I’ve been working on it for about two years, on and off. The thing about Jane Austen is that she was not really prone to producing tidy little bits of sentimental advice. There’s plenty of advice in her work—but it’s nearly always artistically hewn out of a forest of irony, so to speak. Austen is never obvious and never un-subtle.
As I said in the introduction to the book:
So the twenty-one ‘wise words’ I decided to use were ones that could not reasonably be illustrated by pictures of the characters standing there speaking them–that would have been wholly misleading. Instead, I took the sense of the words and illustrated that, using a combination of period sources, adapted for a coloring book.
As with the previous two entries in the series, I employed some shades of grey, to provide modeling and dimensionality:
This time I made a greater effort to include a lot of white on the pages, but there is still a bit of grey, as can be seen here.
All the ‘wise words’ are from Austen’s writings. That should go without saying— but try looking at any quotations site; the fake quotes sometimes outnumber the real ones. (Wikiquote.org is pretty good at ferreting these out. Except in the case of the quotes from Austen letters, which I looked at online, I used my own copies of the novels to verify the selections I ended up using.)
Amazon says the Look Inside feature should be up any time, now, so additional pages can be inspected (more if you’re signed in).