*waves lavender-scented hankie at publishing wonks reading AustenBlog* (if there are any!)

How often does your next Great Idea get handed to you on a silver platter, eh?

A collection of short essays by various writers inspired by moments from Marcel Proust’s “In Search of Lost Time” is so attractive and intriguing an idea that one hopes it spawns a publishing trend. (Next up, “Anna Karenina”? “Pride and Prejudice”?)

Excellent notion!

The Daily Review has reviewed the current production of EMMA in Berkeley.

In the’90s there was an absolute Austen craze that has yet to totally fade away. As a result of all that enthusiasm, we have two movie adaptations of “Emma” relatively fresh in our minds. There’s the 1997 Gwyneth Paltrow version, which boasts abundant charm, and Alicia Silverstone in “Clueless,” one of the sharpest Austen adaptations this side of Emma Thompson’s “Sense and Sensibility.”

In both movies, the Emma character has an innocence and naivet that explains her lapses into vanity, snobbishness and self-delusion.

In the stage version, Emma (played by Grace, who was fighting a bad cold on opening night) comes across as more calculating and worldly. The result is an Emma who is mean and not terribly bright — hardly someone you want to spend an evening with. Nor do you much care if she ends up in the arms of semi-dashing Mr. Knightley (Wyka).

Not bad lit crit for a theatre critic.

ETA, November 23: The Berkeley Daily Planet likes it, but the reviewer cheerfully admits to an unfamiliarity with the source material:

Certainly anyone determined to see a rendition of the “real” characters and the wit that they reme mber from Austen will find the play an irritating failure. But if you can rid yourself of such expectations, this production definitely has its own charms.

Well, there you go. If any AustenBlog readers have seen the production, we’d love to publish your review!

Another author compared to Jane Austen. . .

Is all this literary? Heavens, no. Harding isn’t trying to be Virginia Wolfe or Margaret Atwood.

Jane Austen? Well, maybe. Except that Harding is harder on her characters than on the society which has spawned them.

But if you’re searching for some literary predecessor to what Harding does in her first novel, Austen is your best bet.

Except, of course, “The Journal of Mortifying Moments” is written in fluid 21st-century prose, and it uses the obvious to its own advantage.

Is it just us or does the novel sound rather Bridget Jonesish?

The Kansas City Star has chosen The Jane Austen Book Club as one of its 100 Notable Books of 2004. It was also one of the three books that panelists expanded upon.

This simply structured novel is front-loaded with literary tricks and allusions. Six members of a California book club have six meetings over six months to discuss the six novels of Jane Austen. Hearts are broken, then mended, in this playful book that weaves savvy discussions about Austen and her fiction with winking wit and wisdom about the times in which we live.

The San Jose, California Mercury News has an article about fundraisers that give the opportunity for readers to meet authors, including a luncheon at which Karen Joy Fowler, author of The Jane Austen Book Club, appeared. The luncheon raised $150,000 for a good cause. Anyone else having a flashback to the library fundraiser in the novel? Wonder if Prudie danced at this one?