Well, this sounds interesting. Geetika Lizardi, the playwright for the musical JANE, about which we blogged some time ago, wrote to tell us that cast members of the play have told her that a television drama series or serial titled MISS AUSTEN REGRETS is currently being cast in the U.K. We tried Googling it but found only a review of David Nokes’ Austen biography from 1997. If anyone has any news about this, do let us know!

Geetika also passed along the following lovely tidbit:

I’ve also heard from a costume maker that we’re using for our play that the TV drama is going to be a series/serial of some sort.
She’s making an awful lot of regency costumes these days and speculates that the demand for that period (among audiences) is only going to increase.

It’s difficult not to get excited, isn’t it?

From the Oh No She Di’int Desk, we have a so-called college professor claiming that Jane Austen’s novels are just like modern romance novels.

McDaniel College English professor Pamela Regis, author of “A Natural History of the Romance Novel,” has another message that could be summed up as follows: Read your romance proudly. Don’t apologize for it, because you don’t need to.

Romance novels have been unfairly scorned, she argues.

After all, Jane Austen’s “Pride and Prejudice,” recognized as a classic, follows all the conventions of a romance novel.

Regis defines romance novels as works of prose fiction that tell the story of the courtship and betrothal of one or more characters.

We would expect such a trite comment from a Very Young Person reading P&P for the first time, but really, a college professor? Can’t she recognize that it is about so much more?

To refute the claim of bad writing, just look at “Pride and Prejudice,” she said.

*head explodes*

Once again, with feeling: if Jane Austen were selling her novels today, they would not qualify as genre romance novels. They would be considered mainstream commercial literature. They are not about romance as much as they are about life–and romance certainly is a part of life, but please do not ghettoize Jane Austen’s novels in such a way. We really have nothing against romance novels, though they are not our particular cup of tea, but such a comparison is just silly.