Free screenings of Becoming Jane
U.S. only, select cities…go get ‘em.
The story of Jane Austen’s Shocking Publishing Rejection, which we blogged about last week, has been picked up by every news outlet in the known universe. We are a little astonished at how few of them looked beneath the surface to ask why all those agents and publishers rejected slightly reworked Jane Austen novels. Among those reasons could be, as we said last week: the plagiarized work was recognized and rejected without comment; the query letter was so bad the readers never got to the plagiarized work; the submission did not conform to the recipient’s submission guidelines, so was automatically rejected without comment. The exercise was silly in our opinion. Anyone who knows anything about publishing immediately recognized that it was an invalid argument to say “Jane Austen couldn’t get published today.” If Jane Austen were writing today, her work would be very different–because she wasn’t around 200 years ago to shape modern literature. It’s sort of like in the film “It’s a Wonderful Life” when Clarence says to George that Harry Bailey wasn’t a war hero who saved a transport full of soldiers; every man on the transport died because Harry wasn’t there to save them, because George wasn’t there in childhood to save Harry from drowning when he broke through an icy pond. Taking Jane Austen’s work out of its contemporary context invalidates the whole “experiment.” But as a publicity stunt, it worked a treat. 
Andrew Franklin, the publisher and managing director of Profile Books, responded in the Independent, saying pretty much everything we’ve been saying about this all along. (more…)
