Review by MJ Ryan

The following might be the most rhetorical questions ever posted on a blog dedicated to Jane Austen:

Raise your hand if you’ve fantasized about living in Regency England. Dreamt about meandering down the streets of Bath? Imagined meeting Herself in the flesh? Of course you have! It would be difficult to read any of Austen’s novels and not want to be there, such a great job she does of painting an appealing picture of her world. So imagine the surprise and pleasure of Courtney Stone, the heroine in Confessions of a Jane Austen Addict by Laurie Viera Rigler, when her fantasy comes true and she wakes up in Regency England in the body of a young woman named Jane Mansfield. Her first vision is of a servant coming to wait on her. Nice! Her second is not so pleasurable as Jane’s domineering mother enters the room. The third is downright terrifying as a doctor arrives to bleed her. (more…)

The San Jose Mercury News has a great article about Karen Joy Fowler, author of The Jane Austen Book Club, including her initial reaction to watching the film adaptation of her novel.

Swicord made many changes to Fowler’s book, including reassigning specific Austen novels to different members of the book club. That made for a somewhat disorienting experience for Fowler when she saw an early print of the film.

“I just sort of sat there the whole time thinking, well, I didn’t write that,” she said.

As someone who really loved the book, even though we enjoyed the film very much, there were a few of those moments for us, too. But actually the “assignments” sort of shift–both Sylvia and Prudie are a little bit Mansfield Park, and everyone gets in on the Persuasion action. That’s in keeping with Ms. Fowler’s own writing style, which had the Austen allusions shifting and coming at you in unexpected ways. (We were sad to lose the lone Sanditon reference in the novel, though.)

As for the printed page, Fowler was a trendsetter; new books with Austen themes seem to crop up every month. August alone brought us “Confessions of a Jane Austen Addict,” in which a brokenhearted contemporary woman wakes up in 1813 England; as well as the paperback edition of “Lost in Austen: Create Your Own Austen Adventure,” which invites the reader to play games involving Austen plots. For a running list of Austen-related projects in the works, see http://www.Austenblog.com, which has the very aptly named feature: “She’s Everywhere.”

Yes, she is.