preface.

Mrs. Bennet, with great civility, begged her ladyship to take some refreshment; but Lady Catherine very resolutely, and not very politely, declined eating any thing; and then rising up, said to Elizabeth,

"Miss Bennet, there seemed to be a prettyish kind of a little wilderness on one side of your lawn. I should be glad to take a turn in it, if you will favour me with your company."

"Go, my dear," cried her mother, "and shew her ladyship about the different walks."
Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice

Last fall, a dear friend was reading Pride and Prejudice; she remarked that Lady Catherine's phrase would make the perfect title for a blog. Not only was I TAing for a Jane Austen course at the time, but P&P is also a novel that I re-read over and over again, basking in its diction, chuckling at its snarkiness. So I laughed, agreed, and filed the idea away, not entirely intending to follow through on it. But it gradually, unexpectedly, snuck up on me and became something I was excited about. Became, well, this.

"A prettyish kind of a little wilderness" - it seems such an apt title for a blog. (Thanks again, B., for the phrase. And thanks too to M. for the set-up help.) For in Austen's context of eighteenth-century landscaping, "wilderness" means not an uninhabited desolate space but a section of garden carefully designed to look wild. (Closely-set trees, intricate mazes, perhaps a faux-ruin. You get the picture.) In a way, this blog will, I hope, become its own kind of wilderness: a hodgepodge of recipes, photos, miscellaneous snippets planted (er, posted) carefully, one at a time, eventually to form a pleasing space.

So thanks for taking a turn.