2309 steps today –
not the best, but could be worse. I did succeed in getting up to 3000
yesterday, for the first time since my step-counting began.
And I found “Drop
Dead Easy Knits”, so that wasn’t too bad. I had gone ahead and bought the
Kindle edition. It’s very cheap – you won’t profit much by my extravagance,
Mary Lou. I’m not getting very far with the question of what yarn to use. The
sock yarns in stash are all self-stripers. The little sweater wants two
colours. You can see the problem, and can also imagine the temptation when one
starts looking at LYS’s and their websites.
I’ve now done four
and one-half scallops on the second edge of Gudrun’s hap – the target is 16 ½ per
side, since I omitted that decrease round.
Reading
I continue to
shuffle forward with “What to Look for in Winter” but am not sure I’m going to
finish it.
“Mansfield Park”:
I suppose Mr Yates and Julia could be considered a love match, although they
are whisked off-stage without a single scene to gratify the reader. Perhaps the
real story of the book is Henry Crawford, Maria, and Fanny, and once that’s
over the author has to tie things up somehow, not entirely satisfactorily. The
scenes in Portsmouth, when Fanny is living with her blood-family, are
extraordinary, as you said, Shandy. There’s nothing else remotely like it in
Austen, is there? I don’t think I knew she was a parson’s daughter. That would
certainly – extrapolating from Trollope, some decades later – provide her with
opportunity to observe ill-managed households.
Mary Lou, thank
you very much for that link, which I will soon try to follow.
Oh, do try Claire Tomalin's biography of Austen, Jean - you would learn ever such a lot - I know I did. Such as her father taking pupils to live in the house - so Jane and Cassandra were the only girls in a house full of boys. But yes, as Nabokov says, the Price household is more like something out of Dickens half a century later. Other poorer households in Austen tend to be the deserving poor - Miss Bates, Mrs Smith in "Persuasion", the Harvilles - orderly and hard-working, but without families of course.
ReplyDeleteOr Lucy Worsley's "Jane Austen at Home", also fascinating and with much material not used by Tomalin.
DeleteJennyS
Jean, I do not wish to dissuade you from buying yarn, but doing the body and sleeves in a self-stripe and the yoke in a solid would be cute! Also, I think i sent you the overlap pullover a similar style, a bit simpler, which is sock weight.
ReplyDeleteNorthanger Abbey also has a large family and a daughter who goes to visit a rich family, but the treatment is different.
ReplyDelete