Or, Why Flash Web Sites Suck, by the Editrix.

Alert Janeite Erandika kindly let us know that the P&P3 official movie site for the U.S. is now live, but the AustenBlog staff, though generally not especially challenged from a technological standpoint, is at a loss as to how to make it do much of anything. We clicked “Enter Site” and got a pretty picture but nothing else, and the gerbil on the wheel inside the computer protested until we shut it down. Are we missing something?

Cub Reporter Julie B. opined that a little Jimi Hendrix music would liven it up a bit. We tend to agree.

We’ve been hearing from a lot of the various Jane Austen Societies and regional organizations around the world in reference to their upcoming events. We just wanted to let any Austen Society members (JASNA and all the various regions, JASA, the British JAS, any at all) who read this blog know that we are always happy to publish news about any of your upcoming events, so do please send us the information–click on Contact on the right to find out how to send us the details.

Also, we’re in the process of creating a separate category in the links for upcoming events–that is, when the Editrix gets around to it. *blush*

Fellow Janeite and member of the Jane Austen Society of Australia Dianne wrote to tell us of some upcoming events and news:

The annual Jane Austen Birthday/Christmas lunch will be taking place on December 17th at the Sydney Rowing Club in Abbotsford. All inquiries should be directed to books AT jasa.net.au

Also, the Genesian Theatre in Sydney is putting up a production of Sense and Sensibility, which opens this Friday, November 4th.

Finally, not so much an event as an announcement: the JASA has recently published a book entitled Jane Austen’s Brother Abroad: the Grand Tour Journals of Edward Austen. More information on the book is available here (you’ll have to scroll down a bit), as well as a preview of the text.

Well, that’s perhaps a bit of a tortured metaphor, but it’s late and we are still a trifle jet-lagged, so cut us a break.

Mary Houlihan, writing in the Chicago Sun-Times, writes about how Pride and Prejudice is dominant amongst Jane Austen’s novels, both in print and on film.

There once was a time when the novels of Jane Austen were in vogue only in the classroom and the hearts of her ardent fans. But in the mid-’90s all that changed when the 19th century British author’s works became part of popular culture with well-received television and film adaptations of Pride and Prejudice, Emma, Persuasion and Sense and Sensibility.

But among her novels, it is Pride and Prejudice, Austen’s most popular work, that continues to spread “Austenmania” to new generations. It all started with the 1995 British miniseries starring Jennifer Ehle as Elizabeth and Colin Firth as Mr. Darcy, in a performance that continues to make hearts flutter to this day.

Pride and Prejudice is the current selection of Chicago’s “One Book, One Chicago” reading series.

Ahoy Pittsburghers: PRIDE AND PREJUDICE will be part of the Three Rivers Film Festival, showing on November 4, 2005 at 8 p.m. at the Regent Square Theater.

The film has now premiered in Australia, and the reviews are mixed. Sandra Hall of the Sydney Morning-Herald is not buying the studio hype.

So why do we need a new Pride And Prejudice? The film’s producers explain themselves with the line that this is the first big-screen version in 65 years - which sounds like a good excuse, strictly speaking. But where Jane Austen is concerned, strictness has gone thoroughly out of fashion. The idea these days is to take liberties with her - recycling her work in unlikely, even exotic forms. We’ve had Bride And Prejudice, the Bollywood musical, as well as a contemporary spoof in Bridget Jones’s Diary. Both have helped to show yet again that a true classic is infinitely adaptable. Even classics, however, need time to recover between engagements. But here’s P and P yet again, filmed by Joe Wright, a young British television director determined to push Austen into the realms of dirty realism.

Peter Craven of The Age is polite but does not seem especially impressed.

So this Pride and Prejudice is a bit of a chamber music for kids’ orchestra, with chooks in the background and plenty of dirt and rain and tousled hair and some adult guest players deepening the sense of reality.

Des Partridge of the Courier-Mail prefers P&P2.