Awards season trundles on, and P&P3 has been nominated for six BAFTAs, including Outstanding British Film of the Year, Best Adapted Screenplay, Costume Design, Makeup and Hair, Special Achievement by Debut British Director, and a Best Supporting Actress nom for Brenda Blethyn.

We found an amusing tidbit from the Golden Globes:

My friend Sydnie called me Monday from Beverly Hills, where she was escaping the Seattle rain and had promptly rented a convertible. “Pammy, the Golden Globes are next door to my hotel tonight!” she said breathlessly. “Wish I had you here because I have no clue which stars are which.”

I didn’t have the heart to tell her that no, that probably was not in fact Jane Austen she had spotted outside the Beverly Hilton. Maybe she meant Keira Knightley, the nominated star of the Austen-penned “Pride and Prejudice.” Gotta love her.

Sydnie, if you’re reading this, you’ve won a free session with the Cluebat of Janeite Righteousness. See the Editrix to collect your prize(s).

The Editrix’s hometown newspaper is representin’ for the Janeites with an editorial by Paula Marantz Cohen, a professor of English at Drexel University and the author of Jane Austen in Boca and the upcoming Jane Austen in Scarsdale. Professor Cohen makes us feel all warm and fuzzy by reiterating a point we keep trying to make in discussions about the film: getting bogged down in the little details of costume and art direction misses the larger point of whether or not the film represents the book it is purporting to adapt, not to mention whether it represents the things that keep us reading Jane Austen’s novels 200 years after their publication.

Many reviewers will commend a Jane Austen adaptation if it looks authentic - which seems to translate into containing a lot of mud, having characters with bad teeth, and showing the plight of the servant class. But just because country balls in regency England were headache-inducing affairs, does that mean that we have to experience them that way?

When there is too much scenery, costume, and decor to look at - however accurately and interestingly these things are portrayed - the singular human interaction inevitably recedes into the background. Austen’s novels are not historical documents but novels of manners. The visits, dinners, and balls are important as conduits for relaying essential character. Only the fools and villains in Austen’s novels pay too much attention to surface detail.

We find that in a well-researched and presented historical film (for instance, MASTER AND COMMANDER), the details do not distract us from the story, because everything is as we expect it to be. When the details are “modernized” or incorrect or just plain weird, it can be distracting from the story.

However, in the discussion that has gone on about this film, there has been a lot of attention paid to nitpicky details and less to the larger picture, in our opinion.

(Thanks to our Janeite Spy for the tip about the Cohen editorial.)

Barbara Whelehan, writing for Bankrate.com (via Yahoo!), uses examples from Jane Austen’s work to illustrate the negative effects of carrying excessive credit card debt.

The inability to live within one’s means goes back a long way. If fiction reflects reality, consider the character John Willoughby in Jane Austen’s “Sense and Sensibility,” published in 1811. Willoughby’s “estate had been rated … at about six or seven hundred [pounds] a year; but he lived at an expense to which that income could hardly be equal, and he had himself often complained of his poverty.”

Credit cards were nonexistent in those days, so the quickest way to wealth was to marry well. Willoughby used this strategy, and in the process broke the heart of the pretty and poor protagonist Miss Marianne, whom he had been leading on. A sympathetic friend of Marianne assessed the scoundrel this way: “Nothing in the way of pleasure can ever be given up by the young men of this age.”

Now, doesn’t that sound like something you might hear today? (Add “women” to obviate sexist overtones and make it more current.)

OK, things have changed since the days of horse-drawn carriages and letters sent by post. For one thing, up until around the mid-19th century, those who were unable to meet their obligations were often sent to debtor’s prison for the “wantonness of pride, the malignity of revenge, or the acrimony of disappointed expectation,” in the words of Samuel Johnson, who sympathized with imprisoned debtors, not creditors. No wonder: The litterateur of the 18th century suffered poverty most of his life.

Following in our unintended theme (though we are enjoying it) of discussing various editions of Jane Austen’s novels this week, Alert Janeite/Brontëite Cristina let us know that Pride and Prejudice is available as a BedBook, both in hardback and paperback editions.

“What is a BedBook?” you may well be asking. They are books printed sideways so that one might more easily read it while lying on one’s side in bed. From the BedBooks site:

Bed Books are specifically designed to be read when lying on one’s side.

The patent pending sideways text layout of Bed Books affords total comfort and eliminates the back and neck strain associated with the contorted body positions normally required for reading conventional books while lying down, and usually propped up, in bed.

While this is rather clever, we think that reading whilst lying on our side would make us dizzy. We tend to employ the time-tested “prop it on the tummy” method.

Alert Janeite Jessica sent us a link to an interview with Allegra Goodman, author of the novel Intuition.

Why did you call your book “Intuition”?

It’s Austen-ian, I think. It’s like her “Persuasion.”

Is Austen your hero?

I’m interested in realism. I am interested in writing about people with all their strengths and all their flaws. I love Jane Austen. I love George Eliot. I love Charles Dickens and his engagement with the social and political sphere.

And yet creative-writing teachers are always telling to you to write about what you know, so now we have countless novels that sound like unedited therapy sessions.

At some point you have to move beyond that. You have to know more, you have to learn more. If we all wrote about our childhood forever, books would be rather monotonous.