While not an explicit Austen mention, this description of Washington’s character, from the new Washington biography, His Excellency, by Joseph Ellis, seemed quite familiar.

Two of Washington’s abiding characteristics–his aloofness and his capacity for remaining silent–were in all likelihood protective tactics developed to prevent detection of the combustible materials simmering inside.

This passage from Pride and Prejudice is one of many that springs to mind:

What made you so shy of me, when you first called, and afterwards dined here? Why, especially, when you called, did you look as if you did not care about me?”

“Because you were grave and silent, and gave me no encouragement.”

“But I was embarrassed.”

“And so was I.”

“You might have talked to me more when you came to dinner.”

“A man who had felt less, might.”

(more…)

In the Guardian, John Mullan discusses a host of famous literary parties and how they often are more than an innocent evening’s diversion, including a couple of those in Jane Austen’s novels.

The trick of making such love at first sight credible by pretending it is antipathy is, candidly, filched from Jane Austen. She introduces Elizabeth Bennet and Mr Darcy at the notorious Meryton knees-up, where Darcy is so fascinatingly horrid. Love blossoms at parties throughout Austen. Though clever, silly Emma Woodhouse should always have known that Mr Knightley was her man, it takes a party (thrown at the tarted-up local inn) to make her see him with new eyes.

“His tall, firm, upright figure, among the bulky forms and stooping shoulders of the elderly men, was such as Emma felt must draw everybody’s eyes.” And when she sees him dance, well!

Una Alconbury’s New Year’s Turkey Curry Buffet is not forgotten, though it is a modern version of Pride and Prejudice’s Meryton assembly.

A surprising number of writers, however, have soulmates encounter each other at parties. Helen Fielding’s Bridget Jones’s Diary provides the locus classicus, the Alconburys’ New Year Turkey Curry Buffet. Remember Mark Darcy turning round, “revealing that what seemed from the back like a harmless navy sweater was actually a V-neck diamond-patterned in shades of yellow and blue”? (And remember how those crude old film-makers turned it into an implausible reindeer sweater, as if we wouldn’t get it otherwise?)

We hear argyle is back “in” again.

The article also discusses Byron’s description of the Duchess of Richmond’s ball in Brussels on the night before the battle of Waterloo, which has nothing to do with Jane, of course, but we find it worthy of note as it is the same time period.

The Tablet (U.K.) reviews the book Who Are We Now? by Nicholas Boyle, a professor at the University of Cambridge, which includes a chapter on Mansfield Park.

In Mansfield Park how the Crawfords behave in church, in contrast with Fanny and Edmund, reveals their lack of “principle”: “the church is principle made visible, principle given a name and a face” – “even the church of Jane Austen’s early nineteenth-century England, a prey to rationalism and neglect”.

Remember the dead body found at Box Hill? It’s been identified…the man’s name was Bates.

*cue Twilight Zone music*

(And this is still a very sad story. Though we are astounded and a bit freaked out by the Austenish links, we would like to extend our extreme sympathies to Mr. Bates’ family.)

Jan Dalley of the Financial Times has breakfast with Sandy Lerner at Chawton House. Among the many revelations was that Ms. Lerner, one of the founders of Cisco Systems, does not use the Internet:

At one point I mention something that interests Lerner, and I say I’ll e-mail her the reference. She looks almost startled. “I quit reading e-mail two years ago,” she said. It is my turn to be surprised. The woman whose company was one of the first and most successful pioneers of commercial applications of the internet - and the source of all this wonderfully applied money - never logs on now. If she does, she’s horrified at what she finds.

We are extremely disappointed that such a dedicated Janeite can only see the Internet as painted in terms of black and white; that if there is pornography or flaming on the Internet, there must needs be nothing good about it. That is hardly a position that we can support; we like to think that our humble effort here provides a service to Janeites, certainly not of the same scope as the Chawton House Library, but of some value nonetheless.

The fit of temper, in which Lerner phoned her secretary and told her to buy Chawton House, sight unseen, came after an argument at the Jane Austen Society about whether to acquire the house in Bath where Austen had stayed briefly (she hated Bath) or the empty Chawton, in the village she loved.

We hope that some other rich Janeite purchases that house in Bath. Did Jane Austen really hate Bath, or just hate living there?