Alert AustenBlog Reader Lorraine sent us an article from the Telegraph about literary adaptations on television. While the article does not mention Austen adaptations, it is obvious that the popularity of certain adaptations *cough* have swelled the ranks of Jane Austen readers, and fans.

Many who will never read George Eliot’s novels are now familiar with a version - a dilution, if you prefer - of Middlemarch and Daniel Deronda through their television adaptations. Penguin books will have sold few copies of Elizabeth Gaskell’s North and South over the past 10 years, but perhaps they have sold more since the BBC’s recent adaptation, and it seems certain that many more people learnt about love across the Victorian social divide by watching the television dramatisation than would ever have picked up the novel itself. This was achieved, previously, for Brideshead Revisited and The Forsyte Saga.

We tend to assume that publishing is a gentle and gentlemanly backwater, a place of erudition and good taste, while television is a frenzied world of commercial fears and dumbing-down in freefall. Well, publishing has its own piranha pools these days, and the Patrick Hamilton case proves that television can be a leading force in the preservation of cultural values and high quality. They each have their opponents, their charters, their traditions, their bottom lines, but literature and television may find, in the end, that they can make it through these rough times only by taking proper and regular lessons in populism and seriousness from one another.

There are many Janeites who bemoan the presence of the “movie people” among serious Austen scholars, but anyone who came into the fandom during the mid-90s Austen adaptation frenzy and is still hanging around is a pretty serious fan, we think. It is expected in many quarters that the upcoming film version of PRIDE AND PREJUDICE will bring in another wave of new Austen fans. Some will stay, and some will move on to the next big thing. In the end, we still have the books.

“Jane Austen’s Emma” is the current presentation at the Haymarket Theatre in Basingstoke. Janeites who have read Austen biographies know that Jane Austen and her sister attended public assemblies in Basingstoke, which is close to the village of Steventon. The play runs only through May 28 (sorry for the late notice, but this is the first we are hearing of it!) so be quick if you would like to see it; and as always, if you go, we’d love to publish your review.

Author Tobias Wolff and singer Alicia Keys have both confessed in the public press that Jane Austen is on their reading list.

Ms. Keys told Mercury News that she is currently reading Pride and Prejudice.

Q You mentioned books. What are you reading right now?

A I’m reading Jane Austen’s “Pride and Prejudice” right now.

Q Have you read that before?

A I haven’t. I’ve always wanted to read that.

That’s how it started with the Editrix, too (though she picked up Emma first). The first hit’s free, Alicia!

Tobias Wolff, author of This Boy’s Life among other works, has included Jane Austen on his summer reading list.

Tobias Wolff, author of, among other things, “Old School,” brings big Victorian novels on his summer vacations, so long as he is not backpacking.

“What I read in the summer are books that I don’t have time to read during the year,” he says.

He recommends: “I am going to reread Leo Tolstoy’s ‘Anna Karenina.’ There is a new translation of it that I want to read. I am going to read ‘Vanity Fair,’ by William Thackeray. I also want to read several novels of Jane Austen’s this summer. Then I have a bunch of history books that I would like to read as well.”

To fluff or not to fluff: “I don’t read fluff, simply because I don’t enjoy it.”

Well, we like fluff. Just not all the time! (And a word to the wise, Mr. Wolff: read the Austen, THEN the Thackeray. Trust us.)

My reviews of the other books in this series can be read here.

As the eighth book in the Jane Austen Mysteries series opens, it is July 1809, and Jane and her mother have arrived in Chawton to take possession of the cottage in which Edward Austen’s late bailiff lived. Village sentiment is against the squire’s womenfolk displacing the bailiff’s widow, and when a corpse is discovered in the cellar within a few hours of their arrival, suspicion falls on several neighbours who have a score to settle with the Austens—or with one another.

(The rest of this review contains a major spoiler for the previous book in this series, Jane and the Ghosts of Netley. We find it impossible to write a proper review without reference to it.) (more…)