The Contra Costa Times, inspired by the stage production of EMMA currently at the Aurora Theatre, takes a look at Jane’s Juvenilia.

What sort of teenager, for instance, was Austen? Jane was born on Dec. 16, 1775, at the parsonage of Steventon, in Hampshire, England, where her father was rector. With that genteel background, was she a prim and proper little lady as we usually imagine young girls of that time?

Probably. But she was also wickedly (sorry, Jane) funny. From around the age of 13 to 17, she wrote her “Juvenilia,” a collection of short satiric and farcical pieces for the amusement of her family. (She was the youngest of seven children).

Here are a few sample lines:

“Bless me! There ought to be eight chairs and there are but six. However, if your Ladyship will but take Sir Arthur in your lap and Sophy my brother in hers, I believe we shall do pretty well.” (Eat your heart out, Monty Python.)

She was also dead-on at burlesquing the literary conventions of the day:

“Her father was of noble birth, being the near relation of the Duchess of ——–’s butler.”

She captured the puffed-up speech of the landed gentry with these lines between a daughter and her father in a play-let:

PISTOLETTA: Pray, papa, how far is it to London?

POPGUN: My girl, my darling, my favorite of all my children, who art the picture of thy poor mother who died two months ago, with whom I am going to town to marry to Strephon, and to whom I mean to bequeath my whole estate — it wants seven miles.

The same mini-play also included this “immortal couplet”:

“I am going to have my dinner,

After which I shan’t be thinner.”

Dear, dear little Jane, most of us didn’t know you had it in ya!

We opine that “most of us” does not include the readers of AustenBlog. (If it does, do yourself a favor and pick up a copy of the Juvenilia now!)

Oxford University Press has issued a list of ten favorite quotations, voted on by the public from a list of 100 compiled from the Oxford Dictionary of Quotations. Five percent of the voters chose the opening sentence of Pride and Prejudice, “It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife.”

An artistic photography project involving public participation was inspired by a quotation from one of Jane Austen’s letters: “Pictures of perfection as you know make me sick & wicked.”

Several weeks ago, 100 disposable cameras were sent to various Wieden employees worldwide, including some working in Japan, the Netherlands and New York City. Those employees, in turn, gave the cameras to strangers and friends; their only instructions for shooting pictures were two quotes on perfection by Antoine de Saint-Exupery and Jane Austen, whose “Pictures of perfection, as you know, make me sick and wicked” seems more like a desire for imperfection.

Actually, it is a desire for no Mary Sue heroines in novels. So what is the Saint-Exupery quotation, then?

“A Rare Pattern,” a one-woman show starring Hayley Mills that quotes, among other women writers, the works of Jane Austen, will have two showings this weekend in Connecticut.

‘A Rare Pattern’ starring Hayley Mills plays Saturday at 7:30 p.m. at the Aetna Theater in the Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art and Sunday at 2 p.m. at the Stamford Center for the Arts.

We are bemused by part of the description of the show on the Web site:

An original work using music, poems and literary thought solely of women from the 1880’s through 1940, including Jane Austen (1775-1817)

1880s?