HAPPY BIRTHDAY JANE AUSTEN!

From the Guardian:

Google's home page is festooned today with a doodle to celebrate the 235th birthday of novelist Jane Austen. A Regency couple – most likely the novelist's most celebrated characters, Mr Darcy and Elizabeth Bennet from Pride and Prejudice – are pictured taking a stroll through the English countryside, eyeing each other rather coyly, in the illustration on the search engine's site.

Not my Google! The festoon is pictured above for those who are not honored with its presence.

Often represented as a "romantic" writer, Austen's books in fact contain much comic but biting social satire, and reflections on the chances and choices of women whose options in life are severely limited. Accusations by Oxford professor Kathryn Sutherland earlier this autumn that her famously crisp prose style owed as much to her editor William Gifford as to her own talents have been rebuffed by other Janeites, leaving her reputation as the queen of elegant prose unsullied.

No named muse for writers of prose exists with the exception of Clio, the muse of history, but my muse for my prose is Jane Austen, who was a major influence in my high school years and for the rest of my rather long life. She was then, and will always be for me, the "queen of elegant prose". That's not to compare my writing with Jane's writing, but to say that her prose is my ideal.

Today, I haven't had time to do justice to Jane's birthday celebration, but here's the link to Jane Austen and Irony, which I wrote three years ago, if you'd care to read more.