This article may contain affiliate links. Purchasing from these links helps me provide more awesome content for you. Thank you for your support!
Welcome to BOOKS BY MY FRIENDS, Carolyn! Happy to have you as a guest today to tell us about your latest release CHARLOTTE’S STORY.
JH: What’s the blurb for your book?
CK: Charlotte Lucas, a character first appearing in Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, has made an unfortunate marriage to the loquacious William Collins, reckoning that his tedious conversation is a small price to pay for the prosperous home and family she desires. However, trouble brews within the first months of marriage, for they are not nearly as good a match as she had hoped. To ease the strain of their relationship, Charlotte leaves her husband to visit the fashionable city of Bath with several women companions. The weeks there prove to be a time for self-discovery and freedom, and the marital frost begins to thaw. However, events in Bath result in an unfortunate, even calamitous, consequence. Charlotte devises an audacious solution that combines bold connivance and compassionate duplicity, pursuing her hope of happiness with the wit and courage to seek it.
JH: What inspired you to write
CK: Like so many, I’m a great fan of Jane Austen. But I have often felt that her comic sensibility (which I greatly appreciate!) gives short shrift to some of her secondary characters. This is the case with the main character of my novel, Charlotte Lucas, so in my story, I pursue the life she might have after marrying for realistic but highly unromantic reasons. Many other characters from Pride and Prejudice also appear, some with the personalities and behaviors that Austen herself portrays, others expanded in directions that readers might find surprising–such as Mary Bennet and Anne de Bourgh.
JH: What one thing do you love most about writing?
CK: Chiefly, the opportunity to enter another world, one that grows beneath my typing fingers. While I write with some sense of how a plot should develop, there are times when I just let a scene unfold from sentence to sentence. This isn’t always efficient, so, fortunately, I also enjoy revising.
JH: What’s next for you in the way of writing/publishing?
CK: My second novel, Little Follies: A Mystery at the Millennium, is due for release in January 2023. As you can tell from the title, that one takes place in 1999. I also have written a historical novel that is at the query stage, and my work in progress is based on a trip my great aunt took to Japan in 1936.
JH: How can readers contact you?
BIO:
A longtime admiration for Jane Austen led Carolyn Korsmeyer to write Charlotte’s Story. Her second novel, Little Follies, will be published in January 2023. She is also the author of numerous philosophical works, including Things: In Touch with the Past, Savoring Disgust: The Foul and the Fair in Aesthetics, and Making Sense of Taste: Food and Philosophy.
JH: Thanks, Carolyn. This sounds wonderful. Please make room in your schedule to return to BOOKS BY MY FRIENDS as soon as you can to update us on Little Follies: A Mystery at the Millenium. Scrumptious title, by the way!
All good things,
Joy
XXXXXXXXXXXXXXX
