The Guardian says that Working Title Films, producers of the Bridget Jones movies as well as a lot of other popular “rom coms” starring those Brit actors and actresses that we all love, is trying to make a different sort of movie…like PRIDE AND PREJUDICE.

A gleaming London of sunshine or snow, of middle-class heartbreaks and happy endings, where no one gets stuck on the Tube and nothing looks dirty. Cut to a beautiful American, some hilarious oddballs and a self-deprecating hero, usually played by a stammering Hugh Grant.

It’s true that Mr. Darcy does not stutter, nor is he self-deprecating, bless him.

A writer has been hired to pen a sequel to The Godfather, and Newsday (New York) wonders if it is really a good idea, based on past instances of such attempts.

But it’s always risky to tamper with a beloved franchise: Will readers who think of these characters as family accept them in the hands of a new author, and will they embrace new story lines as part of the enduring Corleone mythology? Or will “The Godfather Returns” end up, like sequels to “Gone With the Wind,” “Rebecca” and “Pride and Prejudice,” as an ill-conceived flash in the pan?

Which P&P sequel are they talking about, one wonders? Do the poor misinformed creatures think there is but one?

ETA: We can’t resist one more bit of Godfather/Jane crossover fun: “You ain’t gonna see Collins no more.” Okay, we’ll stop now.

Maybe not.

The idea of making a comedy of manners about a young virginal woman has already been attempted, some would argue more than passably, by Jane Austen. Hollywood, too, has cleverly brought Austen’s oeuvre to the campus with the sparkingly mordant Clueless.
Wolfe then must find something new to say. He then insists on finding a new way to say it. He fails on both counts.

Almost definitely not.

According to the Times Online (U.K.), rounders–a predecessor to what both Jane Austen and we Wretched Colonials refer to as baseball–is alive and well in the U.K. amongst modern young ladies.

The name may evoke childhood memories of knockabout beach games and school matches for those too slow and uncoordinated for tennis or athletics, but these days rounders, the forerunner of baseball, is taking itself very seriously, indeed. The game began in Tudor times and is mentioned in Northanger Abbey as a light-hearted pastime, but the teenagers charging grimly between the posts at the national trials appear the antithesis of Jane Austen’s genteel young ladies.

Mr. and Mrs. Richard Morland might disagree, remembering the grubby little girl who grew up to be the mistress of Woodston Parsonage (who never minds dirt).

The New Ulm (Minnesota) Actors Community Theatre will present a Jane Austen Birthday Celebration, including “tea, carriage rides and other surprises,” at The Rhein River Arts Center in New Ulm, Minnesota, on December 16 through the 19. As always, we love to publish reader reviews.

Nobel and Pulitzer Prize-winning author Toni Morrison, author of Beloved and other respected novels, read Jane Austen as a young girl. We are in very good company.

Since we’ve had so many celebrities and public figures confessing to Janeiteism lately, we have instituted a new category here at AustenBlog: F.O.J. (Friends of Jane).

Lots of navel-gazing and interviewing going on around the release of BRIDGET JONES: THE EDGE OF REASON.

First up, and most importantly for you rabid Mark Darcy fans, is another interview with Colin Firth, who swears he’s NOTHING like the underwear-folding barrister:

“When I first played Darcy, everyone was saying, ‘You couldn’t possibly be that guy in a million years,’” Firth says. “It was the biggest stretch I’d ever made. But ironically, Darcy is whom I’ve become identified with.”

Ironic indeed. Some might say…iconic. (sorry.)

The Herald provides another in the endless stream of “Is Bridget a good role model for modern women” self-referential claptrap, but at least this one mentions Jane Austen:

What is it about Fielding’s fag-smoking, shag-counting, chardonnay-swigging alter ego, first invented for a column in the Independent, that has allowed young women to see her as some sort of role model? Can it have anything to do with the sublime Jane Austen, whose plot for Pride and Prejudice, as the author acknowledges, she stole (minus the sprigged muslin). “Austen is one of my favourite writers,” says Fielding in a recent interview for iVillage. “She was very acute, very perceptive, and writing in close and honest detail about the tiny preoccupations of women’s lives – preoccupations which speak of much larger social and human issues.” Ye-es, but Bridget’s social issues are pashminas and hangovers and big pants.