First of all, thank you to everyone who came out to the Middleton Author Festival to say hello. Despite a damp start to the day, we had a great time, and it was lovely to see returning readers!
I spent a lot of time in July reading Pride and Prejudice, which left me feeling rather proper. The fun thing about Jane Austen, besides her books themselves, is that there’s an almost endless world of analysis and articles, rewrites and remixes. People have written academic papers arguing about whether Mr. Bennet could have gotten out of the entail or not, what actually happened to Louisa in Persuasion, feminism, what it means that Fanny Price asks her uncle Sir Thomas about the slave trade in Antigua, plus helpful articles for those of us who aren’t historians on whether it is lascivious to play the harp rather than the pianoforte (Mansfield Park), how well the Dashwoods would have lived on 200 pounds a year, why it was scandalous that Marianne wrote to Willoughby (Sense and Sensibility), to say nothing of all the newspaper and magazine articles on who Austen was and why we still love her over 200 years after her death. And then there are the Austen-adjacent novels. People have written books about Mary Bennet, Mr. Collins, Georgiana, the Bennets’ servants, Mr Darcy, Darcy and Lizzie’s daughter…there are so many. To say nothing of the queer adaptations, the modern adaptations, the zombie adaptations…
There are, in short, a divers group of things already written in this vein. I figure what we don’t need here is another article about how awesome Jane Austen is. Two hundred years in, you either like her or you don’t, but you’ve definitely heard of her. Instead, I want to tell you about something that I learned of from Northanger Abbey: the pinery.
Though careless enough in most matters of eating, he loved good fruit—or if he did not, his friends and children did. There were great vexations, however, attending such a garden as his. The utmost care could not always secure the most valuable fruits. The pinery had yielded only one hundred in the last year. Mr. Allen, he supposed, must feel these inconveniences as well as himself.”
Okay, so what’s a pinery? Basically, it is a special greenhouse for growing pineapples (a tropical fruit) in the UK (notoriously not a tropical country; they were also used in other non-tropical countries I believe, but this is Jane Austen). From about 1715 until the invention of the steam engine, a number of designs were proposed, but prior to the invention of hot-water heating in 1816, this was basically it: dig a pit. Make two walls around it, with a biggish gap between them and some small holes in the inner wall. Put your pots in tanners’ bark (oak bark soaked in water that ferments slowly) and fill that gap between the walls with manure. A lot of manure. Like, maybe a couple tons. Feel good that this is the design you’re using—earlier versions put the manure directly beneath the bark and pots; I do not wish to try and imagine the smell. Put glass over the top of this whole mad thing. The decomposing manure creates heat, which is transmitted through the holes to the plants. Wait for pineapples.
(Here I have to say “only” one hundred pineapples per annum, General? I don’t think I’ve ever grown one hundred of something in a single year. I don’t think I even managed to eat one hundred pineapples even when I lived in Vietnam, where they were cheap and delicious.)
Interestingly, unlike the general, it seems like a lot of people weren’t eating the pineapples—they were using them as decor for their parties. This was a very common thing clear through the nineteenth century—pineapples were very expensive (people could rent them for dinner parties, but they cost one guinea—i.e. expensive—to use as a centerpiece and two guineas if you wanted to eat them!). Having a pineapple on your table was conspicuous consumption. Later on, as the technology improved, Victorian gardeners began to produce very large pineapples, so they became a way of showing off how skillful your gardener was.
Sadly, after the steam engine made shipping pineapples to the UK much more affordable, people stopped growing their own. One article notes that of 52 varieties of pineapple listed in 1835, only two are still in cultivation. (I believe the article means still in cultivation in the UK; of course there are still a few rare pineapple varieties, such as the Antigua black pineapple, and different countries also have their own varieties—Thailand apparently cultivates something like twenty-seven.) Apparently, there were once pyramidal pineapples! But they have been lost, because most pineapples are bred to be tin-shaped.
One more vaguely upsetting pineapple fact: while in the wild, hummingbirds pollinate pineapples, cultivated pineapples are pollinated by hand, and during the 20th century it was consequently forbidden to import hummingbirds to Hawaii. (Not that we should be importing birds from place to place, but the poor pineapple flowers, waiting forever for an evolutionary buddy who cannot show up…)
And one more not-upsetting fact: in 1761, John Murray, 4th Earl of Dunmore (Scotland), built a hothouse with a pinery on his estate. On top of the building, he built a stone cupola in the shape of a pineapple, now called the Dunmore Pineapple. It is forty-six feet (14m) high and was apparently meticulously designed by very clever stonemasons. You can see some photos here.
Announcements
The audiobook of Dionysus in Wisconsin will be out sometime next week, I hope. (Unlike eyeball books, you apparently can’t schedule when audiobooks become available. It’s very annoying.) If you’re interested in a review copy on Spotify or Audiobooks dot com (I unfortunately can’t do advance listener copies or free codes on other services), you can fill in my form here. I know it looks long. Don’t worry about it. Otherwise, I will update the Winnowing Fan Press website as soon as I have links to the various sites where audiobooks are sold.
Upcoming Appearances
I will be at the Summer’s Last Call Adult Book Fair in Milwaukee on August 25th from 4:30-9pm. It’s in the Deer District! Details here. I’ll have both Louise Mayberry and Rowan with me, so there will be both regency romances and tarot readings.
I will be at Booked Eau Claire on September 18–19 in Eau Claire, Wisconsin, at the Lismore Hotel. I believe book sales run 8:30-2:30pm both days—check the details and get the whole schedule here. My preorders are closed, but because you all deserve something special for being on the newsletter crew, if you are going and still want the discounted preorder price, drop me an email.
I think that’s all the rest of the events I’m currently planning for the year. Others might come up, but I don’t know about them yet.
Book Reviews
Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen (cis, M/F). I have a hard time reading it as someone would have at the time—I still think Lydia (“untamed, unabashed, wild, noisy, and fearless”) is terrific. Mr Bennet, who’s only in it for the laughs, is also great. Also there are so many situations everyone can relate to, like “you live in a village of twenty people, so you can’t be rude to anyone’s face,” or “your BFF is marrying a drip,” or “some dude thinks he’s better than you,” or “no one loves a micromanager.” It’s a classic for a reason.
Star Shipped, by Cat Sebastian (cis, M/M). I feel like I need to talk about this because I generally love Cat Sebastian’s work—and I did like this, just not as ardently as I have loved some of her other stuff. It’s her first contemporary, and although I am still by no means a real reader of contemporary romance, I liked it. I did wonder why Simon keeps buying sweaters for his boyfriend when they live in LA, where I am given to understand there is very little call for sweaters. But Simon’s anxiety and mild OCD were well-drawn and relatable.