The San Francisco Choral Society and California Chamber Symphony will perform act one of Kirke Mechem’s new opera, Pride and Prejudice. Performance dates are 3-4 August, 2007 at the Davies Symphony Hall and tickets range from $24-$30. See the San Francisco Choral Society web site to purchase tickets, get directions, and more. This sounds like an interesting new adaptation; if you are able to attend, we’d love to hear about it!

The Bellingham Herald (Washington State) reports a Jane Austen English Country Dance Ball will be held Saturday, 14 July 2007, beginning 7:30 pm at the Bellingham Senior Activity Center. Tickets are $12 for the ball ($5 for non-dancers). Instruction and a walk-through will be held Monday, 9 July from 7-9 pm (tickets $5). Other dance instruction is available Thursdays, 1:30-3 pm. See the Bellingham ECD web site for directions, contacts, and other information.

When one feels that one’s support of Jane Austen paraliterature is a hopeless business as the genre has become a quagmire of revolting twaddle written by people who think Jane Austen was a sweet little spinster penning pretty romances, it is a real relief to be reminded why we still bother. There are some gems to be found in the sludge, Gentle Readers, and Amanda Grange’s previous two books, (Mr.) Darcy’s Diary and Mr. Knightley’s Diary, are among them. We are pleased to relate that her latest offering, Captain Wentworth’s Diary, does not disappoint.

The point of these hero’s point of view tales is to present backstory, to show the parallel to the heroine’s journey. In this retelling of Persuasion we are given a real treat: the whole story of the summer of the Year Six, when Anne Elliot and Frederick Wentworth fell in love. Young Wentworth is as full of “intelligence, spirit, and brilliancy” as Jane Austen described him; fresh from his heroics at St. Domingo, he rolls into Somerset ready to dance and flirt with every pretty girl. The last thing he expects is to fall in love–especially not with the quiet Anne; and when he does, and offers for her, and is accepted, the very last thing he expects is for her to break their engagement. He leaves Somerset, injured and angry, to make his fortune. Eight years later, Napoleon has been confined on Elba, and the Royal Navy comes home; and of all the great houses in England to lease, his brother-in-law chooses Kellynch, the scene of that mortifying romance. Wentworth arrives, fresh from the painful scene of helping his friend Benwick cope with his fiancee’s death, still resentful at his own rejection, and convinced that Anne Elliot’s power with him was gone forever. The stage is set, and the game is on. (more…)

A special edition of Persuasions On-Line, the online journal of the Jane Austen Society of North America, looks at P&P05 with a variety of papers on all aspects of the film.

We haven’t had a chance to sit and read the new issue extensively but look forward to perusing all the papers (and invite AustenBlog readers over to the Molland’s forum to discuss it). We did quickly skim Barbara K. Seeber’s paper on various cinematic treatments of Mr. Bennet and were struck by this selection: (more…)

Forbes has included Jane Austen’s House (the official name for Chawton Cottage) on its list of Ten Must-Visit Private Homes.

Jane Austen’s House Museum in Hampshire, England, is a fine example of a 17th-century cottage, but what makes visiting it worthwhile has more to do with who lived there than what’s left.

Austen penned three novels in the eight-room home: Mansfield Park, Emma and Persuasion, and she spent time there revising Pride and Prejudice. Through the end of the month, visitors can view the original manuscript of Persuasion, on loan from the British Library, as well as such original pieces as Austen’s piano and dining room furniture.

Take it from us, Gentle Readers: if you ever have a chance to go to Chawton Cottage, do it.

Alert Janeite Lorna sent us a link to an announcement from Goucher College that Jane Austen scholar Devoney Looser, associate professor of English and literature coordinator at the University of Missouri, Columbia, has been named Goucher College’s 2007-2008 Burke Jane Austen Scholar-in-Residence.

Looser, the author of British Women Writers and the Writing of History, 1670-1820, will complete a weeklong research residency in the Jane Austen Collection of Goucher’s Julia Rogers Library next March, and she also will consult with students and faculty and deliver a public lecture.

We will try to keep an eye out for the announcement of the time and place of the public lecture.

All the Boy Movie Web sites and blogs are complaining about feeling emasculated just from watching the trailer for The Jane Austen Book Club film.

From Box Office Psychics:

Thinking of getting a male-to-female sex change but can’t afford those costly estrogen treatments? Just watch this trailer three or four times and you’ll be singing soprano in no time. Hell, I watched it once and immediately started lactating.

Hilarious!

From CHUD.com (warning: ungentlemanlike language):

Not true at all: I cannot wait to see The Jane Austen Book Club.

That was true when the project was announced last year, and it’s especially true now that the film’s trailer has made its online debut. I don’t care if Patricia T. O’Connor raved in the august pages of the Sunday New York Times book review supplement that Karen Joy Fowler’s novel, on which the movie is based, is “that rare book that reminds us what reading is all about.” For starters, O’Connor’s a skirt, so her taste is highly suspect, especially when Ms. Austen is involved; slap Austen’s name on the cover of a Tom Clancy’s Op Center thriller, and I guarantee you a whole mess of chicks’ll be swooning over the tech-laden prose as if it were put down by the Patron Saint of Dowdy Single Women her damn self. For another, even if Fowler’s tome is surprisingly decent, it’s now spawned a literary genre of women sitting around mis-interpreting great books as a means of explaining away their myriad emotional/physical inadequacies, and this I shall not abide.

Charming!

From the creatively titled I Watch Stuff:

The trailer to The Jane Austen Book Club somehow manages to combine all the reasons I’d never join a Jane Austen book club with all the reasons I’d never see a movie. In it, several women (I didn’t count or notice how many) collect to discuss the works of Jane Austen but soon discover their own love lives are mirroring those of Austen’s characters. Like how Monster Squad gave groups of kids that loved monsters the dream of one day encountering real ones, TJABC gives hopes to lonely middle-aged women they might one day find a man willing to tolerate their boring obsession with a long-dead author (though they are equally unattainable goals).

Didn’t they notice the girltouching?