To sit and pass hour after hour in idle chatter with a roomful of strangers is to me the worst sort of torment.

Captain Harcourt-Bruce was not only dashing, handsome, and brave, he was also rather romantic. The reappearance of magic in England thrilled him immensely. He was a great reader of the more exciting sort of history - and his head was full of ancient battles in which the English were outnumbered by the French and doomed to die, when all at once would be heard the sound of strange, unearthly music, and upon a hilltop would appear the Raven King in his tall, black helmet with it's mantling of raven-feathers streaming in the wind; he would gallop down the hillside on his tall, black horse with a hundred human knights and a hundred fairy knights at his back, and he would defeat the French by magic.

That was Captain Harcourt-Bruce's idea of a magician. That was the sort of thing which he now expected to see reproduced on every battlefield on the Continent. So when he saw Mr Norrell in his drawing-room in Hanoversquare, and after he had sat and watched Mr Norrell peevishly complain to his footman, first that the cream in his tea was too creamy, and next that it was too watery - well, I shall not surprize you when I say he was somewhat disappointed. In fact he was so downcast by the whole undertaking that Admiral Paycocke, a bluff old gentleman, felt rather sorry for him and only had the heart to laugh at him and tease him very moderately about it.

In some ways, 'Mansfield Park' is 'Pride and Prejudice' turned inside out.

'Pride and Prejudice' is often compared to 'Cinderella,' but Jane Austen's real 'Cinderella' tale is 'Mansfield Park.'

I can write most places. I particularly like writing on trains. Being between places is quite liberating, and looking out of the window, watching a procession of landscapes and random-ish objects, is very good for stories.

It [Ashfair House] was an old fashioned house—the sort of house in fact, as Strange expressed it, which a lady in a novel might like to be persecuted in.