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.