What Did Jane Austen Call Her Beta Readers?

I am always, it seems, urgently seeking a fresh beta reader. Writer friends who have not read my first pages are busy. I rewrote the opening chapters, and have an agent eager to read the revision, but do not think it wise to send them until someone intelligent and thoughtful has vetted them for me.

I got to thinking, how did Jane Austen handle this? I know she read her work aloud to a sister.

Rumer and Jon Godden, novelists

Rumer Godden describes a similar thing, taking her sister, Jon (also a novelist) out on a boat in Kashmir and reading an entire draft to Jon, whose only response is, "It won't do, Rumer."















The Bronte sisters were obviously a fan-club/critique group for one another, at least while they were all alive.

What about people who don't have literary siblings? What can we do?

Lack-of-Doubt Envy

This week, as I dropped off one of my children at school, I heard a mom speaking to her son, a terrific little boy in my child's class. 

“I will work hard today and make sure that my mouth speaks only kindness,” the mother chanted. He repeated it after her. 

She took his chin, stared him in the face, and told him to say it louder and really mean it. Then, she said the next part of the chant, “For I know all things are possible within the love of Christ.” 

This is a little brown boy, single brown mother. He is always on the lookout to help and support in the classroom. In fact, I had just mentioned that to his teacher. How kind he is, how ready to interfere for good. 

After he went in, I told the mother what I had just told the teacher. (It is a family value we teach to try to tell people good things when we can.) 

Then, I headed back into the classroom to give my child another hug. As I went, I admit I felt a bit of envy that I do not have this mother's kind of a faith. I know, in fact, the opposite-- that all things are not possible, no matter who believes in what God. Very bad things can happen to very good people. Anxiety can cripple. Even the most religious can be pushed by depression to commit suicide. Babies can be born with cancer and die within the month. Whole peoples can be wiped out through intensive campaigns, millions within a matter of years. 

But I still envied this mother that certainty. I wished to be able to take my own child's chin and say, "Anything is possible with faith in God." 

Instead, I said my usual, "Be kind, and make sure to ask good questions."  

And then, I hugged my child and gave a kiss on top of the head, did the same to the two best friends in class (I have asked permission long before to do this) Then, I found the affectionate little boy who this year is clearly going through some horrible crises at home. (He is glum, his face so sad this year. He says, "I was up all night last night," and frankly, if a child can fall asleep during morning circle time, you know he is sleepy.) 

"Who's my very favorite boy?" I said, and gave him a hug. He put his hand on top of his head, his eyes wide, and said, "Wow. You kissed my head." 

"Yup," I said, "You said that I could. And I love you. You know that, right?" 

It's the best I can do. 

Anna Leonowens vs. Rachel Dolezal Part 1.

Look at the Victorian woman in this photo, sitting there with her parted hair and her the barrel-hooped petticoats under her skirts. She seems comfortable with the various Indian young women around her, some likely Hindu, some Muslim, some Parsee (descended from Persian Zoroastrians who immigrated to India in previous generations) some perhaps untouchable. The white woman is probably a British missionary or perhaps a Headmistress of a school. All the girls grouped around her are very young. The only older Indian woman is the one on our right looking at the others rather than at the camera. Notice how the Indian women sit around the white woman as though she were a queen.

This photo was taken around the era in which Anna Leonowens grew up, like this photo, in British Colonial India. Though she presented herself as the red-headed Welsh widow of a British officer, descended from British gentry, Harriet Anna Leonowens was born in India, her great-great, grandfather a saddler, her great-grandfather a Brimstone-preaching Methodist in the days when Methodism was an outrageous new sect that preached--astonishingly--that all men are equal, her grandfather then barely a "gentleman."

Even more astonishingly, Anna's grandmother, about whom we know next to nothing, was a girl very similar to the young woman of this photo, more than likely a mistress or "concubine," of her grandfather.

Her mother, in what was the very best option for the time for a "half-caste" girl was married at fourteen to a much older enlisted man, Anna's father, who died a few months before Anna was born.  With few other options, a six-month pension and no funds, Mary Ann married again, an Irish blacksmith turned Sapper/Miner in the British Army (the people who dug tunnels and set explosions to bring down walled cities during military campaigns.) Mary Ann, already the mother of three  including Anna, gave this Donohoe nine other children, while living in cramped, close quarters, and providing the British military with yet another tool as she aided her husband in his work. In fact, according to Anna's later stories, Mary Ann risked her life to protect the payroll that her husband was assigned to guard. (Of course, Mary Ann was also risking her life to save her husband's career.)

In this narrow world, the fact of Anna's mixed race meant most doors were closed to her. Her best option was to be removed from her family and sent to a school for mixed-race girls like herself. She, her sister and a cousin attended such a school which sounds a lot worse than Jane Eyre's boarding school and more like Tribal Boarding schools in the U.S. harsh goals designed to remove the girls from "chee-chee," culture and train them to be, like their mother, useful helpmates to British enlisted men.

When they reached the age of fourteen or fifteen, they were kitted out with a small dowry. On a regular basis, older, steady enlisted men visited the school and sat in a parlor where they were given a choice among them such girls for a wife.  Anna's other sister,  Mary Anne, married such a steady older man--twenty-some years older.

Anna refused to do so. Instead, she married a fiery young Anglo-Irishman, and headed off with him to Australia and the beginning of a life of struggle, loss, gain and adventure. She cut all ties with her mixed-race family, claimed her complexion had been forever darkened by her years under the Asian sun, and used the tale of her governessing for the King of Siam as a launching point into American society, where, as a supposedly very proper British woman of very high pedigree, she lectured about how British ideals saved Siam from slavery. Her spine straightened by whalebone, her discipline hardened by a mother raised, as she was, in a harsh British boarding school, her mind forever questioning, Anna broke free of the mold and became the very model of British upper-class uprightness, providing a living for herself and propelling her daughter, Avis, into the Canadian upper class.

Anna And the King of Siam--The reinvented helping to reinvent.

I'm still thinking about the discovery that our pale-skinned, red-haired vision of Anna Leonowens, born in Wales, daughter of a captain in the army, widow of a captain in the army, dreaming wistfully about "When the earth smelled of summer, and the sky was streaked with white, and the soft mist of England was sleeping on a hill," was really a fierce, imaginative, inventive, resilient mixed-race woman who was born in India, raised in India and Singapore, married a weak man and not only found a way to support herself throughout her life, but did so by so completely reinventing herself that she inspired the imaginations of millions of people around the world, in a story of "British civilization" taming a "barbarian." 

This is a woman who had never been to England, whose father was an enlisted man, her mother "Eurasian," in a time when that was social death, who may have grown up among the rest of the soldiers' brats, with what little schooling that entailed, and who reinvented herself not only to teach for five years, the children of the King of Siam, but later reinvented herself with a writing and speaking career, and built a far better world for her children--her daughter married well, and lived a life of leisure, probably never knowing that her great-grandmother was Indian and her mother was not from Wales. 

Anna Leonowens cut off her sister, Eliza Julia Edwards, when Eliza married James Millard, a mixed-race Sergeant-Major with the 4th Troop Artillery, Indian Army in Deesa, Banaskantha, Gujarat, India. In fact, Anna cut Eliza off so completely that she threatened to commit suicide when a family member tried to contact her. (Eliza herself died at age 

But her son, Louis Leonowens, the child of The King And I, who was educated for six years in Siam, was sent to Europe for his education, (after the Thais politely asked Anna to leave.) He returned to Thailand, and married Caroline Knox, the daughter of Sir George Thomas Knox and his wife, a Thai noblewoman--which must have been, in some ways, Anna Leonowen's greatest nightmare, that her son was marrying a woman of mixed race. 

What rich, fascinating characters, including King Monghut, who was no slouch at reinvention himself, who spoke 11 languages, was not raised to be King, was in fact, an intellectual, the successful head of a Buddhist monastery, creating a revolution in Thai Buddhism, and was a moving force in the modernization of Siam.

And then, there is Siam's acting prime minister at the time, Somdet Chao Phraya Si Suriyawong.

And Sir George Thomas Knox and his wife and children. 

And the first women doctors who came from many countries to study at the first medical school in the US to accept women. 

And. . .

Ah, research. 

Well Blow Me Down. The history of Anna Leonowens.

Deborah Kerr

You may know about Anna Leonowens, the pale-skinned, red-headed Welsh widow of a British military officer who brought civilization to the sexy King Monghut of Thailand in The King And I, and Anna And the King of Siam.

Gertie Lawrence: 

I knew a long time ago that King Monghut ((King Phra Bat Somdet Phra  Poramanthra Maha Mongkut Phra Chom Klao Chao Yu Hua) looked like this:

rather than this:


What I didn't know was that Anna Leonowens was passing, all over the place. Her mother was of mixed Anglo-Indian race, her husband was a clerk who was bad at holding down a job. She cut off her sister, Eliza, after Eliza married a man of mixed race, and she reinvented herself. A brutal cut-off--when a nephew approached her, she said she would kill herself if he continued to try to make contact.

She made her father a Captain and made up a birthplace in Wales, and she managed to move herself, and her children and grandchildren across the line to gentility in a time when being of mixed race was a prison of its own.

(By the way, Eliza's grandson, William Henry Pratt, also remade himself, as actor Boris Karloff.)  

So here she is, gang, the bold, brave woman herself: Anna Leon Owens. Let's celebrate her courage and inventiveness as we mourn the world that made it necessary for her to lie her way to success. 

Lonely Arts Club

Last night, I attended our city's first ever Lonely Arts Club, a speed dating event to find critique partners for writers. This is a terrific idea. The folk who ran it were playful and cute. They held it at a hip micro-brewery, dressed as waiters and waitresses, and handed us a menu for a communal writing exercise, like the story-telling game you play with little kids, tossing the plot around a circle.

Okay, that worked better in concept than in reality, but it was soon over and we were able to get to the meat of meeting other writers.

After some false starts, the organizers worked out the speed dating aspect as well. My side of the long table wound up hopping sideways, like fleas, to shout across the table at another writer--okay, the acoustics were horrible. I met a damned good short-story writer. I know she can write,
because she was next to me during the writing exercise. I met other writers who exuded confidence and possibilities. All in all, it was just plain fun, even though I have a mild-concussion thanks to a tall teenager who thought the back of my ice skates were third base and slid into them full speed last Sunday.

Writing is a lonely art. I'm an introvert, so that is mostly fine, but I love being able to shoot pages to someone or having them send me theirs. I find, though, that it can be extremely difficult, when you don't write genre and after you reach a certain level of technique, to find a critique group or peers.

Also, right now, I'm desperately seeking someone to read a revision of my first chapters, which an agent has requested and which I finished weeks ago--I think this is a very good revision--but am not willing to send it out without that careful read by an intelligent writer. My go-tos have either read my opening ad nauseum, or this friend's child is in crisis, this one's mother is in the hospital, this one is planning her wedding and applying to Journalism school, several work and are taking classes, too. I love people who can say no--it makes me know where I stand--but I do wish I could find a wise, thoughtful beta reader for these pages. Right now!

Any offers?

My First Ever Reading: It Was A Dark And Stormy Night

It was a dark and stormy night at the beginning of this month, when I gave my first ever reading. Moments before we left, the sky lit up while a huge clap of thunder shook the house. My little one was too scared to leave home, I took her with me, hoping my oldest could babysit her outside the hall so my husband could come inside. This would be a necessity, as I had heard that my classmates were all leaning towards pieces with a sexual theme--like my piece.

So, we dripped inside with about thirty brave souls--none of my friends could make it, but my two classmates had brought some and some just came on their own. Reader number one's piece was a funny exploration of loud sex in a tiny North woods summer cabin community, complicated by letters both participants sent to a local Dear Abby and, of course, local gossip.

Reader number two's piece was a witty riff on faking it--in art, in relationships, in sex and even in appearing needy enough to get donations. I loved both readings and both classmates read beautifully. (This is a rip-roaringly talented class.)

Then it was my turn. I was very nervous. We had a five minute limit, and though I had been told they would not use a large hook if we ran over time, I feared I might read too slowly, or conversely, race through.  Mine also included a sex scene, in a section from mid-novel in The Color Of Safety. Here, a character comes home to discover an act of betrayal. Though she does not kill herself, a part of her dies, the part that believes she can make her life safe. It was the most literary of the readings. Except heck, sex is sex, right, even if you're obliquely quoting Shakespeare. There were audible gasps and applause when I finished. "Were you an actor?" someone asked.

 "Whew," I thought. "I can do this if I have to." And of course, I am looking to publish successfully so I hope that I will have to do readings, often.

But the best news is, those who read plus one other extremely gifted classmate want to form a critique group. Everybody interested is a grownup and sane, everybody is committed, and each of them are gifted, interesting writers. I don't write genre and I am not a beginner. This makes it very hard to find valid group support and criticism. When you add the requirement of emotional maturity, it can be impossible. And yet, we've done it. Yahoo.