Pride and Prejudice

This eBook is a scholarly essay about marriage expectations in the Regency period as expressed in Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice.  It explores the different relationships between the sexes in the novel, and what the options were for women who were not yet married during this period. Accompanied by photographs taken by the author when she made a Jane Austen pilgrimage to Winchester and Chawton, England, this is a must read for all the “Janites” out there.

How can anyone not love Jane Austen?  I found out that she was looked down upon by “serious students of English Literature” when I was in graduate school and I announced to my class in Romantic Literature that I had chosen to write about Pride and Prejudice.  My fellow classmates dismissed the book, saying that it was just about "some silly girls wanting to get married."  I couldn’t help but be reminded of a letter that Jane Austen wrote to her sister, saying, “I must confess that I think [Elizabeth Bennet, the main character in the novel] as delightful a character as ever appeared in print, and how I shall be able to tolerate those who do not like her …I do not know.”  I hope this essay will help the skeptics take another look at her novel and reconsider.

Marriage in Pride and Prejudice

By Louise Hathaway

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The Importance of Setting in "The Tustin Chronicles: A Detective Santy Mystery"

The best English teacher I ever had used to tell us that what we learned in class is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to understanding literature.  He'd remind us, "This book was not written in a vacuum: what was going on in the time the novel or poem was written?  What about the setting in which the action takes place?  Why did the author chose that locale to tell his story?  How about the author's life?  Did that affect the way he wrote the novel?  Most of the time I felt that I could never do enough to please him; he was always challenging us to do more and that's why his students either loved him or hated him.

His name was Alan Gauley and he taught at Orange Coast College in Costa Mesa, California.  He also inspired T. Jefferson Parker, a classmate of ours in high school, who wrote books about Orange County, such as Laguna Heat or Little Saigon.  I wanted to write a book about my hometown of Tustin that takes place between 1970's to the 1990's.  Mine was a town where the Catholic Church used to hold Mass in a Sunquist packing house, with birds flying among the rafters, before the parish finally got enough money to build a "real church".  It was also a place of hippies and headshops and a nearby restaurant at South Coast Plaza that looked like the waiting room of the 20th Century Limited, complete with a steam train and an announcer intermittently proclaiming "All Aboard!"

My husband and I wrote this murder mystery about our home town.  We'd like to think that Tustin is one of the main characters in our story, The Tustin Chronicles: A Detective Santy Mystery. We live in a city where everyone across the United States, especially in the winter time, dreams of moving to; it's a place where the sun is always shining.  Our town has undergone tremendous growth in the last few decades as orange groves are plowed under to make way for housing tracks and mini-markets. We'd like to think that the theme of the book, a daughter's attempt to find the truth behind her father's murder, could only have taken place here in all the local places with all the interesting real life people that we feel are integral to telling this story.  Hopefully, while reading it, you can almost close your eyes and see it.

 
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Romance at the Mystery Dinner Theater

Have you ever wanted to go to a mystery dinner theater where the audience has to figure out whodunit? That is where two lovers meet in this humorous and sexy romance novel. Isabella, a librarian in her early thirties, goes with her friends to a performance where an actual murder takes place. She falls in love with the handsome investigating detective, who bears a striking resemblance to Don Draper in Mad Men, and gets herself mixed up with some dangerous people when she goes undercover—in spite of his warnings—to help him solve the crime. This book is not just “chick lit”: written by a man and a woman, it appeals to both sexes.  For readers 18 years old and above.

Click here to get a 25% free sample of the book at Smashwords.com

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T. Jefferson Parker

The famous murder/mystery writer, T. Jefferson Parker, graduated in the same class we did in high school.  If you haven't heard of him, he wrote "Little Saigon" and "Laguna Heat" to name but a few. Orange County, California is the setting for most of his books.  We have followed his career through the years and a couple of years ago we told each other, "We should try to write some murder/mysteries that take place in Orange County, too." 

The results are our three books:

The Tustin Chronicles: A Detective Santy Mystery

Murder at the Abbey: A Detective Santy Mystery

The Body on Ortega Highway: A Detective Santy Mystery

All are available at your favorite online bookstores

New Orleans Romance

When my husband and I were 25, we went to New Orleans for the first time.  Up to that point, the farthest we'd ever been from our home in Southern California was Colorado on a camping trip with my parents. From the time we'd met, we had spent countless hours talking about all of the places we wanted to visit and when we finally got a chance to go out and "see the world", our first choice was New Orleans. We fell madly in love with the city.  It was a place we'd return to again and again over the years.  That is my inspiration for writing this romance novel/travelogue.  I include all the fun places and experiences we've had in New Orleans and Louisiana.

Honeymoon in New Orleans
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