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.