Writerly Ambitions

E-Books will be delivered via a download link in an email from our delivery partner Bookfunnel.

Make sure you check your promotions and spam folders if you do not receive an email within a minute.

You will be able to read this on any Ebook Reader (Kindle, Nook or Kobo) and on your computer, tablet or phone. The email from Bookfunnel with the download link will include easy to follow instructions for entering the book into e-reader libaries.

Digital Products have a 30 day refund window. I really don't want to keep your money if you don't think that I gave you something worthwhile. If you hate what you are reading, use the contact form to send me a message, including your name and order number and add a sentence or two about why you disliked the books, and I'll send you your money back. 

A week before the settlement of Mr. Charles Bingley, accompanied for a time by that fine fellow, his estimable friend Mr. Fitzwilliam Darcy, into the neighborhood of Meryton, yet one other person arrived in the environs of that aforementioned market town from that great sinful city whose name is London.
Following a significant absence of many years from her home county, Miss Elizabeth Bennet rolled towards her one time home in the well sprung and supple new Bennet carriage her mother had sent unto London to fetch her daughter.
The gravelly roll of the wheels was a familiar old sound.
It was cold in the carriage, but Elizabeth kept the window open so she could see more easily everything in the half familiar and a quarter forgotten landscape. Elizabeth had not seen her home territory since those fated weeks during her fateful twentieth year.
She giggled inwardly to herself; these days, ever since Elizabeth had acquired notable success as an author, when she spoke to herself she often talked like a silly melodramatic book.
She had been expelled from the wild woods, furrowed fields and… cold creeks of the country county of her birth when scandal exploded, like a bonfire on Guy Fawkes Day, after she had been trapped alone in a hunting lodge during a blizzard for two whole days with that darling of stupid and silly girls, Mr. George Wickham.
Ah, Wicky.
An annoyed and disgusted expression went over Elizabeth’s face, like she’d just stepped with a new pair of shoes into a deep pile of horse muck — unknown to Elizabeth, this was the expression her face took every time the memory of that thinly charming individual imposed itself on her like the gentleman had attempted to impose on her.
What ever happened to Wicky?
He’d been quite put out when Elizabeth absolutely refused to let him have any “waggy entertainment” — “Be a nice, sweet girl,” he’d said. “It shan’t hurt at all. You’ll like it very much. No one will find out.” — during the duration of that stay. She’d been required to make the point that she lacked any interest with the sharp edge of her knee to his groin before he accepted her polite demurral.
Mr. Wickham’s revenge was to spread scandalous stories about their lascivious and lewd deeds.
The truth of those two days had been rather less pleasant than what Elizabeth imagined a two days’ tryst filled with animal concourse between a man and a woman would have been — the two of them spent thirty and six hours shivering on opposite sides of the freezing room. Elizabeth slept not a wink the entire time, terrified of what Mr. Wickham might do if he could catch her completely off guard.
He snored with some comfort and the only horsehair blanket in the hunting lodge.
The yet young woman — not yet thirty! And a writer of modest repute — shook away those recollections of unpleasant past moments.
Rather she preferred to gaze with growing excitement upon the nostalgic haunts of childhood days. There Oakham Mount, from which you could see clear for many miles around. There the Gouldings’ farm. There Mr. Long’s fine house — no, that gentleman had not remained in place awaiting Elizabeth’s return, and rather had removed himself and his wife to a retirement in Bath, and the house was now rented, though Elizabeth could not recall the name of the family Mr. Long had let his modest pile out to.
And Meryton.
Yet more memories, most happy, burst in upon Elizabeth. She had spent many years, so very many, in these quaint environs. The town was so busy seeming to a girl running about who knew nowhere else. So empty and sedate to a woman accustomed to the capital’s unending and (on occasional occasions) unnerving bustle. Her carriage trundled through the town, and Elizabeth looked about eagerly.
Many signs had changed in the seven years past. The haberdasher and the milliner had switched shops. Where the chandler stood, a greengrocer. But her favorite! The old circulating library and bookseller was still in the same place.
Elizabeth determined she would visit Mr. Martin soon.
Despite herself Elizabeth could not help but grin with an honest enthusiasm which made the ironic tones in her mind fade away. The old memories delighted her far more than they pained her. Twenty years of happiness could not be undone by two months of misery.
In essentials Meryton was exactly as it always had been, though a few new built brick structures on the edges of the town had joined the brown and white timber framed buildings that had been there for centuries.
A group of children played in a field, running back and forth as they chased each other, happily laughing.
She grinned, this happiness at old associations long unseen unstoppably bubbling through her. Alas, not all her thoughts were so delighted, for a terrified part of our heroine — Elizabeth also tended to refer to herself in her internal monologue with such an appellation on rare, pompous, occasions — a part of her that was not yet one and twenty, a part of her which had never stopped hurting at the fervent belief her neighbors adopted in her guilt, feared they would recognize her, and despise her again.
Elizabeth took a deep breath, full of the clean country air, with just a touch of manure from one of the pasture fields in the scent.
She smiled.
Nothing maudlin. Not today. The cloudy October weather which promised cold sprinkles would burst forth any moment was far too fine for her to be maudlin in. At least for a few months it would be good to be home once more.
And there the old house was.
Longbourn was a fine compact structure all in red brick. The sort of structure in which those gentry of middling stature, the backbone, or so insisted the newspapers which depended upon their subscriptions, of England would reside. A manor house that had seen a few generations, but which yet was modern enough that the young heirs would not be talking about how it was time to knock the old pile over and begin anew in the hallowed name of Improvement.
A half dozen smokestacks merrily belched thin wisps of smoke into the air. A welcoming sight to the returning authoress.
When the carriage pulled up to the manor house, Elizabeth gathered up her calf skin notebook where she kept the pages of whatever she was working on. During the day she scribbled ideas in pencil onto the sheets and then she later copied them out in ink for the working copy.
The door was opened by her dear old Papa. He smilingly extended out his arm, and he helped Elizabeth to step down from the carriage. “Lizzy, home at last! Home!”
Elizabeth exuberantly embraced her father and then looked at him.
He smiled back at her.
Papa looked older. She’d somehow never noticed when he visited her in London. But his hair had been darker, and his skin firmer when seven years before he saw her off to town, standing in this very place and waving.
The sort of nervous feeling felt at seeing the effect of age on her father launched Elizabeth again into that way of thinking: Whilst our heroine’s father was not elderly, he no longer could be said in frank honesty to be in the middle course of a man’s life.
“Lizzy! My dear, dear Lizzy!” Mrs. Bennet seized Elizabeth and hugged her tightly, disrupting any maudlin meanderings. “My dear, dear daughter! Lord! Home at last! I have missed you so.”
Mama looked younger, happy and relaxed. She’d never used to look relaxed.
Such was the effect, Elizabeth supposed, of four daughters married.
That terrible fear had haunted her mother for many a year, that fear of starving alone, with her daughters, in the hedgerows, unwanted and unaided by any of her many relations, not a one of whom would deign to lift a finger to help their blood relation, with only the insufficient support to keep life in the bones of the income off five thousand in the four percents. The marriage of four daughters, even if not a one had married well had relieved that never particularly reasonable fear from her mother.
Mama bustled Elizabeth inside. “Lord! So unfashionable. That dress! Was it ever even in fashion for the season? As though you’d come from some cheap rural village, not London! Mr. Bennet said he always sends you allowance sufficient for dresses — what have you spent that money on? We must go to the dressmaker tomorrow. Order something in the latest fashion for you. I’ll not have my daughter look so dowdy — everything is prepared for you, Lizzy — your room is nice and warm. You shall feel entirely at home again.”
The more Mama talked the quieter Elizabeth felt. In seriousness she did not want to be fashionable again, especially not here. “I hope I shall.”
“The same, the very same! Everything is the same. Heavens, you do look brown — I thought you spent all your days inside scribbling?” Mrs. Bennet frowned at her. “You are quite freckled.”
Elizabeth laughed. “One might, if they have a pencil and paper, scribble out of their doors with even greater facility than inside of their doors — you know, like the poets.”
“Not respectable people.” Mrs. Bennet sniffed. “Poets are not respectable at all. You’ll give off from scribbling I hope, now that you are living back here where you belong.”
Elizabeth shook her head, smilingly. “Not at all, Mama. Not at all.”
Mr. Bennet laughed. “You’ll not convince your mother to be happy with anything that reeks of the bluestocking.”