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.”