Dorothy’s just about disappeared from view behind the towering pile of books that have been arriving at AustenBlog World Headquarters the past few weeks. Our crack staff of reviewers is sitting up nights and burning too many candles, so expect to start seeing the reviews over the next few weeks (and we’ll be giving away copies of many of the books as well, including another copy of The Jane Austen Handbook).

Laurie Viera Rigler has a new site featuring her book Confessions of a Jane Austen Addict, hitting bookshelves as we write. The site is lovely and fun, with lots of Janeite links (including some cute YouTube videos), a blog, and information about upcoming appearances related to the book. We’ll have a review up soon.

Lori Smith, author of the upcoming A Walk With Jane, which will be published in October, has put together a Fact and Fiction in Becoming Jane page on her blog. She also will be offering virtual visits to book groups via telephone in November and December 2007; contact information is on the Following Austen blog.

Lost in Austen by Emma Campbell Webster (called Being Elizabeth Bennet in the UK) will be out in a few days as well. We know that many of our Gentle Readers would LOVE to be Elizabeth Bennet, so we imagine they are waiting for this one with bated breath. Emma has a new Web site as well and has relaunched her blog.

We have been accused of being a bit unfair to Shannon Hale and her book Austenland, which we really, really didn’t hate. Really. It’s a fluffy afternoon’s read and, as has been said, a good beach book. We just couldn’t identify with a heroine who is so embarrassed by her affection for Jane’s work that she would hide her P&P DVDs in the houseplants. The Editrix flies her Janeite freak flag proudly, you see. We suspect that many of our Gentle Readers (especially those who are fond of Colin Firth post-pond) will enjoy this book.

We also would like to remind our Gentle Readers of some of the Editrix’s recent favorite Austen-related books and encourage you to give them a try. Patrice Hannon’s Dear Jane Austen is a lovely and intelligent imagining of Jane Austen (in the same vein as Becoming Jane, but you won’t want to throw your popcorn at it); we loved Graphic Classics’ wonderful graphic novel anthology Gothic Classics, including adaptations of Northanger Abbey and The Mysteries of Udolpho; The Family Fortune by Laurie Horowitz, which we never reviewed (why didn’t we review it?), but it is a pretty good modern take on Persuasion and is out in paperback; the long-anticipated Captain Wentworth’s Diary by Amanda Grange, which we thoroughly enjoyed, so much that we wanted to roll around in it when we were done reading it; we know many of our Gentle Readers are looking forward to the U.S. publication of Mr. Knightley’s Diary in October, too. Make room on your bookshelves, Gentle Readers and Janeites, and read on!

Alert Janeite MJ Ryan wrote to tell us that there will be a free screening of P&P 2005 at The Magnolia theater in Dallas on Monday, August 20, at 7 p.m. The Dallas Theater Center will be at the screening to give away tickets to their upcoming stage production of Pride and Prejudice, which runs from August 29-September 23.

With luck, it will be posted tomorrow. We hoped for tonight but were distracted whilst looking up “one thing” in Family Record. Famous last words. On to the news!

Alert Janeite Rebecca sent us an article from the CBC about Becoming Jane as well as other Austen film adaptations, which we mostly rather enjoyed (she mentions the Barbie P&P!) though with a couple of quibbles.

As soon as the casting of The Devil Wears Prada star Anne Hathaway was announced, Janeites were protesting that she was too pretty.

Honestly, most of us were complaining more about the Made Up Story than about Miss H.’s relative prettiness. Why wouldn’t we want Jane to be pretty?

Of Persuasion 95:

Many Janeites commend the two leads — Amanda Root, a relative unknown, and Irish character actor Ciarán Hinds — for being kind of homely.

HOMELY? Argh.

Entertainment Weekly has a review of the film, as does the Chicago Tribune.

But the idea that every work of art has direct, identifiable roots in reality is too simplistic. And in film and fiction alike, it leads to a scavenger-hunt approach to biography, as complicated lives are reduced to a sequence of possible clues.

But the biggest problem with this approach may be the way it turns biopics into second-hand versions of the artists’ work. That’s the major issue with “Becoming Jane,” a film that reinvents British writer Jane Austen into a character in a broad Austen pastiche.

[. . .]

But it’s hard for the film to escape the shadow of Austen’s superior talent when it filches so much from her books. And by implying that every aspect of her work came directly from life, it sells her creativity short. The filmmakers clearly respect Austen. So why present her as a mere stenographer, dutifully taking dictation from the world around her?

Well said.

More eBay fun…Alert Janeite Laurel sent a link to an auction of an engraving of Catherine Morland reading what is clearly a very horrid novel. (Not really an auction, it’s a Buy It Now, but you know what we mean.) It’s the same illustration as this one at Molland’s (which Laurel sent us some years ago); though we were once informed it was from the 1833 Bentley editions of Jane Austen’s novels, the auction claims it is from an 1892 book, Character Sketches of Romance, Fiction and Drama by Rev. E. Cobham Brewer. It should, however, be pointed out that the Bentley editions were reprinted many times, so the origins of the illustration may have been lost by the time the Rev. Mr. Brewer ran across them. And this one’s certainly less spendy than the Brock we linked the other day.