Yep, she’s everywhere
The Cleveland Plain Dealer has a nice article on the popularity currently enjoyed by Jane Austen, featuring JASNA’s North Shore (Ohio) Region.
Jane Austen’s sarcastic, wry and pithy drawing-room dramas of curtsies and bows, pianoforte concerts, girls without dowries, meddling mothers and country dancing offer a comforting escape from the cold age of technology, said University of Cincinnati professor Barbara Britton Wenner. “E-mail does not equal missives delivered on a platter by a servant, and book clubs do not equal reading Shakespeare’s sonnets by firelight after dinner.”
And Jane isn’t chick lit. Manly Gregory Peck, who discovered her books at the age of 12, used to take all six of her novels with him on literary retreats. He said that reading Jane calmed him.
*gasp* Captain Hornblower! Oh, wouldn’t he have been an awesome Wentworth or Knightley?
We loved this story:
And lots of people read Jane. As she does before each Dec. 16, Fernberg went to Heinen’s to order a cake with which the club, whose 40 members range in age from 20 to 82, would fete their favorite author’s birthday. While Fernberg ticked off each of the novels to chronologically depict in frosting, the clerk behind the bakery counter corrected the order. “She said, “No, Emma’ came before Persuasion,’ ” said Fernberg.
*applauds*
But most of all, Jane — who celebrated the women who often were not the prettiest in the room, but the smartest — invites readers and moviegoers to imagine eventually being adored, just like Elinor Dashwood in “Sense and Sensibility,” or Elizabeth Bennet in “Pride and Prejudice,” said Fernberg. “All of us would like to think there is someone out there who thinks we are special.”
Awww! Congratulations to the North Shore Region for a great article! The Plain Dealer also had a sidebar about various film adaptations.
November 8th, 2007 at 2:15 pm
Gregory Peck is a FOJ–that’s awesome! I loved him in Roman Holiday (with Audrey Hepburn). He’d good as Atticus Finch too.
November 8th, 2007 at 2:22 pm
Chantel–thanks, I hadn’t checked off F.O.J. as a category, but I should have.
Awesome, isn’t it? Greg Peck was just a fabulous man and actor.