John Wiltshire

Loving a total stranger can be very hard work sometimes. How do you love someone who exists entirely in the shadows? How do you love a man who describes himself as dead? How do you get that ghost to love you back? Ex-SAS soldier Ben Rider falls in love with his enigmatic married boss Sir Nikolas Mikkelsen, but Nikolas is living a lie. A lie so profound that when the shadows are lifted, Ben realises he's in love with a very dangerous stranger. Ben has to choose between Nikolas and safety, but sometimes danger comes in a very seductive package.

Love Is a Stranger

Despite their differences, Doctor Hartmann feels an irresistible desire for Prince Aleksey. But Hesse-Davia is a dangerous world for them.

A Royal Affair

Royal Affair

Nikolas and Ben discover that bonds aren't forged with blood or scars but in the hearts of men strong enough to love. Ben discovers the truth of the adage, 'be careful what you wish for'. Nikolas has exorcised his demons, but when they end up stranded in Russia, the monster inside needs to be let loose. Siberia in winter isn't a place for good men. There is nothing Nikolas won't do to keep Ben alive. Home again, Nikolas then faces an enemy he can't defeat: Ben Rider himself. Discovering a new family, Ben realizes he's been living too long in the shadows cast by Nikolas's all-consuming love. For the first time, life apart from Nikolas is possible. Is Nikolas strong enough to let Ben go?

The Bridge of Silver Wings

Sometimes there is a very fine dividing line between fact and fiction. Named after the main character in his mother's infamous Oliver novels, Ollie's been fighting his fictional namesake his whole life. It's a battle for identity he is slowly and inevitably losing. Ex-army PTI, Tom knows all about battles--the real ones that break soldiers. When he volunteers to help with the Oliver situation, Ollie hears more in the offer than Tom apparently intends, for Tom quickly informs Ollie that he's married. Which is absolutely fine, because Ollie isn't gay--that's Oliver. Tom and Ollie discover fairly swiftly that there is often a very fine dividing line between fact and fiction.

Ollie Always

When they become pawns in a conspiracy, Nikolai must unleash the unfettered savagery of his true nature to save Aleksey.

Aleksey's Kingdom

Ben Rider and Nikolas Mikkelsen learn that danger comes in all shapes and sizes and often in places you least expect it. Nikolas's dark past calls to him, inexorably dragging him back into its seductive embrace. While he goes on an errand of mercy to Russia, Ben travels to Denmark to learn Nikolas's language. Convinced Russia's vastness will swallow Nikolas, Ben doesn't see the enemy much closer to home. Thinking he has lost Nikolas, Ben then makes a terrible decision that threatens to destroy everything they have together. Focused on this very personal horror, bound by a new level of commitment, they have no idea that a greater threat is coming. And when it arrives, it changes everything---even the definition of commitment. Warning: This story contains the violent death of a minor character and some graphic violence.

Conscious Decisions of the Heart

Nikolas is the sanest, straightest, person he knows, so can anyone tell him, why he's on a gay therapy course? Nikolas Mikkelsen could make a very long list of unpleasant things he's endured in his life. Then order it from 'nearly killed me' to 'extremely horrific and don't want to do again'. And what did it say about his forty-five years that being hit by a tsunami would be a considerable way down this list? But nothing, not torture, imprisonment, nor starvation has prepared him for what he now has to endure for Ben Rider's sake-attendance on a residential, gay therapy course. At least he has a new contender for the top spot on his 'my awful life' list.

This Other Country

Recreating Jane Austen is a book for readers who know and love Austen's work. Stimulated by the recent crop of film and television versions of Austen's novels, John Wiltshire examines how they have been transposed and 'recreated' in another age and medium. Wiltshire illuminates the process of 'recreation' through the work of the psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott, and offers Jane Austen's own relation to Shakespeare as a suggestive parallel. Exploring the romantic impulse in Austenian biography, 'Jane Austen' as a commodity, and offering a re-interpretation of Pride and Prejudice, this book approaches the central question of the role Jane Austen plays in the contemporary cultural imagination.

Recreating Jane Austen

Philipa Rothfield

Paul A. Komesaroff

There is no available information at this time.

Bodies, Practices, Knowledges

Sexuality and Medicine

Marcia McClintock Folsom

Jane Austen is a favorite with many students, whether they’ve read her novels or viewed popular film adaptations. But Persuasion, completed at the end of her life, can be challenging for students to approach. They are surprised to meet a heroine so subdued and self-sacrificing, and the novel's setting during the Napoleonic wars may be unfamiliar. This volume provides teachers with avenues to explore the depths and richness of the novel with both Austen fans and newcomers. Part 1, "Materials," suggests editions for classroom use, criticism, and multimedia resources. Part 2, "Approaches," presents strategies for teaching the literary, contextual, and philosophical dimensions of the novel. Essays address topics such as free indirect discourse and other narrative techniques; social class in Austen’s England; the role of the navy during war and peacetime; key locations in the novel, including Lyme Regis and Bath; and health, illness, and the ethics of care.

Approaches to Teaching Austen's Persuasion

Persuasion is now probably the favourite Austen book after Pride and Prejudice. It tells the story of a life that might have been wasted, but is redeemed by love. It is a story by anyone who believes in second chances, or, in Tony Tanner’s words “to anyone who has experienced the sense of an irreparably ruined owing to an irrevocable mistaken decision”. While Pride and Prejudice was written when Austen was a young, marriageable woman, Persuasion was written when she was in her forties, and it features a heroine who, at twenty-seven, could in those days be destined, like Austen herself, to life as a spinster. As John Wiltshire, one of the best modern critics of Austen shows in this guide, the atmosphere of the two books is quite different, like the social world they depict – one “light and bright and sparkling” as Jane Austen herself called it, the other more sombre, shadowed by several deaths, and sometimes gentle and sometimes savage in its irony. But Persuasion has endeared itself to readers because the romance it celebrates takes place so convincingly within a constricting and believable social world. It’s a love story for adults. Anne Elliot is quiet, accommodating, kind and thoughtful, but Jane Austen avoids making her a picture of perfection by inviting the reader into her consciousness. We see that she is watchful of herself, critical of herself, aware of her own self-deceptions, but at the same time subject to impulses and longings, to the dreams and sexual desires we all share.

Jane Austen's Persuasion

In this major study, leading Austen scholar John Wiltshire offers new interpretations of Jane Austen's six novels, Sense and Sensibility (1811), Pride and Prejudice (1813), Mansfield Park (1814), Emma (1816), Northanger Abbey and Persuasion (1818). Much recent criticism of Austen has concentrated on the social, historical and intellectual context of her work, but Wiltshire turns attention back to Austen's prose techniques. Arguing that each of Austen's works has its own distinct focus and underlying agenda, he shows how Austen's interest in psychology, and especially her treatment of attention and the various forms of memory, helped shape her narratives. Through a series of compelling close readings of key passages in each novel, Wiltshire underscores Austen's unique ability to penetrate the hidden inner motives and impulses of her characters, and reveals some of the secrets of her narrative art.

The Hidden Jane Austen

What a pity the founding members of the new Gay Book Club didn't think to use a correctly placed hyphen--if they had, things might have worked out for everyone very differently indeed. Rory McGrath suffers from a debilitating condition--he caught it from reading too many books. Rory believes in true love. He's saving himself until he finds it, preferably with Mr Darcy, but definitely not with the arrogant, unpleasant ape Adam Sandstone. Adam isn't impressed with Rory either. Both Rory and Adam have yet to learn, however, that you cannot always judge a book by its cover. The nine other members of the new club could have told them this, had they been consulted. The founders of the Buckland-in-the-Vale and Sandstone Tor Gay Book Club know only too well that not all truths are written in books. Truth, like life, is what you make of it.

Buckland-In-The-Vale and Sandstone Tor Gay Book Club (Inaugural Meeting)

This volume brings together lively and refreshing articles by a prominent Jane Austen scholar which have been reworked especially for the present collection. John Wiltshire explores the key themes and issues that Austen's novels raise for modern readers, and explore the controversies currently surrounding the author's work. Approachable and well-written, Wiltshire's essays encourage students to question conventional readings and consider Austen in a new light.

Introductions and Interventions

Jane Austen

David Monaghan,

Ariane Hudelet

Jane Austen’s novels are loved because they possess a comedic power that is often conveyed through the singular voice of the narrators. Film adaptations, however, have often been unsatisfactory because they lack or awkwardly render features, particularly the voice of the narrators. This work argues for a fresh approach that begins with a reading of the novels that emphasizes their auditory and visual dimensions. Building on their examination of Austen’s inherently cinematic features, the authors then develop productive new readings of the films. Instructors considering this book for use in a course may request an examination copy here.

Essays on the Filmic Sensibility of the Novels

The Cinematic Jane Austen

Wiltshire John

Jane Austen has been thought of as a novelist of manners whose work discreetly avoids discussing the physical. John Wiltshire shows, on the contrary, how important are bodies and faces, illness and health, in the novels, from complainers and invalids such as Mrs. Bennet and Mr. Woodhouse, to the frail, debilitated Fanny Price, the vulnerable Jane Fairfax and the "picture of health," Emma. The book draws on modern theories of the body, and on eighteenth-century medical sources, to give a fresh and controversial reading of familiar texts.

'The Picture of Health'

Jane Austen and the Body

This book reveals Austen's unique ability to penetrate the hidden inner motives of her characters through compelling new readings of her novels.

John Wiltshire

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