It is a truth universal acknowledged...

There is a 12ft tall statue of Mr Darcy wading through the boating lake in Hyde Park complete with clinging wet look shirt a la Colin Firth. This is in honour of an open air production of Pride & Prejudice currently playing in the park (unfortunately I have been unable to get tickets).

I have been having a rather Regency time of it at the moment. I perennially find myself to falling back into the arms of dearest Jane when modernity fails me. There are too many Wickhams and Willoughbys abounding in my life.There is an awful part of me being English, that wishes for the monochrome social rules of the era (I know this is foolish, I'd be bored, poor, or on a plantation somewhere, not the mistress of a grand house with Corinthian columns) Today I have been watching Regency House Party on 4oD, wandered around Putney because the Thorpes were resident there, trying to imagine it two hundred years ago and read Mansfield Park in the sunshine. Although I must confess that of Austen's six completed works I have only read four, having been somewhat put off by the 1990s version of Emma with Gwyneth Paltrow and just having never gotten round to picking up Sense & Sensibility, but did love the Emma Thompson version. I do sometimes worry that Austen is a backwards step for feminism, but I cannot give her up, just like a thumb-sucking child.