The producers of the new adaptation of PRIDE AND PREJUDICE like to boast that their film is the first big-screen version of the book in 65 years. We begin to think there is a reason for that. Two hours cannot really tell the story with any complexity or completeness; it is a Cliff Notes, Readers Digest Condensed Version of Jane Austen’s story, with regrettable “modern” touches that add little of value to the severely truncated story.

However, we have been scolded recently for dwelling upon the negative in relation to this film, so let’s start out with what is good. (more…)

The townspeople scatter, snatching up small children as they run for cover…when the dust clears, the antagonists are standing at opposite ends of the street, eyes locked, fingers twitching as their hands hover next to their holstered six-shooters…

At one end, Joe Wright. At the other, the Jane Austen Society of North America.

The audience munches its popcorn and leans forward excitedly. Ohhh, this is gonna be good.

There’s a spot of bother brewing between fledgling Brit director Joe Wright - whose movie version of “Pride and Prejudice” opens tomorrow - and members of the Jane Austen Society of North America.

I’m told that in a National Public Radio report, also scheduled for tomorrow, diehard fans of the 1813 novel voice a litany of complaints about Wright’s mushy, souped-up version - the latest in a long line - of the precise and elegant Austen.

Wright responds with an impolite suggestion.

“They can go jump in a lake,” Wright, I’m told, advises NPR L.A. correspondent Kim Masters for her piece on “Morning Edition.”

Wright sniffs that he’s not interested in “quibblers,” adding that he didn’t make the film for them. “I made it for myself, really,” he reportedly reveals.

The trouble started a couple of months ago when University of Colorado English Prof. Joan Klingel Ray, president of the Jane Austen Society, slagged off the movie in an interview with the U.K.’s Telegraph, criticizing everything from Matthew MacFadyen as the male lead, Mr. Darcy, to the movie’s in-your-face sexual imagery.

“The Darcy in the film does not have the quality of attractiveness that Colin Firth has,” Ray asserted, referring to the star of the acclaimed 1995 miniseries.

She added: “The film is full of sexual imagery, which is totally inappropriate to Austen’s novel. In one scene, a wild boar, which I assume is supposed to represent Darcy, wobbles through a farm with its sexual equipment on show.”

After her interview ran, Ray reveals, Focus Features threatened to cancel a screening of the film in Milwaukee for the Austen Society’s annual convention.

The screening was held, though, and while some Austen aficionados liked the movie, others complained about “lame” dialogue and Keira Knightley’s posture.

I hear that a Focus Features flack actually tried to forbid Masters from quoting Ray because the professor is no longer president of the society.

Wrong. Ray’s term ends next month.

Woo Hoo! Deathmatch!

ETA: We simply must add a TOMBSTONE reference: “You tell ‘em JASNA’s comin’! And HELL’S comin’ with us!”

ETA II: We are informed that Professor Joan Ray will be president of JASNA through 2006. Take that, Cowboys.

A lovely by-product of the hype around a new film adaptation is journalists revisiting the age-old question: why is Jane Austen still popular 200 years after she lived and wrote?

Kristi Turnquist, writing in the Oregonian (yes, this is the journalist who asked for our assistance last week), hung out with Portland-area Janeites to find out what makes us tick.

But those who swoon only at the love stories miss the meat of Austen’s worldview, says the Los Angeles-based Taylor. “Jane Austen did not write romances,” says the 32-year-old. “They were social satires, making fun of people and commenting on the society of the time.” We’ve turned it into romance, Taylor believes, because Austen created “the ultimate heroine” in Elizabeth Bennet, whose wit, strength and vulnerability have endeared her to readers since the novel was first published in 1813. Lizzy’s love-hate relationship with Darcy also set a template, she says. “Every romance novel that’s ever been written since then is a takeoff on these two characters.”

We don’t know about every romance novel, but this is still great stuff. There are so many levels to Jane Austen’s work beyond the romantic; there’s something for everyone.

David Elliott writes about Austen adaptations in the San Diego Union-Tribune.

I recall a guest lecturer at college, stoking the fever before it really caught fire in America: “The cocked finger over a teacup in Austen has all the tension of a cocked trigger in Hammett or Hemingway.” Indeed, more. Ham and Hem fire off virile blasts of ammo, while Austen makes her doting and darting ladies, her stuffy but often very sexed gentlemen, run the gantlet of a continuous gun range of subtle, social and specific emotions.

The first Austen book that the Editrix read (at the woefully advanced age of 29) was Emma. While reading the scene about Mr. Weston’s ball at the Crown, we stopped reading and checked the biographical blurb at the beginning of the Signet edition of the book. Why? Because we wanted to know when Jane Austen lived and wrote; we had a vague idea it was sometime in the 19th century, but the prose seemed so modern to us, we thought perhaps we had misapprehended and she actually lived in the 1920s or 30s and was writing about a historical period a century before. Jane Austen didn’t write like any 19th century author we’d ever read.

At the current time we are reading Elizabeth Gaskell’s North and South. While we are enjoying it very much, we are bemused by the many passages describing Margaret Hale’s charming looks and personality. Such descriptions are discouraged for modern writers; the mantra is “show, don’t tell.” (Also it’s corny and kind of Mary Sueish, but that’s beside the point we’re trying to make.) Jane Austen rarely indulges in such descriptions; she follows the rule. Show, don’t tell. That is only one example of why Jane Austen reads like a modern writer.

That being said, it was not until we read Persuasion (after Emma and P&P) that we became a raging Austen maniac; in fact, it was The Letter that did it.

Feel free to tell your Jane story in the comments.

Fellow blogger Eclectic Boogaloo proposes a law that we at AustenBlog can get behind.

2. Another update, this time about a possibly futile campaign to outlaw use of the phrase ‘It is a truth universally acknowledged’ to begin journalistic pieces written about Jane Austen.

A couple days too late for Election Day, but perhaps on next year’s ballot?

(Thanks to Alert Janeite Lorraine for sending this in!)

Several Alert Janeites, including Kira and Lorraine, sent us information about an article in the November issue of Vogue magazine about Jane Austen’s juvenilia. No link unfortunately, but here’s an excerpt:

All three stories are charming glimpses into the wit, comedic talent and uncanny understanding of society that Austen possessed even as a teen.

The article is in the Books section of the “People Are Talking About” feature.