After a sleepless crazy week, a project that the Editrix and several other regulars here have been working on for a really long time (longer than it should have taken, but there’s this messy thing called Real Life involved) is ready for unveiling: Molland’s.

Those of you who visited Tilneys and Trap-doors may remember the old Molland’s forum there. The Editrix decided to move the interactive areas of the site to their own domain, and the e-texts of Jane Austen’s novels kind of go with the forum, so they were all to be moved. Then we were approached by our friend Robin, who had a collection of interesting out of copyright articles and essays about Jane Austen and her work that he had collected with the idea of adding them to the e-texts. Also, we asked Robin to start putting together a comprehensive list of Jane Austen-related links. Another friend, Cinthia, began to collect various illustrated editions of Jane Austen’s novels and offered to scan them and also recruited others who had already done so (thanks, Heather L!) to donate them as well, resulting in an incredibly huge list of illustrations for every Jane Austen novel. We think that the result is a pretty nice little resource site for Janeites, and we hope you all enjoy it!

We also thought the site complemented AustenBlog extremely well, so we added a permanent link to the right column (which you may have noticed already) and a reciprocal link to the blog at Molland’s. Some conversations that might range off-topic for the blog, or if you ever wanted to start a discussion, would be great to have on the forum. You do have to register, to help prevent spammers (tho’ we have learned they are basically unstoppable), but the registration is local, so you won’t be giving information to anyone but the Editrix. She is unbribable. Mostly.

Suggestions, comments, and bug reports are happily accepted.

We have also heard of a couple other interesting sites of interest to Jane Austen fans that are in the development stage…we will certainly present them when they go online!

P.S. Sorry for the dearth of posts lately, but we’ve been distracted with this project. Back to the grindstone tomorrow.

Definition, from m-w.com:

Main Entry: hu·mor
Pronunciation: ‘hyü-m&r, ‘yü-
Function: noun

3 a : that quality which appeals to a sense of the ludicrous or absurdly incongruous b : the mental faculty of discovering, expressing, or appreciating the ludicrous or absurdly incongruous c : something that is or is designed to be comical or amusing
synonym see WIT

The above is provided for eejit writers who don’t get obvious jokes when Jane Austen wrote them. The New York Times has a review of The Book of Lost Books by Stuart Kelly, about books that were lost in manuscript or never written. The article includes the following:

Jane Austen apparently laid the groundwork for a history entitled “The Magnificent Adventures and Intriguing Romances of the House of Saxe Cobourg,” but died instead.

It is hard to tell if the writer of the book or the writer of the article is confused; it is possible that both are; but surely one of them realized that Jane was JOKING when she wrote her “Plan of a Novel“? She was MOCKING all the eejits who tried to tell her what she SHOULD write, or the silly books being written by other authors. How can people not get that? Even if they read it out of context? Unless, of course, they, like the heroine of the Work, was “a faultless Character…perfectly good, with much tenderness and sentiment, and not the least Wit.”