We are simply delighted to see that Northanger Abbey is included in the Independent’s list of great beach reads.

This is by far the silliest of Austen’s novels - a hilarious gothic spoof. It’s so mocking, yet forgiving, of the foolish excesses of youth.

Lovely!

The Salisbury (North Carolina) Post has a roundup of the many novels available that have been inspired by the work of Jane Austen.

This week’s Sunday papers have a couple of Austen allusions in unexpected places.

First, a review of a novel titled A Bit of Earth has an allusion calculated to raise disapprobation in the breast of any Janeite:

Smith, a professor of creative writing at Southampton University in England, is a “great-great-great-great- great-niece” (according to her Bloomsbury bio) of Jane Austen. I’ve never felt any great urge to read Austen, but I’m now on the hunt for both of Smith’s earlier novels, The Bluebird Café, and Happy Birthday and All That, because Smith’s writing style entranced me as much as did the storyline for A Bit of Earth.

The reviewer seems to be not especially well read amongst the classics, for she not only expresses no curiosity about reading Jane Austen’s work–meaning that she most likely knows nothing about it–but failed to recognize, or at least failed to mention in her review, the rather obvious allusions to The Secret Garden: the title of the book and the protagonists’ surname, Misselthwaite. We haven’t even read the bally book and we noticed it, for pity’s sake.

Let us move on to more verdantly pleasant ground (keeping up the garden metaphor) with an article about an architect who is designing buildings on a college campus; not an article in which one would expect to find an Austen illusion, yet there it is!

And also I think modernism, the style that dominated architecture in the 20th century, tended to ignore everything that went before it, and that’s ridiculous. Architecture, like every other art, climbs on the shoulders of what went before. We take old ideas and we recycle them, and we remake them. And every creative enterprise does that, whether it’s literature or whatever. People are writing books today in the manner of the early 19th century, in the manner of Jane Austen, and that’s legitimate.

Q. Well, Jane Austen still holds great appeal. People still read her. They’re still making movies about her books.

A. Exactly. And the great buildings of the past hold great appeal.

We could not have said it better!

And in the category of Simply Inexplicable, we have an article about the failure of English speakers to recognize words that come from outside their own language.

Today, English is a “global” language. Yet the “difficult”, “inaccessible” vocabulary that’s often regarded as the problem with reading the great writers of the past is to some extent caused by our having become an island in our use of it.

Such complaints even extend to the elegantly concise Jane Austen (one of the panellists in the ABC Favorite Novel competition several years ago claimed this).

Really? That’s very sad indeed.