some of my prose by Julie Ralphs

Fanny as a nu-Bronte,reads her ‘Sence and Sensibility’ By Julie Ralphs.......  In the sitting room, Fanny sobs as she is read as a classical novelette by Natalie. A nu-Bronte in ‘ Sence and Sensibility’, in the NEXT ROOM at the Grange. Fanny’s fluffy compendium is left on the drawing table. The diary opens a window to another worldly portrait of her as a modern day heroine and not a sketch of a lady of English middle class life as penned in the eighteenth century. Its leafs are filled with the sweetness of countenance and her little love petal notelets that are tied together in a soft lace. In her own private language- sweet pony prayers that belong to the language of the soul. A canvas sketches her, where she sits there as though painted there. Her black hair disposed in glossy ringlets falls softly about her visage. There are quiet conversations but it is only in the opening chapter of Jane Austen’s book. Dining at Thrushcross Lodge are the Middletons, the analogy is taken indoors. Fanny puts away her needlework, as her Gentleman caller arrives. Holding out a hand in a long primrose- coloured glove, there is a sweet but serious kiss. And with a playful tone in her words, ‘ Must I pour out his tea, Papa’. Papa was impressed with her voice, look and air. He smiled upon her,’My dear Fanny’. A tray was brought of old Worcester porcelain. The bourgeois cosiness and domesticity revisited. Among the lace in the bosom of her silk dress. Edward’s picture was in a tiny locket about her neck. Fanny sits down to the pianoforte and plays something appropriate to love’s young dream, love’s ephemerioe. He stood beside her in a cream waistcoat with gold and onyx buttons and took up his glasses, a little book of her nature poems in hand, came to life in her soft lyrics. Aunt Anne looked up from her Romantic novel in her velvet chair. She read the maniloquent words in the pages of her life. Her cameo ring, reminded her so much of her mistress. Fanny’s portrait next to the still-life’s seemed to stare back in astonishment. A soft and tender smile seemed to come through the ether like the warmth and perfume of a flower. The fictional young lady is re-invented by an authoress to be the heroine of something other than just her own life. Her hands gloved in French grey, were crossed one over the other. She blushed a smile so sweetly kind. Edward interrupted the reverie. ‘ There is a painting in her face’ he writes. And then his eyes are fixed upon an old sepia photograph in a gilded frame on the dresser of the drawing room.   The wrought –iron gate, opens to Edward’s thought of an erotic plate of his mistress in a Lacey frock swinging in a garden seat, sat on the mantelpiece. She comes to life. With her black ringlets streaming in the light summer breeze in sepia. Edward had slipped a notelet and key into the seam of her petticoat. The flowers of the ephemeral sewn into her panties. A book of homilies in her hand, and a pony read of Fanny Hill. The notelet she unfolds and reads. It opens and the words constitute courtship. His letters are enclosing her diary. She walks down the path of the grove down to a secret garden.  He sees her, his mistress and governess in spirit at the Rector’s garden. They meet in secret and walk through to the grove. He meets her with a love letter in a dream. There Fanny lies on the grass with the letters, and Edward makes her a bracelet out of the pink and white daisies. She reads to him the notelet and some nature verse from a little book by Emily Dickinson. In her lap, lies Edward and a soft embroidery of the Manor and the Estate. Under the shady boughs and the pink laburnum and lengthening vistas, sits the realm Seamstress on the garden seat with her sketches of her, and Edward’s letters are tied in a religious lace in the pages of her diary as a kind of narrative coverture. Her secret drawings in the journal and its yellowing leaves fall on the parchment beneath the old oak tree. Fanny is seen by Edward  peering into the fishpond with the water nymphs by the fountain and the impatiens. Edward is combing her hair with a jeweled comb.