Hi friends! Are you ready to meet another new author!! Keena Richins is the author of 3️⃣Austen-Inspired stories – Persuading Him, Persuading Her, and Sense Without Sensibility.  The first two books are modern-day Persuasion retellings, and as you might guess, Sense Without Sensibility is a modern-day Sense and Sensibility retelling! Keena is here today to celebrate her newest release, Sense Without Sensibility and share a little bit about the challenges with modernizing this Jane Austen novel in particular. We hope you enjoy!

Out of all of Jane Austen’s books, I think Sense and Sensibility is one of the harder ones to modernize mainly because of the first chapter. Mr. Dashwood dies (sorry, spoiler alert) and the estate (and all the money) is inherited by the firstborn son. Normally, the son would take care of the females in the family, but the son was from Mr. Dashwood’s first marriage. The father had remarried and had three more daughters. The relationship between them was apparently strained and, since the son had a greedy wife, he ended up not giving any money to his half-sisters, leaving the females destitute.

This scenario no longer happens in modern-day America. Even if a woman is cut from a hefty inheritance, she has other options. She could contest the ruling and/or sue. Or she could get a job. She does not have to depend on any a male to help her survive like during the Regency period.

Most variations I’ve seen tend to remove the large inheritance entirely, making the women penniless by a force outside of their control (such as the father making bad business decisions and folding the company).

I, however, wanted to keep the large inheritance as well as the cruel decision of the son (and his wife) to rob his half-sisters of their father’s money and I also wanted to include the sense of doom and despair that our heroine, Elinor, feels in losing a beloved father. I struggled for a long time on how to translate the above into our modern world until a tragedy struck me personally.

My dear grandmother suffered a stroke.

My grandmother was 83 and full of life. She lived by herself, less than ten minutes away from me, and was always a supporter of my writing, reading and praising my stories. And she had the best wry wit. I loved coming over and helping her with whatever technological advance that had stumped her yet again.

Then one day, everything changed. We’re not exactly sure what happened, but we can assume she woke up and stepped out of bed like normal, then apparently collapsed, perhaps because the stroke had already paralyzed her right leg. She was found by my sister, hours later, alive but incoherent. The doctors did what they could, but the vascular damage had already been done. My grandmother went from a fully-functioning adult to an invalid with instant dementia in less than twelve hours. She no longer recognized me, struggled to remember her own children, and couldn’t hold a conversation longer than a couple of contrite phrases.

My grandmother was lucky enough to have saved enough money for a comfortable retirement. But this also meant someone now needed to be in charge of all that money. She had three children who shared the burden, but the bulk of the decisions were put on my father’s shoulders.

Now, my father is a good man and has always been wise with money. However, as I watched him take over my grandmother’s accounts and realized how much power he had, my writer-mind started wandering down what-if lanes. All you needed was someone who was not a good person, who had a serious flaw of greed deep within, to run amok with those finances and cut off anyone counting on that money.

That described Fanny, the son’s greedy wife, perfectly.

Since hard assets like businesses need to be liquidized in situations like these—and it would make sense that Elinor, the oldest daughter, would be working for her father’s company—Elinor’s family would lose their inheritance, their jobs, and whatever futures they had once planned. I finally had a starting scenario that would duplicate the opening conflict of Austen’s Sense and Sensibility.

Now, I’ll admit, giving Elinor’s father the same type of stroke that had struck my grandmother was tough; a lot of the scenes in the book are pulled directly from my own experiences with my grandmother. But thankfully I did not have a Fanny in my family to make a huge mess. Then again, that also meant I didn’t get Fanny’s handsome billionaire brother to show up to help either. But hey, that’s why we read stories, right? To dream of what could have been.

Thank you so much for sharing, Keena. I so agree with you about Sense and Sensibility being difficult to translate into modern times for the very reasons you stated. Definitely a daunting task! And I am so sorry to hear about your dear grandmother, what a beautiful smile she has. It is wonderful that you live close by and that she has her family to take care of her. 💕

~ About Keena ~

Keena Richins has a curse: she must write the stories bubbling in her head or go mad. Seriously. You should see the hordes of characters in her head constantly babbling about their lives. When she needs a break, Keena will delve into books and her favorite are the Jane Austen books, so it is only fitting for her first debut to be a modern twist on one of those classics. And many more are soon to come.

~~~

GIVEAWAY TIME!!!

Keena is generously giving away 3 ebook editions of Sense Without Sensibility in conjunction with this blog tour!!  Woot woot!  

Commenting on this post and entering through the rafflecopter widget on this blog enters you in a chance to win!

a Rafflecopter giveaway

• This giveaway is open worldwide.  Thank you, Keena!
• This giveaway ends February 27th!

 

Thank you to Serena Augsto-Cox and Keena Richins for making this blog tour possible!

Be sure to check out the rest of this tour!

February 10 ~ Austenesque Reviews ~ guest post
February 14 ~ Diary of an Eccentric ~ review
February 15 ~Jorie Loves A Story ~ review
February 18 ~My Jane Austen Book Club~ guest post
February 19 ~ Soapy Violinist ~ review
February 27 ~ The Book Connection ~ review