ChickLit books such as Bergdorf Blondes are homages to Jane Austen’s novels, according to a review in the Sydney Morning Herald :

Although it’s clearly inspired by Jane Austen’s novels, it lacks their crucial tension. Underlying Austen’s comedy was always the grim truth that to her heroines, marriage was a matter of life and death. For these modern Park Avenue princesses, nothing is at stake apart from perhaps securing next season’s signature Manolos or their favourite table at Da Silvano. Moi and her friends desire marriage simply to improve their complexions.

Bergdorf Blondes’ author, Plum Sykes, doesn’t seem to take herself or her book too seriously.

Sykes confesses she wrote Blondes because she couldn’t find anything cheerful to read following NYC’s darkest hour. “I wish Jonathan Franzen could be a bit more superficial at times,” she told The New York Times recently with tongue only half in cheek.

Gurinder Chadha, the director of BRIDE AND PREJUDICE, tells The Guardian that she found making the film an exercise in diplomacy.

The making of Bride and Prejudice required enormous feats of diplomacy. It was shot on three continents (although with a budget of only £12m, Chadha had to be inventive: for a hotel in Beverly Hills, read Stoke Poges golf club) and the cast came from three, very different acting traditions. “It was tough because every actor thought their way was best. The Americans thought Bollywood was very inferior. And the British actors thought they were better than the Americans. I felt like Russell Crowe in Master and Commander; it was my job to keep on course and I kept steering it with my map of British-Asian sensibility. What I’ve ended up with nods to Bollywood and to Hollywood and elements of it feel like the movie Grease. But it is actually a very British movie.”

The AustenBlog staff would like to point out discreetly that Ms. Chadha would do better to compare herself to Captain Wentworth on the Laconia, but we are Hornblower and Aubrey fans as well and probably should shut up.

As we previously reported, filming of Working Title’s big-screen film version of PRIDE AND PREJUDICE began today at Burghley House in Lincolnshire. According to This is Lincolnshire, filming will take place in Stamford as well.

The multi-million pound adaptation of the Austen classic will also be shot in parts of Stamford.

This includes St George’s Street and St Mary’s Street, which were both used in the 1994 adaptation of George Elliot’s Middlemarch.

We’d love to pass on any reports from the set to our readers, with full credit of course. Send them to editor AT austenblog.com.