Today is the birthday of Jane Austen. It has been 250 years since Jane Austen was born. 250 years since one of my favourite authors entered the world!
The works of Jane Austen are some of my all time favourite books and ones that I have read over and over again. Over the years my favourite Jane Austen book has changed and I imagine it will continue to change. At first Sense and Sensibility was my favourite, then Pride and Prejudice and now it is Persuasion.
Last week I went on the tour at the Jane Austen centre in Bath again and absolutely loved it. If I was lucky enough to live in Bath I would definitely try and get a job there.
Jane Austen started my love of classics and she is my ultimate comfort author who I will always return to. So thank you Jane Austen. Thank you for inspiring my love of reading and always been there when I need a comfort read.
I have had a lovely day of reading and relaxing today which has been just what I needed.
I have been busy planning the Carol service for the church I play the organ for and I found this little poem which I thought I would use for my blog today and the Carol service later this month.
The poem is by the Cornish poet, school teacher and writer Charles Causley (1917-2003).
Mary's Song
Your royal bed Is made of hay In a cattle-shed. Sleep, King Jesus, Do not fear, Joseph is watching And waiting near.
Warm in the wintry air You lie, The ox and the donkey Standing by, With summer eyes They seem to say: Welcome, Jesus, On Christmas Day!
Sleep, King Jesus: Your diamond crown High in the sky Where the stars look dawn. Let your reign Of love begin, That all the world May enter in.
‘Anyone who murdered Colonel Protheroe,’ declared the parson, brandishing a carving knife above a joint of roast beef, ‘would be doing the world a large favour!’
It was a careless remark for a man of the cloth. And one which comes back to haunt the clergyman just a few hours later – when the Colonel is found shot dead in the clergyman’s study. But as Miss Marple soon discovers, the whole village seems to have had a motive to kill Colonel Protheroe.
The first Miss Marple mystery, one which tests all her powers of observation and deduction.
Review
I finally got to a Miss Marple novel in my Agatha Christie challenge. I have been really excited about reading the Miss Marple books because I always loved the TV series. I find Miss Marple the perfect cosy mystery.
Leonard Clement is the local vicar of St Mary Mead and is married to Griselda. St Mary Mead is a sleepy little hamlet where everyone knows everyone’s business and Leonard is regularly asked for guidance on all matters.
Colonel Protheroe has been found dead in Leonard’s study. However, as Miss Marple soon begins to realise almost everyone in St Mary Mead had a motive to kill the Colonel. The police who are assigned to the case are quite useless which is a typical trait of a Christie book and one that I always look forward to because I always have a good laugh at the mistakes the police make.
Miss Marple is on the case and she clearly already has an idea who committed the murder but she tells Leonard that she has seven suspects. Miss Marple annoys the police and always appears as a little old lady who is everyone’s neighbour and friend. Nobody sees her as a threat.
I did enjoy this book but I didn’t find it up to Christie’s usual standards. Considering this novel is a Miss Marple book I did find that Miss Marple was hardly in it and would have liked to have seen more of her. Griselda rather got on my nerves and I found her rather useless and not the best wife for a vicar. I really hope my next Miss Marple book features more of Miss Marple. I give this book 3 out of 5 Dragons.
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About the author
Agatha Christie (1890-1976) was an English writer known for her 66 detective novels and 14 short story collections. She also wrote the world’s longest running play, The Mousetrap. She also wrote 6 novels under the name Mary Westmacott.
My chosen quote this week has a festive twist and is by the American memoirist, essayist, poet and civil rights activist, Maya Angelou (1928-2014).
“I’ve learned that you can tell a lot about a person by the way he handles these three things: a rainy day, lost luggage, and tangled Christmas tree lights.”
Long before she was a rare book dealer, Rebecca Romney was a devoted reader of Jane Austen. She loved that Austen’s books took the lives of women seriously, explored relationships with wit and confidence, and always, allowed for the possibility of a happy ending. She read and reread them, often wishing Austen wrote just one more.
But Austen wasn’t a lone genius. She wrote at a time of great experimentation for women writers—and clues about those women, and the exceptional books they wrote, are sprinkled like breadcrumbs throughout Austen’s work. Every character in Northanger Abbey who isn’t a boor sings the praises of Ann Radcliffe. The play that causes such a stir in Mansfield Park is a real one by the playwright Elizabeth Inchbald. In fact, the phrase “pride and prejudice” came from Frances Burney’s second novel Cecilia. The women that populated Jane Austen’s bookshelf profoundly influenced her work; Austen looked up to them, passionately discussed their books with her friends, and used an appreciation of their books as a litmus test for whether someone had good taste. So where had these women gone? Why hadn’t Romney—despite her training—ever read them? Or, in some cases, even heard of them? And why were they no longer embraced as part of the wider literary canon?
Jane Austen’s Bookshelf investigates the disappearance of Austen’s heroes—women writers who were erased from the Western canon—to reveal who they were, what they meant to Austen, and how they were forgotten. Each chapter profiles a different writer including Frances Burney, Ann Radcliffe, Charlotte Lennox, Charlotte Smith, Hannah More, Elizabeth Inchbald, Hester Lynch Thrale Piozzi, and Maria Edgeworth—and recounts Romney’s experience reading them, finding rare copies of their works, and drawing on connections between their words and Austen’s. Romney collects the once-famed works of these forgotten writers, physically recreating Austen’s bookshelf and making a convincing case for why these books should be placed back on the to-be-read pile of all book lovers today. Jane Austen’s Bookshelf will encourage you to look beyond assigned reading lists, question who decides what belongs there, and build your very own collection of favourite novels.
Review
As soon as I saw this book I put it on my birthday list and my wonderful husband bought it for me. It was on my TBR pile for just over a week before I started reading it as I couldn’t resist.
I absolutely loved this book and could not put it down. The first thing I liked was the layout of the book as each chapter focuses on one of the authors that Jane Austen was known to have read. We get a good history of each author and what books, plays or collections of poems they wrote. We also learn about Jane Austen and how her life linked with these authors. I also really enjoyed learning about the reasons these women chose to write.
The other element I enjoyed was learning a bit about the rare book trade and how rare book dealers work. I enjoyed learning about the different editions that Romney collected, how she hunted them down, purchased them and appreciated them. I loved learning about rare editions of Austen novels and first editions of the authors focused on in the book. I also loved learning about how books were published in Austen’s time, how the print runs ran and what the paper and binding was made out of.
The only problem I had with this book was that as soon as I started reading this book I started a list of all the books these authors had written with the plan of reading them myself one day. This means my wish list of books has grown hugely. I have actually read a few off the list because I had an amazing English teacher who introduced me to the work of Ann Radcliffe and I became a fan of Frances Burney earlier this year. However, there are still plenty of books left for me to collect and read. I give this book 5 out of 5 Dragons and it is definitely one of my top reads of 2025.
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About the author
Rebecca Romney is a rare book dealer and the cofounder of Type Punch Matrix, a rare book company based in Washington, DC. She is the rare books specialist on the HISTORY Channel’s show Pawn Stars, and the cofounder of the Honey & Wax Book Collecting Prize. She is a generalist rare book dealer, handling works in all fields, from first editions of Jane Austen to science fiction paperbacks. Her work as a bookseller or writer has been featured in The New York Times, The Atlantic, Forbes, Variety, The Paris Review, and more. In 2019, she was featured in the documentary on the rare book trade, The Booksellers. She is on the Board of the Antiquarian Booksellers’ Association of America (ABAA) and the faculty of the Antiquarian Book Seminar (CABS-Minnesota).
November wasn’t such a good reading month for me but what I did read I really enjoyed. I have completed my Goodreads reading challenge for the year now so that I really good.
Lady Book Dragon 