The Seattle Times reports that King County’s library system allows patrons to download audiobooks to their home computers; patrons can then burn the audiobook to a CD or download it to an mp3 player to listen. The selections include Pride and Prejudice, as one lucky library patron discovered.

Jean Marston, who uses the Redmond library, said she had never listened to books on tape but was drawn to the new e-books because of the ease of downloading them. She just finished Jane Austen’s “Pride and Prejudice.”

“I like it because I don’t have a physical item I have to remember to return and no overdue worry,” Marston said. “I was blown away by the quality and am anxious to keep doing it. I got sucked in.”

We hope that more libraries begin to offer such a service!

(We suspect that the reporter is a trifle confused over the difference between e-books and audiobooks. E-books are generally understood to be text, read on a computer or handheld device. Audiobooks are spoken-word, whether delivered on recorded media, such as CDs or cassettes, or via download.)

Dear, sweet Dorothy had no more finished ministering to me after reading Mags’ post, when I ran across this posting on IMDB. Pyromaniac975 reported back from a PRIDE AND PREJUDICE screening:

Sadly, MacFayden doesn’t jump in a pond and does not come out all wet. If by my standards, (that the trademark scene is the moment that you absolutely fall in love with Mr. Darcy and envy Lizzie with all your heart and hope that one day you’ll have a guy just like Mr. Darcy for yourself) then I guess I’d say that the trademark moment is the sunrise scene.(I won’t say anything more unless you’re dying to know and then you can e-mail me and I’ll tell you)When you get to see this movie I’m sure you’ll agree that it’s one of the most romantic things you’ve ever seen, (other than the end, which everyone I know said they adored).

It’s a good thing I’m much too fine a person to be overcome by a quite ugly fit of jealous rage towards this (sniff) Pyromaniac person.

Oh no…there’s more…

And as for chemistry….mmm…..let’s just say he does good by Keira. Remember I said this when you watch the scene with Elizabeth and Mr. Darcy in the rain. Oh yeah, he looks real good.

Dorothy, quickly!..Dorothy…too late…[thunk.]

Dorothy, take a pot of Orange Pekoe to Cub Reporter Julie B. before she reads this, and add just a drop of the Tullamore Dew, if you please. Stand by with the vinaigrette.

*ahem*

Keira Knightley discusses her ideal sort of man at femalefirst.com.

Knightley’s ideal mate is ENIGMA actor MATTHEW MacFADYEN - the most manly man she has ever met. Describing her PRIDE AND PREJUDICE co-star, she says, “It was great working with him because he’s one of the few manly men.

“He’s not a pretty boy - he’s a man. It was such a lovely experience because Matthew is so romantic as MR DARCY.”

Better and better!

As the first green shoot of daffodil emerging through the snow heralds the arrival of spring, the arrival of BRIDE AND PREJUDICE on American shores is announced by the first of the big-name reviews, as Peter Travers reviews the film for Rolling Stone magazine. Mr. Travers seems lukewarm toward the film, but is clearly beguiled by Aishwarya Rai.

But first, take a look at the photo above of Aishwarya Rai, who stars as Lalita, the eldest daughter. Rai, a former Miss World and a goddess in her native India, will soon be adding Americans to her worshipful flock. No wonder 60 Minutes just did a major profile of her. Rai is a world-class hottie with talent to match, as she proves in her first English-speaking role.

All the boys fall in love with Lizzy/Lalita, don’t they?

Purists who think Austen will be spinning in her grave will be wrong. She’ll be dancing.

Purists? Who, us?

(The Editrix received news yesterday that she may be attending a special screening the first night of the film’s release on Feb. 11. w00t!)

The Telegraph has a review of Jane Austen’s Guide to Dating by Lauren Henderson.

Undeterred by potential drawbacks - Austen’s books tell us nothing about sex, are set in an age whose social mores bear scarcely more relation to downtown Manhattan’s than they do to downtown Kabul’s, and are novels rather than self-help manuals - Henderson has discovered, at the heart of the oeuvre, 10 key principles of dating.

As she puts it: “I think the books are coded instruction manuals - but they can be novels, too. They are about the best way to find someone who’s going to be a life partner for you.

“What Austen is about is the continual process of observing the behaviour of people around you. And whether you’re country dancing or grinding your bum into someone at a hip-hop club, it comes down to the same fundamental things.”

There’s also a sidebar article with a rundown of “Austen’s Men.”

The article contains the interesting note that the book has been optioned for film. (We hasten to add that optioning a book for film doesn’t mean that a film will be made.)

In an Australian article about fellow horrid-novel writer Dean Koontz, Stephen King is quoted as saying he has never read Jane Austen.

‘NEVER,” Stephen King admitted when asked if he’d read Jane Austen or Tolstoy, “but I have read most of what Dean Koontz has written.”

Like the author of the article, we think Mr. King may have been teasing; we seem to dimly recall Austen references in Mr. King’s book On Writing (though we’ve blocked out much of what we read in that book as it gave us writer’s block for a month; it’s the scariest book that Mr. King ever wrote, in our humble opinion). If not, it would be a shame, for if anyone should read Northanger Abbey, it’s Stephen King.

Rachel Brown, first year student at Oxford, is looking for her Mr. Darcy. She turned to the matchmaker in resident at Oxford Student to find him.

The lovely Rachel is generally adored by her friends for being “beautiful, fun and easy to talk to”. When she’s not spending time with them she enjoys watching girly films, playing music, yoga, swimming and reading - one of her favourite books is Pride And Prejudice, and her ideal date would involve Mr Darcy, a lake, and that wet shirt!

The article reports on her date with Mr. Darcy Alex Shutter. Each maintained that the date went well, until this tell-tale sentence from Alex:

After that I walked her back, but I didn’t get her number - but that was probably more down to my or our own cowardice than anything else!

Right, Alex. We’re on to you, Mate. Thanks to Greg Behrendt, we know the real reason you didn’t get her number was that you just weren’t that into her.

Alert AustenBlog Reader Laura sends word of several upcoming publications that we think will be of great interest to Janeites: Jane Austen, Or The Secret of Style by D.A. Miller; All Things Austen : An Encyclopedia of Austen’s World by Kirstin Olsen; and the “I Can’t Get Enough Of Jane Austen 2006 Calendar.” Thanks for the great links, Laura!

We also received a brochure from Cambridge University Press, which will be publishing new scholarly editions of the novels of Jane Austen in nine volumes over the next two or three years. According to the brochure, “The edition will offer authoritative texts of the published work and manuscripts along with textual and explanatory notes, and an introduction giving full details of the progress, early publishing history and reception of each work, together with discussion of its critical significance. An additional volume, Jane Austen in Context, will provide more detail on many aspects of the texts and their literary and social context.” There is not yet any information on the set at the Cambridge University Press Web site, but Amazon has listings for several of the volumes. Mansfield Park and Emma are listed with a release date of November 2005; Persuasion is listed with no publication date. Jane Austen in Context also has a November 2005 release date listed.

The catalog also lists an upcoming book by Deidre LeFaye, A Chronology of Jane Austen and her Family, that sounds very interesting: “(LeFaye) has now collected all this material together to produce a unique chronology, containing some 10,000 entries. As a result, for the first time ever, those interested in Jane Austen can discover what we know about where Jane Austen was and the experiences she was having, at many precise moments of her life, and similarly what was happening to members of her family.” There is no listing for the book at Amazon as yet.

That’s a difficult idea to argue with, and we always encourage everyone to read more Jane, though ultimately we find the argument rather simplistic.

Too much Quentin Tarantino and not enough Jane Austen are to blame for the increase in violent crime, a senior police officer has said.

Clive Wolfendale, the deputy chief constable of North Wales Police, said: “We have seen an unprecedented year in the number of violent attacks, which have led to deaths. All of these have been swiftly detected.

“In today’s society, more people are likely to spend their evenings watching a Quentin Tarantino DVD than reading a Jane Austen novel. Perhaps we should not be surprised by the consequences.”

We do not consider enjoyment of Jane Austen’s work and Mr. Tarantino’s work mutually exclusive. We dare say that Jane would have loved JACKIE BROWN: a sweet, if unusual, odd-couple romance, with a stone fabulous soundtrack. The work of both artists enjoys immense popularity and critical acclaim and engenders a great deal of discussion amongst those who enjoy them. Maybe the answer is to have Quentin Tarantino direct a Jane Austen film; say, PRIDE AND PREJUDICE: John Travolta as Darcy, Uma Thurman as Elizabeth, Samuel L. Jackson as Wickham, Harvey Keitel as Mr. Bennet, and a cameo by the director as the charming Col. Fitzwilliam. It would sure put a different spin on Darcy and Lizzy’s dance at Netherfield…

As noted earlier by AustenBlog, a decision from the Heritage Lottery Fund was expected Tuesday regarding a grant needed to purchase the John Murray archive. The Fund approved the grant, which clears the way for the National Library of Scotland to purchase the documents.

[The archive] was started by the first John Murray, who was a Scot and founded his publishing house in London in 1768.

Seven successive Murray generations built up the archive with the close relationships each enjoyed with the writers of their time helping to make it a “who’s who” of 19th century society.

Described as one of the world’s most significant literary collections, the John Murray Archive is made up of 150,000 manuscripts, papers and letters.

It contains correspondence between the publisher and influential figures including Jane Austen, Charles Darwin, Sir Walter Scott, Benjamin Disraeli, David Livingstone, Thomas Carlyle, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and Edith Wharton, among others.

More on the archive purchase here, here and here.

A note from the Editrix: Thanks to Alert AustenBlog Reader Joanne for sending in this news–I didn’t have a chance to post it before Cub Reporter Julie got to it! Dorothy obviously put a little Extra Something in her Orange Pekoe this morning.

Coutts, the UK’s “most exclusive bank,” is profiled in the Financial Times. Gordon Pell, chief executive of Coutts, delineates the only circumstances under which client names are revealed:

Mr Pell is far too discreet to name any of the bank’s current clients. He says the bank has a rule that it will only name clients who have been dead for at least 100 years and who have been eminent in their lifetime.

Those that satisfy such criteria have included Charles Dickens, Chopin, William Pitt the Elder, William Pitt the Younger, Hector Berlioz, Jane Austen, Bram Stoker, the Duke of Wellington and Lord Nelson.

An account there now would put Jane in quite wealthy company:

In addition to the Queen, Coutts’ current clients are rumoured to include Sting, the pop star, and Wayne Rooney and David Beckham, the Premiership footballers as well as wealthy lawyers and entrepreneurs.

Potential customers need to show that they have at least £500,000 in investable assets, or £5m in less liquid form.

So much for one thousand pounds in the 4 per cents.

Chapter 7 of the video game “Spider-Man 2: The Game” is entitled…drum roll please…”Pride and Prejudice.”

According to my Twelve-Year-Old Xbox Expert, the chapter’s title refers to the foibles of the chapter’s villain, Quentin Beck. The Evil Mr. Beck, “an arrogant special effects guru,” is dangerously proud of his great FX work in Hollywood and irrationally prejudiced against Spider-Man, insisting he’s a fake.

So now we know where hungry English Lit majors end up.

Baz Bamigboye, writing for the Daily Mail, does his best to keep us up-to-date on Miss Keira Knightley’s many glamorous comings and goings. In the middle of it all, he delivers this reassurance to Janeites everywhere:

Yet another of Keira’s pictures, Pride And Prejudice, opens in the autumn. Those who have seen a rough cut of Joe Wright’s film have told me it’s a cracking movie - Keira and Matthew MacFadyen as Mr Darcy are said to be sublime.

For the American readers of AustenBlog: If something is cracking, it means it is the best. But you probably already knew that, right?

Publisher John Murray is selling an archive of manuscripts and letters for £32m. Will the Heritage Lottery Fund contribute £16.5m to help the National Library of Scotland purchase the collection?

That question will be answered this Tuesday, reports the Sunday Times. The archive, estimated to be worth £45m on the open market, includes items from Jane Austen, Lord Byron and Charles Darwin.

Among the most interesting papers in the collection are exchanges between Austen and her publishers. She came to John Murray after he agreed to pay to publish Emma.

Some academics believe the archive should not be purchased:

However, John Sutherland, professor of English at University College London and chairman of the judges for this year’s Man Booker prize, said that the archive was “a plumless pudding” which reveals nothing that experts did not already know.

His view is supported by A N Wilson, the author, who argues that Murray, descendant of the 18th-century founder of the John Murray publishing company, should give away the archive. “He’s a very rich man,” said Wilson.

The purchase is also controversial because the Scottish executive has offered more than £6m towards the £32m price.

“There are lots of very poor people in Scotland and taxpayers’ money would be better used on them,” said Wilson.

More information on the archive purchase is available here.

The Scotsman has an article on BRIDGET JONES: THE EDGE OF REASON and the ski resort in Lech, Austria where the skiing sequence of the movie was filmed.

Bridget jones [sic] staggers down the steps of the Hotel Post in an unflattering pink suit with skis on her shoulder. Of course she can ski, she assures Mark Darcy, sleek in black and silver. As they ascend in the chairlift they have a fine overview of Lech, Austria’s smartest ski resort. Lifting the bar at the top, Mark glides off expertly, while Bridget crashes into a snowdrift.

She follows, creating havoc among ski racers, then emerges unscathed near a picturesque Lech stream before skiing straight into a chemist and attempting to buy a pregnancy-testing kit in broken German in front of a crowd of Austrian yokels.

The whole article is worth reading, especially this last gossipy bit:

Ironically it was Colin Firth, aka the supposedly expert Mark Darcy, who is a challenged skier, while co-star Renée Zellweger was well able to manage most of the shots herself. “She is a superb athlete,” says Cavendish, “which really helped because no stunt double can capture Bridget’s body language like she does.”

The Desert Sun has published an article on the ever present threat of plagiarism in high school. The Internet, despite all its good attributes (such as one certain site whose title begins with “Austen” and ends with “Blog” . . .), also helps to promote plagiarism through sites that sell essays to students. This Humble Reporter was shocked and grieved to find the following:

Students download papers from online paper mills like CheatHouse.com or Other People’s Papers or even Jane-Austen-Essays.com, or they cut and paste paragraphs from Web sites, rather than doing their own research.

Having been unable to resist, I visited the last of those unmentionable sites, and was dismayed to find more than 7 pages worth of titles of essays on Jane for sale. Is it possible that people will bypass reading one of the great authors of our world, and buy essays from sites such as the one I visited?

Mags, may I please borrow Dorothy until I am able to recover from the fainting fit my visit has caused, or until my faith in the younger generations is restored (whichever comes first)?

The Kansas City Star has published an odd reading list: “the great unread”. Your Humble Reporter was indignant when she found that one of Jane’s books on the list, but was (slightly) pacified by the accompanying commentary:

There are those books one is embarrassed to admit one has never read. But I’ll include one here: Pride and Prejudice, by Jane Austen. And given my affection for Bridget Jones’s Diary, I want to discover for myself Helen Fielding’s inspiration for a character as human as Bridget.

Perhaps we’ve gained a new FOJ here?

In an interview with the Boston Herald, Academy Award-nominated actress Shoreh Agdashloo spoke briefly about her teenage daughter, whose name originates from a familiar source:

“We worked hard from scratch to be a normal American family,” she said. “We have a 16-year-old daughter named Tara Jane, after `Gone With the Wind’ and Jane Austen. “

This naturally brings up the question: Would Jane have been an FOM (Friend of Margaret [Mitchell])?

For AustenBlog readers in the U.S., the film BRIDGET JONES’S DIARY (which features that other Mr. Darcy, of course) will be broadcast on the NBC network tonight at 9 p.m.

AustenBlog World Headquarters is under a foot and a half of snow at the moment; Dorothy is despairing of ever getting the Editrix’s barouche dug out, but we will soldier on (and hope that our kind neighbor with the snowblower will perhaps take pity upon us). The Jane news today has a touch of spring about it, with an article in the Bangor Daily News about a growing horse chestnut tree that mentions one of Jane’s characters:

I had wondered about horse chestnuts ever since I had heard Colin Firth utter the name in his role as Mr. Darcy in “Pride and Prejudice.” I, too, wanted to enjoy a horse chestnut season, whatever that meant. I knew next to nothing about them and made no attempt to find out more because I could just dream of Mr. Darcy and who needed another tree, anyway?

We are certain that is a miniseries-only mention and that the Mr. Darcy in the book never said anything about horse chestnuts, though Jane mentions “Spanish chesnuts” on the lawn at Pemberley. However, it it likely that Mr. Darcy did look for horse chestnuts, either in Lambton or locally:

If that weren’t enough, the nuts have long been used to play “conkers,” a game in England. According to the Royal Forestry Society of Great Britain, a hole is drilled through the middle of the nut or conker and a string is threaded through and knotted. The player then hits the conker against his opponent’s until one of the conkers breaks. Guess which player is the loser?

We agree it is charming to think of young Mr. Fitzwilliam Darcy playing conkers with his friends, and even more charming, on a day such as this, to think of a warm day at Pemberley with the green trees spreading their shade over the lawn. Summer will come again!

ETA: w00t! Kindly neighbor came through with his snowblower! Barouche is dug out and street-ready, though we’re staying inside to watch the football game.