Alert Janeites Julie T. and Joan Ellen let us know that Stephen Colbert mentioned Jane Austen during his promo on The Daily Show last night.

Well, we wish he WOULD write it!

We wish we were in Bath this summer (actually we wish we were there most of the time), but we can enjoy the offerings of the Centre’s Web site anywhere we have Internet access.

Check out the new quiz, which is pretty tough! We are told the questions will rotate occasionally, so check back often.

Also, Chapter 7 of There Must Be Murder has been posted. Catherine gets some distressing news and overhears an interesting conversation, but may herself become the subject of unkind gossip.

The Centre’s online magazine offers its usual excellent selection of new articles, including a period recipe for lemonade, Jane Austen’s final piece of writing, a review of Persuasion 2007, a biography of George III, and instructions for making a chatelaine.

This month’s sample article from Jane Austen’s Regency World is “Rejecting Jane,” in which slightly reworked bits of Jane Austen’s novels were sent to unsuspecting literary agents and publishers, with mixed but predictable results; but if that was the real query letter they sent, we suspect that was the cause of the rejections more than the content of the work.

We thought things were a little quiet on the Becoming Jane front, considering that the film opens in two weeks, but have been in strict training for Harry Potter Weekend so appreciate the lack of distraction. However, a few things popped up today, and we begin to think that rather than laying low, the film’s been kicking around for so long between Europe and the Antipodes that its imminent arrival in the States is something of an anticlimax. Instead of obeying the dictum No News Is Good News, perhaps what we’ve been seeing is a result of the law of physics No News Really Is No News. The other day, we had Anne Hathaway refuting rumors that Ang Lee talked her into taking the role. Does anyone care? Or are we really reduced to posting articles about Anne Hathaway’s dog? For Ang Lee may not have helped, but the dog apparently did. (more…)

The Marine Theatre in Lyme Regis is organizing a Jane Austen Weekend on November 10-11, 2007. They cannot promise any sailors waiting around to rescue swooning women, but have planned a full schedule of events, including a talk by Lyme Regis expert Diana Shervington (a descendant of one of Jane’s brothers); afternoon tea; an evening performance of “Jane Austen, An Elegant Portrayal,” a play by the Phoenix Theatre Company, including “readings from her letters and dramatized extracts from some of her best loved novels”; a film adaptation of one of Jane’s novels at the historic cinema, The Regent; and a tour of the Lyme Regis locations of the film of Persuasion.

Alert Janeite Julie sent us a scan of a drawing of Jane Austen in the July 23, 2007 issue of Time (click on the thumbnail to see a larger version). The article is about authors’ “guilty pleasure” summer reading, and presumably Jane’s is French Women Don’t Get Fat. Um, okay.

Alert Janeite Carmen reports that Sally Hawkins won the Best Actress award for her role in Persuasion 2007 at the Montecarlo Television Festival. (Here’s an article in Spanish as well.)

Alert Janeite Marie sent us a link to a post at Shannon Hale’s blog, where she explains the line in Austenland that we snarked about a while back. First, the line:

Sure, Jane had first read Pride and Prejudice when she was sixteen, read it a dozen times since, and read all the other Austen novels at least twice, except Northanger Abbey (of course).

Now, the defense:

So why that line in austenland? Because if you were to take a broad poll of non-scholarly readers of Austen, those who read her for fun, the one book that most of them won’t have read or else won’t have enjoyed as much as the others is Northanger Abbey. (Quite often I find they will have started it but never bothered to finish.)

After we read the book we thought it might have been a bit of an inside joke, since the main character is a bit Catherine Morlandish in taking Firth!P&P a little too seriously, but decided that was a trifle subtle for this book.

A mild amusement at Francesco Explains It All: Jane Austen’s Summer Newsletter.

So to pass the time we have conscripted our very selves to the duty of throwing a fete of such exuberance and conviviality forthwith hereto this coming week’s end. There shall be pointed yet diverting disquisitions of the predicament of unmarried decorous English women in these times. There shall be inumerable opportunities to demonstrate the purity of our secular spirituality. There shall penetrating explorations of the uncertainty that forever rules our moral situation. And there shall be the revelation of a great love, presented with detached irony, hardy realism and pleasing results for who object to both wild abandon and great caculation