The latest Jane Austen Mystery, Jane and His Lordship’s Legacy by Stephanie Barron, is scheduled for a March 1, 2005 release, though as of this writing it is not yet available on Amazon.com. However, the first chapter is available to read on Amazon and on Stephanie Barron’s Web site. Let’s hope it makes up for the ending of the last one, eh? *sob* The Austen ladies are moving into Chawton Cottage as the book opens:

The house’s position at the fork of Chawton’s two principal roads must be adjudged an evil – but outweighing this are the broad meadows to north and east, the stout wood fence and hornbeam hedge enclosing the grounds, and the delightful promise of birdsong from the thriving fields. Mr. Seward, the late bailiff, maintained a shrubbery and an orchard, but Mrs. Seward cannot have loved her flowers; the borders must and shall be worked. Syringas, and peonies, and the simpler blooms of mignonette – all these we shall have, and Sweet William too.

The Exploits & Adventures of Miss Alethea Darcy by Elizabeth Aston, the sequel to Mr. Darcy’s Daughters, is available to order now (though we couldn’t find it in B&N a week ago).

The Exploits & Adventures of Miss Alethea Darcy takes readers back into the imagined family of Elizabeth Bennet and Mr. Darcy. Their musical daughter Alethea makes a disastrous marriage to a man whose charming manners conceal an unpleasant nature. Flinging caution to the winds, she flees her marital home, masquerading as a gentleman, and accompanied only by her redoubtable maid, Figgins, she sets off for Venice to take refuge with her sister Camilla. But events — always dramatic and sometimes dangerous — conspire to thwart her plans. Before she can meet up with Camilla, chance and her love of music lead her into the world of Italian opera, while her encounter with the aloof and difficult Titus Manningtree, in Italy to pursue a lost Titian painting, is to change her life — although fate has several more tricks to play before she can find happiness.

WELL! That sounds very…interesting, indeed. (We confess that Alethea was our favorite character from the first novel–and the most likely of the daughters to have sprung from the combined Darcy and Bennet loins. Many apologies for the tortured metaphor there.)

Recent press has two examples of journalists misappropriating Jane Austen and her writings for their own purposes.

First, the Memphis Flyer has a review of a play (not Austen-related) that contains the following:

The play’s best moments, however, go to Jo Lynne Palmer, a character with hysterical tendencies who seems to be plucked directly from the pages of a Jane Austen novel. Her comic bit involving the dearly departed’s ashes and a bowl of gazpacho nearly brought the opening-night audience to their feet mid-show.

We can only hope he means a comic minor character such as Mary Musgrove or Miss Bates, not one of Jane Austen’s heroines!

The second, much more egregious passage, is from the Guardian, in an article about pressure on modern teenagers:

When Jane Austen was 16 she wrote a short story entitled Catharine, or the Bower. The tale follows the adventures of a young penniless orphan, Miss Wynne, forced to marry a man twice her age ‘whose disposition was not amiable and whose Manners were unpleasing’. Austen’s own teenage years were not much better: they were spent looking after nephews and nieces, caring for a hypochondriac mother, assisting various female relatives during their confinement and then childbirth.
Her fate, like Miss Wynne’s, was not uncommon in the 19th century. Indeed, for generations of girls in Britain, their teens brought only a succession of arranged marriages, factory work, barbaric boarding school, pregnancies, poor nutrition, medicine, hygiene and dentistry.

Cinderella Austen: whodathunkit?

And as for this article, also in the Guardian, we can only paraphrase Catherine Morland and say: Oh! Who can ever be tired of Austen?