Collier Bluff Books is offering five free e-books of Kate Warren’s book The Bennets: A Pride & Prejudice Prequel to AustenBlog readers. The first five readers who e-mail collierbluffbooks AT yahoo DOT com (that’s an e-mail address; read it out loud) and mention AustenBlog and the contest will receive a PDF download of the book.

Alert Janeites Lizik and Heather L sent us links to an upcoming radio adaptation of Emma that will be broadcast on BBC 7 Radio, a satellite station; fortunately for the rest of us, they also will broadcast the play on the Internet! Heather wrote that David Bamber (Mr. Collins in P&P 1995) will play Mr. Elton.

(The Editrix has an audiobook of Emma read by Jeremy Northam. Nanny-nanny-boo-boo. You oughta hear his Miss Bates!)

Part I will be broadcast on Thursday, December 14 at 10 a.m. Greenwich Mean Time (do the adjustments to get your own time) and rebroadcast at 9 p.m. and 2:00 a.m. Friday (that latter one might be the best choice for those of us on the North American side of the pond). Part II will be broadcast on Friday, December 15, at 10 a.m. GMT and rebroadcast at 9 p.m. and 2:00 a.m. Saturday. Each episode is one hour long.

The Editrix, who should be doing other things, designed an e-card for our readers to send to their Janeite acquaintance celebrating Jane Austen’s Birthday this Saturday, December 16. Enjoy!

From the Scotsman’s, er, bytes to Our Lady of the Janeites’ ears!

The Murrays finally sold the collection to the NLS earlier this year for £31 million, the money being raised from a Heritage Lottery grant, the Scottish Executive and £6.5 million by public subscription. Indicative of the size and depth of the archive, neither the Murrays or the library know exactly what was being handed over, as no-one has ever managed to catalogue the vast resource. Even the valuers for the sale had to make an educated guess of its value when they ran out of time. A single Jane Austen letter can command £50,000 and there were thousands of equivalent letters and documents in the archive. Not only that, new discoveries were being made every week, making it a daunting, once-in-a-lifetime opportunity for its curators.

Now, before everyone gets all excited, we would like to point out that they are NOT saying that there are letters to or from Jane Austen in the archive; Jane saved copies of her correspondence with Murray anyway, so they are included in the letters; but there is one letter at least from Murray in which he discusses Jane’s work with Walter Scott. And if that notion doesn’t blow your mind, you’re not paying attention! We are not among those Janeites who revile poor Cassandra for burning most of Jane’s letters–we dare say Jane would have approved, and that’s good enough for us–but the idea of finding some fresh tidbits, we confess, excites us tremendously.

In our travels around the Internets, we are truly delighted by the diversity of Austen fans–nationally, racially, sexually, politically, socially, religiously. This is true even in our “real life” interpersonal relationships within the Austen fandom. We can all find common ground on Jane.

That being said, we found a couple of links that are, perhaps, better suited to the more adventurous segment of our fandom. We present them because we found them interesting and amusing, and relevant to the mission of AustenBlog, which presents the daily collision of Jane Austen and popular culture; we recognize that they will not be everyone’s cup of tea. If you prefer your Jane G-rated, we suggest you don’t click on the jump. The rest of you guttersnipes, go to it! (more…)