Several shops have been set up at Cafe Press to sell Jane Austen-related merchandise. DeeDee has set up several Janeite Supply Shops, featuring merchandise asking the burning question: What Would Jane Do? as well as Team Jane merchandise and Jane Austen for President.

Amelia also has What Would Jane Do? merchandise as well as other Austen-related fun stuff. (What, no I Heart Henry Tilney shirt?)

No, this is not an upcoming title in the Jane Austen Mysteries series (at least as far as we know). The Los Angeles Times has an article about celebrity shoplifting that included a bit about Jane Austen’s aunt, Mrs. Leigh Perrot, who stood trial for stealing lace. Had she been convicted, she could have been hanged or transported to Australia.

With the rise of the middle class, shoplifting spread. A sensational trial occurred in 1800 — l’affaire Winona Ryder of its day — when the police arrested Jane Austen’s aunt, Leigh Perrot, in Bath for stealing lace. After spending seven months in jail, Perrot was acquitted in a few minutes by a jury that felt she had already been too harshly punished. A few years later, Henry Mayhew, the chronicler of Victorian crime, noted, “We find ladies in respectable positions occasionally charged with shoplifting.”

We were under the impression that the jury simply found that there was not enough evidence that the lace was stolen rather than planted on the lady’s person; apparently the shopkeepers had a plan to extort money from the Leigh Perrots in return for dropping the charges.

An article about Gritty Realism™ in the upcoming Brontë biopic boils down BECOMING JANE to its essence:

What happens: Austen has a fling with a young Irishman.

We shall retire to Bedlam.

Alert Janeite and Internet Sleuth Sylvia M. turned up an article listing the leads for NA2: Felicity Jones and JJ Feild.

Here is a photo of Felicity (who looks just right) and here is JJ’s Web site (not bad either–love that smile).

We vaguely remember JJ as Frank Cheeryble in Nicholas Nickelby. Might have to rent that one again…

ETA: Alert Janeite Maisy sent a link to another pic of Felicity.

Also, thanks to Alert Janeite Kelley who sent in the news, but we didn’t read our e-mail till just now. *Editrix slaps self with Clue Trout*

It’s kind of hard to tell from this article, but it seems that ITV is cutting back on some kinds of drama to permit “high-quality” productions such as the “Jane Austen Season.”

Elliott added that the move to scale back the more expensive single and two-part dramas would free up money to be spent on high quality productions and pointed to the forthcoming Jane Austen season and the much-awaited return of Jimmy McGovern’s Cracker.

Yes, but see where saving money gets you?

While we’re waiting ever-so-patiently *cough* for news about NA2, we recommend a trip to Heather L.’s Jane Austen resource site, Solitary Elegance, newly located at its own URL. The site includes an exhaustive review of various radio, stage, and film adaptations and a nearly-complete set of the C.E. Brock watercolors. The latest addition is a transcript of NA1 and a list of press releases related to the filming of NA2. Check it out!

Alert Janeites Heather L., Sylvia M. and Jessica all wrote to tell us about this article from the Irish Film Board, which says that NA2 will begin filming in August, with some of the filming to take place at Dublin Castle (more at Wikipedia–thanks to Heather L. for the links). No news as to the cast yet.

Heather L. expressed concern, which we share, that a castle will be used as the Tilney estate rather than an actual, you know, ABBEY. Like this one, located conveniently NEAR BATH. We’re just saying.

Not that we’re bitter or anything. Of course not!

Amy H wrote to tell us that she has listed a custom Barbie doll beautifully dressed as Elizabeth Bennet on eBay. Love her pretty straw hat and her reticule!

Attention Crossword Puzzlers: the name you are looking for is most likely EMMA. Enjoy your puzzle.

Brontëana wrote to tell us that the next book in Jasper Fforde’s insanely brilliant Thursday Next series, War of the Words, to be published in July 2007, will feature Jane Austen herself. From the FAQ:

What is your next published book?

The fifth in the Thursday Next series. Yes, she’s back. Facing possibly the greatest danger to the bookworld since the abolition of the Net Book Agreement. And a few grammersites. And the replacement Miss Havisham. And Friday. And Jane Austen. And the end of the world (again). Thursday Next: First Among Sequels will hit the bookshops in July 2007.

Is that really going to be the title of the next Next?

No. We ran it past marketing and they said it might put people off who were new to the series. So I’m calling it War of the Words instead. At least, that’s what we’ve put in the back of The Fourth Bear, so it’s semi-official.

For those unfamiliar with the series, previous Austen-related content has included the location of Jurisfiction headquarters at Norland Park. A conversation between Thursday Next and Marianne Dashwood from Lost in a Good Book: (more…)

Alert Janeite Liz M. wrote to tell us that Calvin College in Grand Rapids, Michigan, will stage SENSE AND SENSIBILITY on November 2-4 and 9-11, 2006.

Set in the shift between Classicism and Romanticism Jane Austen’s classic novel asks the question, “Can we be rational in love?” Adapted for numerous stage, film, and television productions, Calvin Theatre Company’s Sense and Sensibility emphasizes the novel’s innate dramatic qualities, often sharp satirical wit, and the complicated road to love in a society where wealth was considered an indication of character and a little gossip could go a long way.

Liz wrote that the gang at Calvin did a great job with Tom Stoppard’s ARCADIA this past spring, so she has high hopes for this production. Tickets are $9 Thursday, $10 Friday and Saturday, and $5 for students. Show times are 8 pm unless noted otherwise. Contact the box office at 616.526.6282.

*cries with laughter*

Thanks to TeresaAF for the link!

P.S. Actually Lily and James are Lizzy and Darcy and Ron and Hermione are Emma and Knightley with genders reversed. Still v. v. funny.

P.P.S. And Ginny Weasley is Anne Elliot!

Rachel Cooke continues her rant in the Observer about the various tarted-up new editions of classic novels, including Jane Austen’s. (Here’s our previous post)

As the Bookseller wryly notes, classics make sense to publishers not only because there are no royalties or advances to be paid; there is no frustrating wait for the ‘break-out’ book from Tolstoy or Dickens.

That’s why they keep remaking the movies, too, you know.

All this repackaging obviously has an impact on sales – publishers wouldn’t bother otherwise – which means that, however tiresome, it must be a good thing, mustn’t it? More copies of Austen and Flaubert and Wilkie Collins get sold – and they, in turn, help to keep in print more obscure authors: Gissing, Gibbon and Gosse (the Penguin Classics catalogue is pure bibliographic bliss: where else in the private sector can you see Hildegard of Bingen cosying up to Barry Hines?). So why do I feel so snippy about it?

A good question! We have mixed feelings about it, but tend toward the positive, because we like the covers!

But a lot of good books do require a concentration span longer than that of the average Big Brother contestant. Why pretend otherwise? Why must everything be made to seem easy? Whatever you think about Richard & Judy’s book club, it has an essential honesty: it passes beach reads off as beach reads, and tricksy books (like David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas) as tricksy. But this new marketing of classics seems to me to be essentially dishonest, the publishing equivalent of orange-flavoured cod-liver oil. I mean, I really loved Vanity Fair, but never more so than when I had finished it.

Well, yes, because you’d experienced the story. You hadn’t received a distilled version interpreted through someone else’s “vision” as one does with a film adaptation. And isn’t that why we read, after all?

Confirmation in the Independent today in an interview with the actress.

She’s to play Anne Elliott in an upcoming adaptation of Jane Austen’s Persuasion.

Some more tidbits from the article.

For someone whose star is rising so rapidly, she’s not what you’d call an “actressy” actress. She’s a slip of a thing who looks rather younger than her age (she turned 30 this April), with clear, pale skin and angular features that can look strikingly pretty and – when occasion demands – frail and worn, even drab. The only flamboyant things about her are her jewellery (lots of it: big earrings, outsized ring, chunky bracelet which she breaks during the interview, sending it tinkling in pieces under the table); and her wild, curly mane of dyed blonde hair, a toned-down version of what she sported for Waz (”I looked insane – like I’d just stuck my head down the loo with a bottle of bleach”).

Sounds different from the picture we have here, eh? That looks more like Anne Elliot, to our mind.

She says that last sentence with a slight wobble in her voice, as well she might, having had a health scare over Christmas that left her facing the possibility that she might never act again – a chronic condition that she doesn’t want to name and which now, thankfully, seems to be responding to treatment.

Goodness! She’s Mrs. Smith!

It’s striking, I say, that for someone so upbeat and bubbly, who reacts so positively in the most part to people and life, the characters she’s played tend to be dark, or to go through severe struggle.

Interesting…Anne Elliot certainly goes through struggles, but she sort of blossoms as the story goes on, and gets stronger and more beautiful. It’s good to know that she can play dark but has a different personality, that she can bring both sides to the story.

As a woman, does she feel any pressure from the acting industry’s preoccupation with looks, I ask? “I do find it difficult when it’s less about acting and more about how you look. But I’m not a female lead. I don’t play romantic heroines, and that’s a good thing because they tend to be very dull parts. Except in Jane Austen! I’ve been lucky enough to have stepped around that. I play a range of characters. Some are prettier than others, some are quite plain. I’m lucky enough to have a face that can shift around.”

As a reminder, the film starts shooting in September 2006 and will be broadcast in the U.K. in 2007. No news on broadcast anywhere else in the world yet.

We are only a few weeks late in reporting this…*Editrix slaps self with Clue Trout*

Registration is open for the 2006 JASNA Annual General Meeting in Tucson, Arizona. Some of the workshops are filling up fast, so if you intend to go, best to get your registration in soon! An additional charge will apply for registrations received after August 18.

You must be a member of JASNA to attend the AGM. You can join JASNA at the same time that you register for the AGM. Companion tickets are available, which allow one’s non-Janeite companion to attend the Friday night entertainment, Saturday banquet and Regency Ball, and Sunday brunch.

If any AustenBlog readers are going to the AGM, look for the Editrix–she will have a little something for you.

Get out your glad rags and dancing slippers, Virginia Janeites! There will be a Jane Austen Ball at Gadsby’s Tavern in Alexandria, Virginia, on Saturday, August 12, 2006 at 8 p.m. Tickets are $25 in advance or $40 at the door. Dance instruction will be provided.

There will be an international conference on Jane Austen and Comedy at La Trobe University in Melbourne, Australia, on 29 November – 2 December, 2007. The organizers have made funds available to assist with the travel expenses of delegates in the Asia-Pacific Region. Proposals for papers are due 1 June, 2007. E-mail Laura Carroll, the administrator of the event, for more information; her address is on the Contact page of the conference Web site.

Now that we’ve discussed the next generation of Janeites below, we look back upon the generation that preceded us. Stephen Bowden pointed us to an article in the Guardian, taken from their archives of July 19, 1952, about the yearly meeting of the Jane Austen Society at Chawton Cottage.

The society was formed, with truly Austenian disregard of politics and foreigners, in 1940. Jane Austen’s utter silence on Napoleon, his wars, his threats of invasion, did not more beautifully ignore the possibility of his conquering England than did Miss Dorothy Darnell, quietly beginning in 1940 to form a literary society, beautifully ignore the possibility of Hitler doing any better than Napoleon.

Love it!

Outside, in the stabling, is the very donkey-cart in which she used to drive about the lanes as far as Alton.

The donkey cart (beautifully restored) can still be seen in the outbuildings at the Cottage.

We missed this somehow…Penguin in the U.K. is re-releasing many of its classic titles, including Jane Austen’s six novels, in new editions with covers that look more like modern novels than classic novels. We think the cover drawings are quite nice and not too chick-lit; we don’t dislike the Headline covers, either, but we like these better.

The Guardian Blog weighs in:

This year has brought us two new editions of Jane Austen – one from Penguin Red Classics, and one from Headline. Both look pretty awful, if you ask me – Georgette Heyer meets Jane Green is the best description I can come up with.

[. . .]

The publishers would say that I am simply being snobbish. Their watchword is ‘relevant’; they don’t want to ‘intimidate’ readers; a great story is a great story – full stop.

Why, I wonder, must everything be made to seem so easy?

Jane Austen isn’t a writer of mere romances; she’s far more complex – and savage – than that. In this week’s arts column, I’m asking if this isn’t just a kind of cynicism on the part of publishers: are they duping people into buying books that, once they’ve opened, they will find unpalatable, even unreadable?

Or is anything at all that increases sales of classic novels something for which we should give grateful thanks? Are there less well-known classic novels that you think could actually benefit from a marketing push for today’s readers or should we leave well alone?

The question about “duping” readers into picking up something that they simply won’t like is a good one, but we hope that more readers new to Austen will be charmed than put off.

We (really a “we”, it was the Editrix and a friend) were in the local book emporium tonight, inquiring at the information counter as to whether Jane Austen for Dummies might have been released a few days early, when a young lady came up with a pile of four or five books in her hand, every one related to Jane Austen. She said she had only Love and Freindship left to read and she would have read all of Jane’s work.

We fell upon her with cries of glee and presented her with a copy of the JASNA brochure (which we just happened to have on hand) and wrote down the URL of our region Web site so she could check out our activities. She seemed not unhappy to be accosted by crazed Janeites but somewhat taken aback, as one might imagine, and the girl behind the information desk look positively frightened. But we hope that at least the young lady continues to read Jane Austen and indulge herself in the paraliterature and biographies and everything else associated with it. It was great to see another generation learning about the joy of Jane Austen’s work.

Luis Alfaro, the screenwriter of the upcoming modern-set adaptation of Sense and Sensibility, found AustenBlog and answered a few questions about the film for us.

We were approached about a year ago by a great company that did a lovely film called Garden State to do a contemporary adaptation of this great Austen work. We read and re-read the novel so many times. We have seen all of the adaptations of her work, both here in the U.S. and internationally. This is an English language feature film that begins filming in November in Los Angeles. We love the title Sensibilidad because the story has a Mexican-American slant, but I am sure something more commercial will be attached once the film is done. It is very much a contemporary romantic comedy and we hope we do justice to Austen.

Thanks for posting, Luis, and best of luck with the film! We’ll look forward to it. (And we love the title SENSIBILIDAD!)