Review by MJ Ryan

When tackling the continuation of another author’s unfinished story, the new author must decide whether to try to divine from the available text which direction the original author was going or whether to take the characters in a new direction. I’m not sure it can be easily determined where Jane intended the characters in The Watsons to go. Maybe that’s why it remained during Austen’s lifetime a mere fragment, and maybe that’s why Aiken decided that the latter avenue would be best. Since it would be difficult to completely review the book without giving away a spoiler or two I will give a succinct two sentence review for those who don’t want to be spoiled: as a historical drama the book mostly works. As a continuation of what Jane Austen started, it falls short. For those not worried about being slightly spoiled, read on. (more…)

Wordcandy.net is having a giveaway–basically the same one we had last week, with five winners of a Jane Austen-related Sourcebooks title. So if you weren’t one of the winners in our drawing, check it out!

And there is still time to enter the current AustenBlog giveaway of a copy of the new paperback edition of Confessions of a Jane Austen Addict by Laurie Viera Rigler.

Austen 2008!

Here’s a last-minute entry for those in the Rochester, NY area: the Pittsford Community Library will have a book group meeting to discuss Pride and Prejudice on Thursday, May 8 (today!) from 1:30 to 3 p.m.

The folks in Calgary have a little more time to plan for this one: this Saturday, the Jane Austen Society presents “Plotting Sexual Pursuit: Origin and Implications of Jane Austen’s Courtship Plots,” a lecture by U of C English prof Dr. David Oakleaf at the Sunalta Community Centre, 1627 19th Ave. S.W.

Stephenie Meyer, author of the Twilight Saga series of young adult vampire novels, is a Friend of Jane.

What writers inspire you?
Jane Austen, William Shakespeare, and Orson Scott Card. I can’t go through a year without re-reading Austen.

To celebrate the paperback publication of Confessions of a Jane Austen Addict by Laurie Viera Rigler, we are giving away a copy of the new paperback edition of the novel. To be entered in the drawing, send your full name and mailing address and your Jane Austen Addict confession to austenblog AT gmail DOT com. How have you embarrassed yourself for Jane Austen? (And yes, this is open to readers outside the U.S.) ETA: entries due by Saturday, May 10, at 10 p.m. U.S. Eastern time.

Congratulations to the winners of last week’s Spring Book Giveaway contest: Rebecca W. won a copy of The Darcys Give a Ball by Elizabeth Newark; Vicki R. (aka Baja Janeite) won a copy of Emma and Knightley by Rachel Billington; Marybeth won a copy of The Watsons and Emma Watson by Joan Aiken; Mariflor won a copy of Old Friends and New Fancies by Sybil Brinton; and Vicki K. won a copy of The Pemberley Chronicles by Rebecca Ann Collins. The winners all will receive notification e-mails shortly.

We recently added several titles to our collection of e-texts at Molland’s Circulating-Library for the reading enjoyment of all Janeites.

As a result of many user requests, we’ve expanded the section on Jane Austen’s work to include Lady Susan, Love and Freindship (which includes Love and Freindship, of course, Lesley Castle, The History of England, and other juvenilia), and The Watsons. We are considering adding Sanditon as well so it will be included in the all-texts search index.

One addition that we’re really pleased about is a subject guide to the third edition of Jane Austen’s letters, edited by Deirdre Le Faye. The index is meant to complement the existing biographical, topographical, and general indices in the letters. Del Cain, a retired librarian from Florida, made these notes for his own use on index cards, which he then typed up. He asked for our help in putting the index online, and we have arranged it by one letter of the alphabet per page. We are trying to think of a way to make the index downloadable and printable without it being a huge PDF.

Janeites who have been enjoying her work on the Internet for a long time will remember Cathy Dean’s e-texts archive, which included some biographies and introductions to various editions of Jane Austen’s novels. Word reached us last year that the site had gone dark, though the texts were still available via the Internet Archive (but for how long?). We managed to track down Ms. Dean and ask if we could transfer the e-texts to Molland’s, and she gave her permission. We thank her for it! Among the items we’ve transferred are two book-length Austen biographies, Jane Austen and Her Times by G.E. Mitton (which is very charming) and Jane Austen by O.W. Firkins (less charming, but interesting to read from a historical perspective).

We’ve also included two family biographical works: James Edward Austen-Leigh’s A Memoir of Jane Austen and Jane Austen, Her Life and Letters: A Family Record by William Austen-Leigh and Richard Arthur Austen-Leigh (the original 1913 text). There also are some new shorter pieces. We have a stack of other texts to scan and add to this growing collection, so stay tuned! In the meantime, we hope you enjoy reading some of these texts, which are fascinating from a historical perspective. The 21st and even the 20th century have no lock on Jane Austen scholarship. Also, we’re very interested in user feedback, so let us know how you use the texts and how they can be improved.

We’ve posted about this before, but since we talked about it as part of our presentation at the JASNA Super Regional event in Rochester this past weekend, we thought it was time to post it again: one of our favorite Jane Austen sites on the Internet, the Augusta Burke Notebooks at Goucher College Library’s website.

Augusta Burke was a Janeite who, beginning in the 1930s, amassed an incredible collection of Jane Austen first editions, letters, and other memorabilia, most of which she bequeathed to Goucher College, her alma mater. Part of the collection is a series of notebooks in which Mrs. Burke pasted articles and clippings that referenced Jane Austen and her work. She kept these notebooks from 1935 until her death in 1975.

The Jane Austen Collection website also contains a PDF of a booklet printed in 2000 for the 25th anniversary of the collection. The booklet includes a letter from Mrs. Burke’s husband, Henry, one of the founders of JASNA, to the director of the Pierpont Morgan Library in which he explains about the notebooks. We loved this quote:

Alberta started keeping notebooks where even the most casual Austen reference merited an entry. Approximately 2,800 items of this sort have found their way into 10 notebooks which are now a part of the Austen collection. Anything worth clipping was pasted into the notebooks…The three big items which almost filled a notebook apiece were the production of Helen Jerome’s Pride and Prejudice, the movie with Laurence Olivier and Greer Garson, and the musical First Impressions.

Other highlights of the notebooks include receipts for and correspondence about the items that the Burkes acquired for their collection–including a first edition of Emma, uncut and in boards (which means it’s never been read) for $135! A first edition of P&P for £15 8 shillings!

We encourage our readers to spend some time surfing around the notebooks. However, make sure you have several hours to kill–you’ll get lost in there.

The Telegraph has a piece about traveling to the places where Jane Austen lived, including Bath, Steventon, and Chawton. Of Bath:

But it’s still a glorious place. When we arrived it was flooded with light and filled with teatime chatter. A musical trio played in one corner, much as their forebears must have done when the heroine of Northanger Abbey, Catherine Morland, first walked in, open-mouthed in wonder, her eyes “here, there, and everywhere”.

We weaved towards the four-headed pump spouting its warm, sulphurous waters. From the window, we caught a glimpse of the Roman Baths below. For once we had the advantage over Austen, as the great watery Temple was only properly excavated in 1897, 80 years after the author’s death.

Thank you!!!! People forget that the Roman baths weren’t a feature of Bath in Jane Austen’s time–they were aware of them but they had not yet been excavated.

After a anachronistic “Minerva Smoothie”

Anachronistic? Wouldn’t that be kind of like a syllabub?

Alert Janeite Mary sent us a link to an interview with Gina Fattore, staff writer for the television show Californication, on Studio 360 in which Ms. Fattore talks about how she was inspired by Jane Austen, via Clueless, to become a screenwriter. She talks about the universality of Jane Austen’s novels and how seeing Clueless made her realize that they are not just about “horses and carriages and corsets.” Nicely said!

Perhaps we expect too much from a site called “On Line Opinion” (you know what they say about opinions and a certain vulgar body part…everyone’s got one) but this fellow’s essay about God in Jane Austen’s novels is rather ill-informed even for the World Wide Web.

It is safe to say that God does not appear as a character in the novels of Jane Austen. The church is certainly present as a respectable profession for second sons, but such sons are not moved by any religious sensibility but by the necessity of obtaining a place in society.

Clergy may be enthralled to worldly prestige and goods like Mr Collins in Pride and Prejudice or simply solid and noble like Edmund in Persuasion but they do not appear to be moved by the Spirit of God. Indeed they show little difference in character to any other character in the novels.

We would recommend that the author read Irene Collins’ fine works on Jane Austen, particularly Jane Austen and the Clergy, before attempting to write upon this subject again. (We also would recommend Jane Austen, the Parson’s Daughter.) He would then be informed that all of Jane Austen’s clergymen (yes, even Mr. Collins) are very much representative of the clergy of her time. We would also recommend Irene Collins’ books for our readers as well!

There still are some bits to finish up from last week’s UK broadcast of Miss Austen Regrets. The Telegraph’s Stephen Pile said:

At the start of the 21st century we are all madly interested in What Jane Austen Was Really Like, but the reports are confusing. In the cinema Becoming Jane showed us an intelligent woman who was nonetheless feminine and romantic, but television is not so easily fooled and has come up with something far more complex.

In Miss Austen Regrets (BBC1, Sun) she had an utterly different set of boyfriends from the film (Rev Bridges, Bigg-Wither and even, controversially, Dr Haden, but no sign of the racy Lefroy). What emerged was Jane Our Contemporary.

The Times’ Roland White seems less than pleased.

Yet the Jane Austen portrayed so brilliantly here by Olivia Williams was hardly a role model for today’s spiky, independent career girls. For all her bravado on the subject, she was obsessed by the one thing that eluded her - Mr Right. It was pretty much all she talked about: partly advising her niece and partly reflecting on her own lack of success.

We feel as though we should paraphrase Edward Austen from the film–”If that’s what you think it is about, perhaps you should watch it again.”

Whereas the Guardian’s Andrew Anthony is in raptures.

Surely not even the most devoted member of the Jane Austen Society would have thought that what British television needed just now was another costume drama of early 19th-century social manners featuring Hugh Bonneville. And yet Miss Austen Regrets was a sublime delight. Olivia Williams as Austen grabbed our sympathy with throwaway epigrams, and such was the spirit of the piece, that every visual cliche seemed almost fresh.

Baja Janeite sent us some Austen-related fun for a Friday!

On Savage Chickens: When Tolkien meets Jane Austen

On Cartoonstock: More Jane Austen cartoons than you will be able to stand

And we’re going to bring back a classic from the archives: Utahraptor owes me money!

Alert Janeite Carmen sent us a link to a fan-made trailer for Miss Austen Regrets (complete with Spanish subtitles! Lovely!) since neither PBS nor Auntie Beeb bothered to make one:

All kinds of book news this week! (Actually we’ve been saving it up.)

Alert Janeite Carol let us know that romance author Mary Balogh is working on an Austen-related anthology project with several other authors.

And I have just agreed to participate in another anthology, this one the brainchild of Susan Krinard, who thought it would be fun to write paranormal novellas based on various Jane Austen novels. She had already recruited Colleen Gleason and Janet Mullany by the time she asked me. I was hesitant as I have never written anything paranormal, but I always find it difficult to resist a challenge, especially when it involves nothing more arduous than using the imagination. And so I have my sights set upon making something paranormal of the basic plot idea of Persuasion. The tentative title for the anthology is Bespelling Jane, and it will contain two historical and two contemporary novellas. You may watch for it some time in the future–if we can catch the interest of a publisher, that is!

Keep your tongues in your cheeks, ladies, and we suspect it will work a lot better.

Hot on our discussion the other day about Austen first editions and memorabilia, we have the results of an auction of a collection of first editions at Bloomsbury Auctions, which went for a lot less than you might expect.

Other highlights included a group of privately owned first edition Jane Austen books. Austen’s first book, Sense and Sensibility , 1811, had a contemporary author attribution of “Miss Austen,” and it sold for $24,200. Pride and Prejudice, also in three volumes, made $33,300; Mansfield Park fetched $6,460, Emma made $11,400, and Northanger Abbey sold for just above its higher estimate at $7,250.

Again, unclear if the listing of NA included Persuasion; most likely, as that book is not otherwise mentioned in the collection.

EADT has an article about the influence of playwright Elizabeth Inchbald (author of the infamous “Lovers’ Vows”) on Jane Austen’s work.

The latest edition of the Jane Austen Podnovel is now available.

Alert Janeite Amo sent us an article about a spoof rewrite of Shakespeare in “yoof-speak.” The author of the piece takes it to the logical conclusion and rewrites a certain opening sentence.

“It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife” could become “You’re loaded, but got no bird. You some sort of bender?”

On that note, Gentle Readers, that’s it for Friday Bookblogging. Until next time, always remember: Books Are Nice!

Well, sort of. Alert Janeite Lisa sent us a link to an article on “the top 10 sporting bookworms” in which now-retired footballer Pat Nevin admits to enjoying auditory Jane.

6. Pat Nevin Almost a decade before Graeme Le Saux arrived at Stamford Bridge with all his fancy airs and graces, Nevin had already been nicknamed ‘Weirdo’ by those in the Chelsea dressing room for his unusual interest in politics, art and literature. The Scot has described Voltaire, Chekhov, Dostoevsky and Gogol as “wonderful” and in 1999 said that if he didn’t have time to read, he made up for it by “using talking books in the car. At the moment I’m listening to Pride And Prejudice”

That makes tremendous sense to us!

As the title says: WHYY (the PBS station in the Philadelphia area) is showing a Mother’s Day marathon of P&P95. From the press release with which several unrelated posts on this blog were spammed (News flash: we have an e-mail address):

WHYY TO AIR MOTHER’S DAY MARATHON OF
MASTERPIECE “The Complete Jane Austen: Pride and Prejudice”
This mother’s day WHYY brings families a marathon showing of “The Complete Jane Austen: Pride and Prejudice.”

How many ways can a young woman find true love amid the dinner parties, balls, carriage rides, picnics and other picturesque opportunities to meet the opposite sex in turn-of-the-19th-century England? There are six transcendently satisfying scenarios, as told in a half-dozen enchanting novels by Jane Austen — one of the most beloved writers in all of literature.

“The Complete Jane Austen: Pride and Prejudice,” beginning Sunday, May 11, 2008, at 3 p.m. and running all day thru to 11 p.m. on WHYY-TV12, features the Emmy Award-winning “Pride and Prejudice” that made Colin Firth a leading man and a special half-hour program, Celebrating The Complete Jane Austen.

In “Pride and Prejudice,” Colin Firth (Bridget Jones’ Diary) is Mr. Darcy and Jennifer Ehle (The Coast of Utopia) is Elizabeth Bennet in the definitive adaptation of the most-loved of all Austen novels. With five daughters, no sons and an entailed estate, the elder Bennets are in dire straits as they try to arrange advantageous marriages. Wedding bells ring three times, but the path to true love is tortuous indeed. Adapted by Andrew Davies. Directed by Simon Langton.

Celebrating The Complete Jane Austen is hosted by NBC correspondent and “Weekend Today” co-anchor Lisa Daniels, an avid Austen fan. “As a journalist and NBC network correspondent, I’ve been trained to maintain a neutral attitude toward my subject. When it comes to Jane Austen, that’s impossible for me to do!” confesses Daniels.

Daniels tackles the questions the most ardent Janeite would ask: Two hundred years after her death, why do Jane Austen’s novels continue to relate to modern readers? What’s in these stories for the “Sex and the City” crowd (one answer: clothes!)? And what were the challenges in bringing these novels to television?

From the Regency era to today, there are more social similarities than meet the eye. “How could Jane Austen’s 18th-century mind create characters that we read again and again now? I think it’s because her heroines are very modern. They are women who are trying to find themselves, trying to do the right things by who they are, in their way.

So it’s just P&P95, looks like…that’s not “The Complete Jane Austen” by any stretch. And wasn’t Lisa Daniels the reporter who put together a video report raving about Jane Austen’s wonderful dialogue, illustrated with movie clips that contained no dialogue that Jane Austen actually wrote? Oh, better and better!

According to Ellen Gray at the Daily News, there is a possibility that it will pre-empt the second part of Cranford here in Philly. Take it from us: much as we love Jane Austen and P&P, BIG MISTAKE. The proprietor of AUSTENBLOG is telling you this is a BIG MISTAKE. Just about every woman in America already owns P&P on DVD. Show us something new and wonderful.

If anyone wonders we are often cranky, the stupid makes our brain hurt. You would be cranky if your brain hurt, too.

A new stage production of Pride and Prejudice will be presented at the Barons Court Theatre beginning May 6 and running through May 18. Tickets are £10-12 and available online. As always, if you see it, send a report.

Thanks to the ever-Alert Baja Janeite for the news!

You might not be able to afford the inscribed edition of Emma described below, but you can be one of five lucky winners of one of the latest Jane Austen-related publications from Sourcebooks. They are giving five AustenBlog readers the opportunity to win their choice of the following books:

Old Friends and New Fancies by Sybil Brinton

Letters from Pemberley and More Letters from Pemberley by Jane Dawkins
(Note: These are two separate books–please only request one of them.)

The Darcys Give a Ball by Elizabeth Newark

The Pemberley Chronicles and Women of Pemberley by Rebecca Ann Collins
(Note: These are two separate books. Please only request one of them.)

The Watsons and Emma Watson by Jane Austen and finished by Joan Aiken

Emma and Knightley by Rachel Billington

Mrs. Darcy’s Dilemma by Diana Birchall

To be entered in a drawing to win one of these books, send an e-mail to austenblog AT gmail DOT com with your name, mailing address, and the title of the book you would like to receive, by 10 p.m. Eastern time, Friday, May 2, 2008.

ETA: For the Jane Dawkins and Rebecca Collins books, each author has two separate books. Please only request one title. Apologies for the confusion. For those who have requested both, we’ll put you down for the first one–they are a series–unless you e-mail us and tell us differently.)

The Press Association reports that a copy of Emma inscribed by Jane Austen to Miss Anne Sharp, the governess at her brother Edward’s estate, Godmersham, will be auctioned by Bonhams on June 24. (Perhaps this is the sale? The catalogue is currently not available.) The auction house expects the book to sell for £50,000. Inscribed? That’s ALL? We think six figures is not out of the question, though of course auctions are always iffy. A quote from the current owner, who wishes to remain anonymous:

“The novel had been sitting in my family library for at least three generations and it remains a mystery as to how the book first got there.”

Indeed!