Authors Electric

National Portrait Museum I was a teenager when I first read Jane Austen. But how much funnier the books are when seen from an adult perspective, and how different they all are. Born in 1775, Austen is a product of her times although not blind to the inequalities in society. Although from a relatively modest background, Jane’s own brother was adopted by a wealthy childless family, which made her an acute observer of the advantages conferred by money and breeding. In those days, heroines were traditionally faultless wimps without wit; in Pride and Prejudice Elizabeth Bennet breaks the mould and is the most modern in outlook. One of five daughters, the family home will be inherited by a male cousin, leaving the girls in a difficult position. Jane Austen was very objective about the position of women, and how important it was to marry well or, in fact, at all. So, taking a cursory look at the books one by one and focusing on the central female characters we get a good idea of a fairly wid...

I have fellow Electric Author Allison Symes to thank for my ruminations this month. Her post a couple of weeks ago on her dislike of Fanny Price in Mansfield Park unleashed a lively debate on Jane Austen’s heroines, and why we love some more than others. It struck me then that the fact we can argue about this at all is down to Austen’s genius in creating six romantic heroines, all struggling within the confines of the same social framework, and all so different from each other.    Not what Jane Austen does. Photo by Dmitrii Fursov Ah yes, that social framework. Let’s get one thing out of the way first. I have no time for anyone who holds the extremely-unoriginal-but-frequently-voiced-with-Great-Smugness-by-persons-who-think-they-are-the-first-to-do-so-opinion that Jane Austen is not worth considering because she didn’t set her novels on the battlefields of the Napoleonic Wars. That point of view simply cannot grasp that Austen’s greatness lies, not in recounting military cam...

‘A very famous editor once said to me: “Barry, tell them what they eat.”’ This is one of the delightful pieces of advice given by Barry Cunningham on writing for children . He doesn’t say who the famous editor is – Kaye Webb? – but I love this nugget for its apparent triviality, actually giving an extremely important message.  Food matters to children. It’s a big part of their everyday lives and if you want them to get lost in your story, better make sure you don’t let the action go on too long without feeding your characters. Yes, you can have scene breaks, but every now and then your readers will want to know what your hungry hero will be having for supper; even more so, if supper happens to be a fabulous party, or a midnight feast planned in the dorm.  Enid Blyton totally got this: remember all those picnics enjoyed by the Famous Five, or the illicit night time snacks shared by boarding school girls in Malory Towers? More recently J K Rowling...