Author Linda Beutler ~ Guest Post & GIVEAWAY!

Hey Everyone! I'm so excited to have Linda Beutler guest posting on my blog today! Linda is the author of The RED Chrysanthemum, a Pride and Prejudice variation. I recently had the pleasure of reading it, and I LOVED it! I will post my review on Monday! 

Be sure to read all the way to the bottom of this post, and you'll find a Rafflecopter form to fill out for a chance to win a copy of The RED Chrysanthemum! 

Thanks for the opportunity to guest blog here at So little time... It is a real privilege to get to know the JAFF community this way.

The questions has been posited, “After writing gardening books, what made her want to write a Regency romance, especially a P & P variation?” The question makes it sound as if I can provide some natural and logical explanation of how one led to the other, and the truth is, I can’t! The only thing I can do is provide a kind of timeline, and it will be up to whomever reads this to make of it what they will.

I first read Pride and Prejudice after the 1980 BBC mini-series aired in the USA, but had already read Sanditon and Emma. Pride and Prejudice joined the rotation of books I revisit again and again, a list that includes A Room with a View by E. M. Forster, Cold Comfort Farm by Stella Gibbons, and the Bertie and Jeeves stories by P. G. Wodehouse. After a spate of reading all kinds of fiction, I always return to one of my “English anchors”. When the Emma Thompson version of Sense and Sensibility was released I rushed to see it, then watched the 1995 BBC Pride and Prejudice in reruns after realizing I’d missed its first run on A & E here in the States. It was at about this time I began garden writing for magazines.

The garden writers who inspired me had a bit of Jane Austen about them. The best were witty and opinionated, even though ostensibly writing non-fiction, and reading them (Christopher Lloyd, Margery Fish, Beverley Nichols and the like—again, mainly British) encouraged my written voice. Books about gardening didn’t have to read like textbooks, and I’ve been assured that mine do not.

In the summer of 2011 I must have made my annual rereading of P & P with a more critical eye than usual. It didn’t seem outlandish, when I picked up my first title of JAFF from my local library (What Would Mr. Darcy Do? by Abigail Reynolds), for some one to ponder the what-ifs more prominent in P & P than in any of Austen’s other stories. It flipped a switch. I bought the 1995 BBC P & P set, and was immersed in the voices of Elizabeth and Darcy as countless titles were read, discarded, or cherished. And I really don’t know exactly when I started, but before I made a trip to China in the summer of 2012, I was writing. In my hotel rooms throughout western Yunnan I was filling yellow legal pads, writing by hand as I had not done in years!

My first long story, Longbourn to London (posted at A Happy Assembly) was not so much a what-if as an expansion of the six week engagement of Elizabeth and Darcy, and there was little of the language of flowers in it at all. During that story, Elizabeth asks Darcy why he came to see her at the inn in Lambton on the morning she learns of Lydia’s elopement with Wickham. Darcy answers her in a charming and romantic way, but the question set me barking off after another squirrel, which became The Red Chrysanthemum.

With Andrew Davies’ screenplay as much in my thoughts as Jane Austen’s original novel, I started with Darcy arriving at the inn, and Elizabeth reading letters from Jane containing nothing to move Elizabeth to anything other than a few chuckles and knowing smiles. Both the canon and the screenplay allow for an evening at Pemberley, but how to get Elizabeth there more often in the remaining week she is to spend in Lambton? That’s where the language of flowers, which has always fascinated me, came in handy. Doing the research was pure joy, like putting a puzzle together, and when I unearthed a pdf of an old herbal with Victorian era illustrations of garden maids in Regency dress, I couldn’t believe my luck!

My own garden is in the cottage style, because that’s what my house is, a 1907 “brakeman’s cottage” built for workers at the end of the streetcar line connecting my neighborhood with downtown Portland. The iconic garden designer from the early 1900s, Gertrude Jekyll said, “The garden should curtsy to the house.” And my garden does. There are many plants here Darcy and his sister might known in the flowerier parts of Pemberley, a hundred years before my house was built. A mansion so grand would have had a cutting garden, a kitchen and herb garden, perhaps a conservatory attached to the house, and glasshouses producing fruit and salad herbs to extend the growing season. Off the Pemberley kitchen would have been a still room with a maid assigned to create arrangements fresh and dried, to make sachets for wardrobes and linen closets, and to blend strewing herbs to freshen the carpets and repel pests.

The 1995 screenplay gives us a glimpse of such a room in Longbourn, where Elizabeth and Jane dry flowers and discuss the return of Mr. Bingley. The scene enabled everything I wanted to include to fit easily into place on a grander scale in Pemberley. Even Bingley, great joiner-inner that he is, picks up the dialect of the local wildflowers.

There it is, the explanation—ephemeral as it is—for how the flowers, got into The Red Chrysanthemum, and how I became compelled to write in this new-to-me genre, whether I wanted to or not! 

It should be mentioned there is adult sexual content in the chapters after Darcy and Elizabeth marry. It is important to my vision of them that we know they are completely and utterly happily married. ~Linda B

Thank you so much, Linda! Your garden is beautiful! It's been a pleasure having you guest posting today. I'm so glad you figured out a way to have Darcy and Elizabeth spend more time together while she was in Lambton! Read my review here! 

Connect with Linda Beutler

website | twitter | facebook | Meryton Press

~ * ~ * ~ GIVEAWAY ~ * ~ * ~

Linda Beutler has generously offer to giveaway one signed copy of The RED Chrysanthemum to one lucky person! Open Internationally! Last day to enter is October 21st, 2013! 

Good luck!

a Rafflecopter giveaway


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