*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.