Stefanie Sloane – Featured Beau Monde Author

Stefanie Sloane, today’s Featured Beau Monde Author, is a native Northwesterner with the pale skin to prove it.

 Stefanie credits her parents’ eclectic reading habits—not to mention their decision to live in the middle of nowhere—for her love of books. A childhood spent lost in the pages of countless novels led Stefanie to college where she majored in English.

No one was more surprised than Stefanie when she actually put her degree to use and landed a job in Amazon’s Books editorial department. She spent over five years reading for a living before retiring to concentrate on her own stories.

Stefanie currently resides with her family in Seattle.

 Find her at – Web and Facebook and Twitter

Jillian Kent – Featured Beau Monde Author

Jillian Kent, today’s Featured Beau Monde Author, has been writing for years and now her dream is coming true.

She is also a full-time counselor for nursing students, has a masters degree in social work, and is fascinated with human behavior and how our minds work. Because she works in contemporary society she thought it would be fun and interesting to explore what might have happened in a lunatic asylum in Regency England. That’s just a snippet of how her story idea was conceived and she hopes you will escape into the past with her and find faith for the future. You’ll enjoy this journey.

Jillian is more than enthusiastic about the release of her first book, Secrets of the Heart, The Ravensmoore Chronicles, Book One ( Coming May 2011) and is thrilled that Romantic Times gave Secrets of the Heart 4 STARS!

If you want to read the first chapter of this novel to see if it’s your kind of read, please visit her website at http://www.jilliankent.com/books/ . You’ll find a great book trailer waiting for you there.  Jillian also invites you to join in conversation on her blog anytime, plus, about twice a month she blogs with other Realms buddies at http://justthewritecharisma.blogspot.com/

You can find Jillian at – Web and  Facebook and Twitter @jillkentauthor.com

Jane Austen’s ‘The Watsons’ sold at auction

Jane Austen‘s unfinished Bath novel sold for £993k on Saturday, July 16, 2011.

austen manuscript
The Austen Manuscript

An amazing announcement from the Bath Chronicle and read more of their article….

An unfinished novel which Jane Austen started writing when she was living in Bath has been sold at auction for £993,000.

The handwritten parchment for The Watsons, which experts believe was only a quarter completed, has been sold by Sotheby’s to the Bodleian Library in Oxford. ​ The Austen manuscript It had been expected to fetch £200,000, but the rare nature of the work and the fact that it is the earliest surviving manuscript by Austen, meant it went for much more. It is believed to have been started in 1804, while she was living in Bath, but is believed to have abandoned it after the death of her father the following year.

Holly Newton, from Bath’s Jane Austen Centre, said: “She started the book when she was living in Bath and there is speculation about why she didn’t finish it.

“One theory is that the storyline was too close to home, too autobiographical. Also, she wasn’t particularly settled or happy when living in Bath. There were financial problems, her father died when she was living here, so it has been suggested that she had a lull in her writing when she was here because she wasn’t settled.”

The only surviving manuscripts of Austen’s completed novels are two draft chapters of Persuasion, which are kept at the British Library, her younger work Lady Susan, which is at the Morgan Library in New York, and Sanditon, which is at King’s College, Cambridge.

Ms Newton added that she was not surprised The Watsons had sold for such a large sum of money. She said: “Original Jane Austen-related artefacts would always go for a lot of money. There has been a recent surge in popularity and there is so much interest in her life and work. ……There aren’t many artefacts from her life, so these kind of pieces give us a real insight into how she worked.”

Experts believe Emma – the headstrong and independent-minded heroine of the novel – is based on the author herself.

via (no longer online) This is Bath | Bath Jane Austen The Watsons sold auction.