O.k. I admit it this is very much a chick-flick but I loved it and may need to watch it again, the play of language and the acting were brilliant. The idea of a woman making a living as an author or “by the pen”…shocking. And so Jane Austen published anon. I’m not to the level of a Janeite but it’s hard not to be touched by her creative genius and clever use of language.
My favorite lines in Becoming Jane “What’s she doing?”
“Writing”
“Can anything be done about it?”
If any one faculty of our nature may be called more wonderful than the rest, I do think it is memory. There seems something more speakingly incomprehensible in the powers, the failures, the inequalities of memory, than in any other of our intelligences. The memory is sometimes so retentive, so serviceable, so obedient; at others, so bewildered and so weak; and at others again, so tyrannic, so beyond control! We are, to be sure, a miracle every way; but our powers of recollecting and of forgetting do seem peculiarly past finding out.
Jane Austen, Mansfield Park
Today, use your daily writing to work on memory. Set the timer for thirty minutes and write about the first time you fell in love. Don’t forget the details, really try for the small stuff…you might remember things you thought were long forgotten. Now get back to work!
Lovingly,
The Writing Nag