But then, isn’t everything compared to Jane Austen these days?

Any remaining issues will continue in the next Precious Ramotswe mystery — unless, as in Jane Austen’s novels, matrimony between sensible people signals the final solution and the end of the story. In which case, we can look forward to Smith’s new series, ‘The Sunday Philosophy Club,’ coming soon to a bookstore near me. I hope.

Roger Michell, the director of the 1995 film adaptation of PERSUASION, compares that film to his latest film, THE MOTHER:

Seven years ago, director Roger Michell was telling people that he saw his film adaptation of Jane Austen’s Persuasion as the story of a woman who was watching her life go by and deciding she had to live for the first time.

The Telegraph reports that traffic delays are expected in the town of Stamford related to the filming of PRIDE AND PREJUDICE.

The film company wants to recreate the 1790s in the town by erecting a covered walkway. Traffic flow will be restricted until the road is closed completely at the beginning of September for final preparations and filming.

Previous reports have stated that filming in Stamford will begin in mid-August.

The Stamford Today Web site has an article about extra auditions.

Even canines had the chance to become stars of the silver screen as people were asked if they owned a dog and what breed it was.

Producers were also interested in those with military experience and posed the unusual question – ‘can you march?’
[…]
Successful applicants vying to be extras will be telephoned in the next few weeks, ready for the town centre filming which begins next month.

(Via KeiraWeb.com)

Publisher’s Lunch Weekly reports that Kensington Publishing Corp. has purchased:

Sally Smith O’Rourke’s THE MAN WHO LOVED JANE AUSTIN (sic), examining the question: What if Fitzwilliam Darcy from PRIDE AND PREJUDICE was based on a real man, as an old letter to Jane Austen from Darcy sends the protagonist looking for, and falling in love with, the man she thinks is his descendent.

It’s much too early to establish a publication date; we would say look for it in a year or so, possibly sooner if Kensington is trying to ride The Jane Austen Book Club’s coattails.

We remember seeing a link to this book some time back, but the link is dead. Undeterred, the crack staff at the AustenBlog Testing and Research Labs, Ltd. tracked down a Google Cache of the forward and this link from the Wayback Machine.

This book with the same title seems to be a different book.

An undated news item on the Stamford Arts Centre site reports that PRIDE AND PREJUDICE will be filming in Stamford in August.

Top actress Keira Knightley heads the star-studded cast which will descend on the town later this year to make a new version of Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice.

The outside of the arts centre will feature in the film.

Plans are already under way to adapt streets and close roads while the town is turned into a film set for four days in August.
[…]
Speculation is already mounting in Stamford as rumours of big names in the film world are said to lined up for other parts.

But this week film producers were remaining tight-tipped. A spokes-man for Working Title said no other details could yet be released, but did say it was unlikely local people would be recruited as ‘extras’.

Another item on the Peterborough Today Web site contains a call for extras to audition for the scenes to be shot in Stamford:

Casting teams from Working Title, which is producing the film, will be at Burghley Park on Thursday, in an open audition to find more than 400 extras.

Candy Marlowe, assistant director of the film, said male and female extras from Peterborough and Stamford were needed for scenes which will be shot in Stamford in August.

If anyone gets a role, we would be delighted to publish your set report. Please e-mail us at editor AT austenblog.com.

An article in The Telegraph points out the recent spate of paraliterature referencing Jane Austen’s novels, as well as the upcoming films based upon her novels.

Emma Tennant certainly started something when she wrote Pemberley, a sequel to Pride And Prejudice, in 1993.

Since then many authors, usually American women, have used Jane Austen’s characters to amuse themselves - if not lovers of English literature. Their works include Darcy and Elizabeth, An Assembly Such as This, Letters from Pemberley, More Letters from Pemberley and Vanity and Vexation. Pride and Prescience, published in February, is even billed as “a Mr & Mrs Darcy Mystery”.

The latest addition to this sub-genre, published last month in America, is Linda Berdoll’s Mr Darcy takes a Wife. The sequel, according to one book-seller in Wisconsin, “is laced throughout with sensuality and intrigue”.

Meanwhile, two further film adaptations of the novel are in the works: Pride and Prejudice has a screenplay by the British novelist Deborah Moggach whereas Bride and Prejudice is a Bollywood version by Gurinder Chadha who directed Bend It Like Beckham.

A review of the DVD of PRIDE AND PREJUDICE — the recent modern-set version, of course, which was released yesterday on DVD and VHS — from the Salt Lake Tribune.

But his movie is prejudiced by slack storytelling, ludicrous plot coincidences and one-note characters whose only aim in life seems to be to get hitched. The film unfolds in some sort of bizarre, Archie-comics reality where grad students never drink, smoke, swear or have sex and adults barely exist.

We wonder how it is possible that a reviewer in Salt Lake City doesn’t quite understand the milieu in which the film is set.

A review of REGENCY HOUSE PARTY, soon to grace the airwaves down under.

For the women - who in modern life were ambitious and able, with high-powered jobs - the Jane Austen fantasy wasn’t all it’s cracked up to be in BBC bonnet dramas. “Just being put in that environment where there’s nothing to do all day, it diminishes you,” Ross Pirie says. “You become less of a person, less interesting. You become a child.”

Steven Wells of the Guardian points out that, despite the colonials’ regrettable habit of claiming ownership of The Great American Pastime, the text of Northanger Abbey proves otherwise:

Baseball is rounders. And rounders is baseball. Same game. Different name. A few baseball historians still cling grimly to the tired old patriotic lie that baseball in an entirely American invention. Despite the fact that the game was mentioned in Jane Austen’s 1798 chick-lit bonkbuster Northanger Abbey. And that the first rules of the game - Ball mit Freystäten (Oder Das Englische Base-ball) - were published by Guts Muths in the town of Schnepfenthal in the Duchy of Gotha in 1796.

The AustenBlog staff hastily consulted the well-thumbed edition of Northanger Abbey here at AustenBlog World Headquarters but failed to find any evidence of, erm, “bonking,” or anything that could reasonably be described as “chick-lit.” (And as AustenBlog World Headquarters is within half a day’s ride of Citizens Bank Park, the Editrix would like to say that the upper deck is quite a lovely place to watch a game of rounders base ball, and that she regrets the incident in which she berated a member of the Kansas City Royals to “pull down his skirt and get back to work” when he feigned injury.)

The author of the “Gossip Girl” books, directed at teen girls, compares her books to Jane Austen’s (registration required, or use BugMeNot to get a password).

“I think my books are very similar to Jane Austen,” author Cecily von Ziegesar says of her five-volume series, which less involved observers have likened to a junior-edition Sex and the City.

As Amber in CLUELESS used to say…”Whatever.”

The Jane Austen Book Club was singled out for special recognition in the Penguin Group’s 2004 first half operating results.

Among these titles were: The Jane Austen Book Club by Karen Joy Fowler (one of the most talked about and best-reviewed books of 2004, with more than 175,000 copies in print to date)

Who says the Jane Austen renaissance is over? (Yes, Harvey “John Thorpe” Weinstein, we’re looking at you.)

Lindsey writes to tell us that a teaser trailer for BRIDGET JONES: THE EDGE OF REASON is available online. Thank you, Lindsey!

The “Couch Potato” column recommends reading Pride and Prejudice when one finds oneself without access to cable television.

Jerome Weeks of the Dallas Morning News writes an article about romance novels, including Regency romances, and their relation to the work of Jane Austen:

Jane Austen actually lived during the Regency – and invented the witty romance with her masterpieces – but she didn’t write Regencies. She wrote what, for her, were contemporaries.

The distinction, Pamela Regis says, is that Austen didn’t use her era the way Regency romances do. Dr. Regis, who teaches English at McDaniel College in Maryland, is the author of A Natural History of the Romance Novel.

The setting, she argues, is more than coach and candelabra: “The Regency is an era of glittering corruption.” The novel’s love affair typically involves an aristocratic rogue (who, of course, is never really a rogue and therefore gets suitably cleaned up for the wedding). But by the end, the emotional values of the couple stand in contrast to the era’s dissipation.

“When romances can explore a setting,” Dr. Regis says, “and set the lovers against the values of that setting, they get stronger.”

We were reminded of another interesting link: The Alberta Burke Notebooks at Goucher College’s Julia Rogers Library. Mrs. Burke was an inveterate collecter of Austeniana, including newspaper clippings mentioning Jane Austen, which she pasted into notebooks and eventually bequeathed to Goucher College. The notebooks from the early 1940s contain many clippings about (go figure) the first film version of PRIDE AND PREJUDICE. The AustenBlog editorial staff senses a kindred spirit in Mrs. Burke and encourages all Janeites to check out the site. It is a fascinating look at one Janeite’s view of Jane Austen in popular culture.

For all those AustenBlog visitors who are perhaps a trifle sick of PRIDE AND PREJUDICE filming news, we found an interesting link in our travels that we thought might be of interest: an electronic version of Jane Austen, Her Homes and Her Friends by Constance Hill, first published in 1901, from the University of Pennsylvania’s Celebration of Woman Writers.

KeiraWeb.com reports that filming of PRIDE AND PREJUDICE has moved from Burghley House to Groombridge Place in Kent, the location for Longbourn, and will remain there through mid-August.

In other location news, the screenwriter of PRIDE AND PREJUDICE, Deborah Moggach, wrote on her Web site (click on July ‘04) that Chatsworth will be the location for Pemberley.

Apparently it’s going to be all shot on location, with Chatsworth being Pemberley and that house in “The Draughtman’s Contract” becoming Netherfield.

We have not seen any studio confirmation of this anywhere, but it is a persistent claim on various Web sites. The IMDB lists Groombridge Place as the shooting location for THE DRAUGHTMAN’S CONTRACT.

The AustenBlog editorial staff normally would scruple at posting celebrity tittle-tattle (at least publicly) but the linked article does contain the information that Simon Woods is indeed playing Mr. Bingley, so we raise our vinaigrettes and post in a good cause.

The first pics from the set of PRIDE AND PREJUDICE have hit the net.

That popping sound you hear is the simultaneous explosion of the heads of costume geeks worldwide.

Link found via a pingback from the Sense & Sensibility Forums.

EDIT: Julie B. posted a link to pics of Darcy and Lady Catherine (and Lizzy wearing a bonnet, thank the costume gods) in the comments.

EDIT: The link above has expired; here is a link to Snotty!Darcy at matthew-macfadyen.co.uk.

Another pic of Judi Dench as Lady Catherine.

The National Library of Scotland is attempting to secure a grant from the Heritage Lottery Fund to purchase the archives of publisher John Murray, who was the first publisher of Emma, Persuasion and Northanger Abbey. The archive includes letters written by Jane Austen.