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!)