Pride and Prejudice has inspired filmmakers, authors, and of course readers for 200 years, so it is perhaps not wonderful that there currently are three musical adaptations of Pride and Prejudice that we know of. We blogged about one last week that should see Broadway next year sometime, and we previously have written about another adaptation that is being seriously considered by some regional theaters. Ms. Place of Jane Austen’s World reminds us that the latter production is posting an mp3 of a different song from the soundtrack each week; the current song available for download is “A Husband,” sung by Mrs. Bennet. We have a CD of this soundtrack and will be reviewing it as soon as we have some quiet time to give it the proper attention. A sampler of each song is available on the play’s Web site.

Ms. Place also discovered a third adaptation, first performed in 1986 and more recently staged in 2003 after some rewriting. Samples of the songs from that adaptation are also available.

The good news to take from this is that it is likely that at least one of these plays might be coming to a theater near you!

We really are trying to be Zen about Becoming Jane, and are pleased to see all the attention that Jane Austen and her work are receiving as a result of the film.

WUBR Radio’s On Point did a show about Jane Austen, featuring Austen scholars Claudia Johnson of Princeton University and Jenny Davidson of Columbia University and Lev Grossman of Time, whose article about Jane Austen we linked to a few days ago. There’s even a tiny shoutout to AustenBlog in there. We had some trouble listening with the onboard media player, so downloaded it as a podcast. Thanks to Alert Janeite Ruth for the link!

Ann Maloney embraces her inner Janeite in the New Orleans Times-Picayune.

Some have said that Austen became a writer because she couldn’t find “Mr. Right,” but I believe that she wrote because she was a natural-born psychologist, an astute and witty observer of the human condition.

Her well-drawn characters are not purely noble. They jump to conclusions and make terrible mistakes and awfully bad choices. They compromise and settle to get what they need.

Read the novels when you are 14 and they are romances. Read them at 25 and they are treatises on the struggle of being an intelligent female in a male-dominated society. Read them at 45 and relish the social satire and the complexity of the human condition.

I like to imagine that when I die and go to heaven (presuming I do), I will discover a dusty trunk in the seaside room that God has set aside for me. When I look inside that trunk, it will be filled with Austen novels I’ve never read.

Now that would be paradise.

Indeed! Thanks to Alert Janeite Lisa for the link.

The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette has an article about Jane Austen the Hollywood phenomenon.

But in Austen’s case, audiences can’t seem to get enough and supply is growing to meet demand: Some 40 feature films and television shows or series have been based on her works. (No. 1 Shakespeare has 400 features alone, with Dickens not a close second.)

Wow!

And lastly, here’s one for the Darcy fans: an appreciation of Mr. Snooty McJerkpants from The Buffalo News.

He has a funny name: Fitzwilliam Darcy. His occupation is even worse: “gentleman.” (Ugh.) He’s cold, aloof, stoic and proud to the point of arrogance. “Haughty, reserved and fastidious,” in fact, are some of the kinder words Jane Austen used to describe Darcy in her novel, “Pride & Prejudice.”

There doesn’t appear to be much to like about this gentleman, Mr. Fitzwilliam Darcy, one of the two central characters in Austen’s book. (The other is the intelligent and witty Elizabeth Bennet, whose silly family and lack of money act as a wall between her and Darcy.)

But Darcy isn’t all bad. He is the embodiment of tall, dark and handsome, after all. He’s also loyal to a fault and willing to do whatever it takes to protect and help those he loves.

Go read it. You know you want to.

Alert Janeite Ann sent us a link to an article about grammatical errors that contained the following:

The truth is that writers–even great, dead ones–sometimes make grammatical errors.

In Pride and Prejudice, for example, Jane Austen’s narrator says, “Every body declared that he [Wickham] was the wickedest young man in the world; and every body began to find out that they had always distrusted the appearance of his goodness.”

To be correct, she should have written “and people began to find out that they had always distrusted the appearance of his goodness.”

This doesn’t mean Jane Austen was anything less than a brilliant writer. Grammar is important, but it’s not the hallmark of great writing. Rather, it’s a tool to help us express ourselves and understand others.

But using “people” instead of “every body” in that context ruins the repetitive cadence of the first clause of the sentence:

“Every body declared that he [Wickham] was the wickedest young man in the world; and
every body began to find out that they had always distrusted the appearance of his goodness.”

It’s art, people! To heck with grammar!

Alert Janeite Lisa let us know that Carl Davis, the composer of the music in P&P95 along with many other productions, has been named an honorary CBE (he is an American citizen, that’s why it’s honorary) by the Queen. Congratulations to Mr. Davis!