there any other authors you recommend? Anthony Trollope, Angela Thirkell, D.E. Stevenson, Dorothy Whipple, Elizabeth Gouge, Elizabeth Fair, Miss Read
  • Hardback, paperback, or e-reader? Any and all. 🙂
  • How do you mark your place in a book? A literary heroine bookmark from the Carrot Top Paper Shop on Etsy.
  • How do you organize your books? By genre, though my English books are split on a different shelf.
  • Any other thoughts/comments on Jane Austen or JASNA EWANID? Loving all of it!

Thank you so much for participating, Elizabeth! We loved reading your answers!

If you wish you participate (and we hope you will!), please email us at jasna.ewanidsm@gmail.com. Cheers!

Fun, Interviews, Uncategorized

Member Mondays: Diana S., Our Giveaway Winner!

JASNA EWANID SM

As our region membership expands, we want to learn more about you, our members, so we have come up with a new thing: Member Mondays! We kind of kicked it off with our interview with author Pamela Aidan (read it HERE). Every Monday (or every couple of Mondays), we will be sharing answers from our “Member Mondays” questionnaire with a different member of our region. If you would like to participate, please email Jane at jasna.ewanidsm@gmail.com! We want to hear about everyone!

We are so happy to share answers from our 2019 Spring Giveaway winner Diana S. today! She is a newer member and her first event with us was our Spokane Northanger Abbey discussion meeting in February.

2019 Spring Giveaway winner Diana S., pictured at our recent Spring Tea in Pullman, Washington, with her prize!

Name: Diana S.
Location: Spokane, Washington

  • How did you become a Jane Austen fan? How long have you been one? Decided to give P&P another chance, fell in love. Twenty years ago. (Hated it in high school)
  • Favorite Jane Austen novel: Persuasion
  • Favorite Jane Austen character: Henry Tilney
  • Favorite Jane Austen couple: Admiral & Mrs. Croft
  • Which Jane Austen location would you most want to visit? Chawton Cottage. I’ve been to Bath, but years before I was a Janeite, so I’d like to go back and see it anew.
  • Favorite JA Adaptation: 1995 Persuasion, starring Amanda Root & Ciaran Hinds
  • Special Jane Austen items in your in collection? 1st editions of her juvenalia 1922, 1933, 1951. 1885 Northanger Abbey & Persuasion. 1890 Life of Jane Austen by Goldwin Smith. 1898 Letters of Jane Austen.
  • Favorite Jane Austen quote? There are too many brilliant quips to be able to choose just one.
  • Best part about being a Jane Austen fan? The sense of peace & fulfillment upon finishing one of her books. The feeling that all is well with the world.
  • Biggest villain in a JA novel? John Thorpe.
  • Favorite JASNA EWANID events so far? Northanger Abbey discussion and the annual tea. I loved them both!
  • Favorite place to read? Outside, on a sunny day with a slight breeze, in the garden, with a glass of wine. (Editor’s note: that describes today’s weather perfectly! Happy reading, Diana!)
  • Are there any other authors you recommend? Elizabeth Gaskell, Charlotte Bronte . . . the usual suspects. 🙂
  • Hardback, paperback, or e-reader? Hardback, preferably antique.
  • How do you mark your place in a book? A ribbon.
  • How do you organize your books? I guess by genres—music, art, gardening, but antique books are separate from modern.

Thank you for sharing, Diana! We hope you enjoy your giveaway prize!! If you would like to participate in Member Mondays, send us an email at jasna.ewanidsm@gmail.com!

Interviews

An Interview With Pamela Aidan-Part I

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There are only about 10 tickets remaining for our upcoming Jane Austen Spring Tea on 28 April, featuring author Pamela Aidan speaking on “Creating The Regency World,” so please purchase yours today if you want to make sure you are in attendance! You can do so HERE. We are delighted Pamela agreed to do an interview with us and happy to share Part I with you today! Part II will be up next Monday, 22 April, the last day to purchase tickets (provided they don’t sell out before).

We gathered questions from people on our social media channels and added them to a list of our own. Our questions are in italics and Pamela’s responses are in bold for easy reading. Thank you, Pamela!

-What’s your favorite Jane Austen novel? Who are our favorite characters? Favorite character you love to hate? Favorite location in JA’s novels?

Pride & Prejudice/ Darcy and Elizabeth/ Wickham / Pemberley

–Which characters would you invite for dinner?

    Darcy – We’d talk over whether I got anything right in the Trilogy and then what his life with Elizabeth was like.

-If you could have a meal with Jane Austen, which one would it be? What would you have?

    After all the Austen movies I’ve seen, it looks like Regency era breakfasts are fantastic! Slices of those delicious looking hams and beef roasts and sweet rolls.

–How did you become a Jane Austen fan? 

    Decided to read the “classics” in 10th grade. There was a series that published twenty or more of them and the first one was Austen. I’d loved Georgette Heyer and was astonished to discover where her novels came from.

-Do you have a favorite out of the novels you have written?

    The second and third are both contenders. The second because it is all my own ideas and the third because of some wonderful scenes that where so much fun to flesh out.

–From TallFleur on Instagram: How do you balance what is lore of the times (modern beliefs of the Regency era) vs. what actually occurred? Where do you draw the line in appeasing readers who may mistakenly or rightfully call out one or the other in a review?

    As far as I remember, all the events in the Trilogy and Master Darcy were either ones that actually occurred or were plausible given the cultural currents during the time period. The possible exception might be the amount of “cant” or slang I employed in the speech of some characters.

–How did your years as a librarian influence your writing? 

    The influence of years of librarianship was more in the publishing of my novels than the writing of them. Knowing the difficulty and time involved in bringing a book to publication, I looked for an alternative. It so happened that print-on-demand had burst on the scene several years before and here, also, my years of librarianship helped my husband and I to research and produce a product that stood well in comparison to those published by the big publishing houses.

Check back next Monday, 22 April, for the second half of the interview, including Pamela’s answer to whether she plans to write more novels!

[Read Part II]