Two new Jane Austen biofics each offer a peek into Jane Austen’s innermost thoughts before Sense and Sensibility was published:

Just Jane by Nancy Moser is a contemplative, diary-like exploration of Jane Austen’s thoughts on life, love, and writing. The narrative begins with Jane’s brief romance with Tom Lefroy, spends the majority of the book covering the time before any of her novels were published, then very quickly celebrates the success of Sense and Sensibility, Pride and Prejudice, and Mansfield Park, concluding with Emma’s publication. As Jane observes life around her she tries to find a place to call her own in her own family. She also strives to create meaning for her life through her writing, though she struggles with writer’s block and the uncertainty of whether her novels are any good.

Passages from Jane Austen’s letters are interwoven with new explorations of Jane’s inner feelings, frustrations, and personal triumphs. I found the difference in tone between the two a little uneven – there is a certain wit and sparkle to Jane Austen’s letters which is missing from this interpretation of her private thoughts – but overall the book steadily maintains the pursuit of what it means to be “just Jane”. Fans of A Walk with Jane Austen will appreciate Just Jane’s similar thoughtful pace and tone.

The Lost Memoirs of Jane Austen by Syrie James is inspired by the anecdotal story of Jane’s mysterious “suitor by the sea”. This romance is a fast, easy read; as the cover promises, I couldn’t put it down. I also think readers will eat this one up with a spoon due in no small part to the hero, who bears a strong resemblance to Richard Armitage. Jane meets him on a visit to Lyme: while walking up Granny’s Teeth on the Cobb, she slips and falls, but is safely caught in the manly embrace of Mr. Armitage Ashford. (Take that, “Butterfingers” Wentworth!) Mr. Ashford seems to be the perfect match for Jane, but will a secret destroy her chance for happiness?

Lost Memoirs is packed full of references to characters and scenes from Jane Austen’s novels. Many readers will enjoy recognizing Mrs. Jennings, Mr. Collins, and other favorites from the people Jane encounters in this story. Even the romance with Mr. Ashford moves along thanks to plot elements from several of Jane Austen’s novels. And unfortunately here is where I must be crabby: to me, a scene from Persuasion, followed by a scene from Sense and Sensibility, followed by a scene from Pride and Prejudice (and so on) make an entertaining YouTube video, but not a memorable novel in its own right. So many people Jane meets and so much of the action of Lost Memoirs will be directly reproduced in her novels that one wonders if Jane can be believed when she tells a friend that her aim in writing is to create, not reproduce. I would have liked to have seen more original characters and plot in Lost Memoirs instead of such heavy reliance on those Jane created.

But even with this criticism, The Lost Memoirs of Jane Austen kept my interest and was a pleasant way to pass an afternoon. Less picky readers will adore Mr. Ashford, love the tastefully done romance scenes, and have fun spotting all the references (and there are some obscure ones). Finally: if Jane Austen doesn’t deserve a good snog in a rowboat by Richard Armitage … well, I don’t know who does.

AustenBlog is giving away a copy of Just Jane by Nancy Moser. To enter the drawing, send an e-mail with your full name and mailing address to editor@austenblog.com by 10 p.m. Eastern time, Wednesday, November 21, 2007. (The contest is closed early, because the Editrix is a moron.)

We were fascinated with the premise of Lovers’ Perjuries, which is, as the subtitle plainly states, the courtship of Jane Fairfax and Frank Churchill. What would make a fine, upstanding young gentlewoman like Jane Fairfax agree to a secret engagement with a rather thoughtless fellow like Frank Churchill? What would lead a devil-may-care charmer like Frank Churchill to fall in love with the reserved, accomplished, destined for the governess trade Jane? Though these characters are so important to the story of Emma, we get little of their own story, and Joan Ellen Delman has a great deal of scope for presenting their courtship. Fortunately for the reader, Ms. Delman takes full advantage of this scope and presents a dense, meaty story that is true to the original while maintaining the reader’s interest in the diversion.

Jane Fairfax goes to Weymouth with her guardians, the Campbells, and Miss Campbell’s fiancé, Mr. Dixon; there she meets the charming Frank Churchill. They bond when they meet while independently attempting to assist Frank’s destitute former governess, and Jane finds herself often thinking of Frank while observing a Persuasionish love affair gone wrong among some acquaintances. When Frank is forced to leave Weymouth by his demanding aunt, he declares himself to Jane; she is really in love with him, and, having seen the heartbreaking results of refusing to enter a secret engagement in her friend’s affair, she agrees to her proposal against her better judgment.

Jane returns to Highbury, and Frank follows after a time; misunderstandings ensue from the clandestine nature of their relationship, none of which will be surprising to anyone who has read Emma. After Frank goes to London for a “hair cut,” he writes Jane a saucy note that is slipped among the Irish music that comes with the pianoforte: “What think you of Mr. Broadwood’s handiwork–is not he an excellent barber?” Our heart thrills with Jane’s at the totally inappropriate, totally welcome gift–a true gift of love, as Frank says in Jane’s hearing, knowing that Miss Woodhouse will misunderstand; and Jane knows that Miss Woodhouse will understand, and is distressed, but at the same time is pleased by it, and the reader is sympathetic to her dilemma and to her romance. Jane is in love, and at the same time mortified at the part she must play and the deception of those she loves and those she respects, and Frank’s behavior with Miss Woodhouse does little to help. She is jealous, he thinks she is overreacting, they quarrel and separate, and though we know how it will turn out, we are on tenterhooks anyway; but the ending is as romantic and lovely as that of the main characters of the original novel. And like in Mr. Knightley’s Diary, an unexpected minor character also gets a bit of late-in-life romance, leaving the reader wondering puckishly why Miss Woodhouse never turned her matchmaking talents in that direction.

We very much enjoyed the first, non-Emma part of the book, and expected the book to slow down some once they got to Highbury and the familiar part of the story, but we found ourself more deeply involved the further we read. Ms. Delman does an excellent job of fleshing out Jane and Frank and tells their story with tenderness and humor. It is beautifully written, with an excellent feeling for the period language. Great care is taken in getting all the details right, not only of the period but of the original book, though Ms. Delman does not have the firm, sure touch of Jane Austen with comedy (but then who does?). Lovers’ Perjuries is an absorbing, delightful read, and an excellent companion volume to Emma.

Review by Laurel Ann

Author Syrie James’s personal and professional accomplishments serve her well in her reverent presentation of The Lost Memoirs of Jane Austen. Her website brims with such a diversity of talents that one does not question why she is qualified to write about such a sensitive subject, but rather why she waited so long! Even Jane Austen’s discerning character Mr. Darcy might consider her one of the 12 most accomplished women of his acquaintance.

Breaching the hollowed halls of Jane Austen paraliterature is a daunting task for none but the stout-of-heart and thick-of-skin writer. Mrs. James wears her Austen-armor well and delivers a sincere and honest love story that will engage and delight most Jane Austen devotees, and raise an inquisitive eyebrow of the Austen purists. Her Jane is real and approachable, flesh and bone, human and fallible; — not the stour judgmental old maid envisioned in the 19th-century portraits. We feel her troubles, her joy, her pain, understand her life decisions, and appreciate her all the more for it.

It is not often that this discerning reader can offer unqualified praise, so I will not break my streak. Five Austen stars!

AustenBlog is giving away three copies of The Lost Memoirs of Jane Austen by Syrie James. This drawing is for U.S. residents only. To be entered in the drawing, please send your full name and mailing address to editor@austenblog.com by 10 p.m. Eastern time, Wednesday, November 21, 2007. (The contest is closed early, because the Editrix is an idiot who doesn’t know what day it is.)

The Guardian asked several writers, directors, and actors of period adaptations which one they liked best–and Persuasion 1995 proved a popular choice.

Sue Birtwistle Producer

Persuasion (1995)

I remember it well, not just because it was very well done but also because it was made at exactly the same time as we were filming Pride and Prejudice and there was a friendly rivalry. They were in Bath and we were up the road in Wiltshire and whenever a plane came over we used to shout: ‘Go and buzz over Persuasion and spoil their filming instead.’

Nick Dear’s adaptation was so fresh and Roger Michell directed it in a very fresh way. It was about real people, which is what we were trying to do with Pride and Prejudice. I love the book, it is very mature and it has got some fantastic lines. When Anne Elliot overhears Captain Wentworth say: ‘I wouldn’t have known her’ after they have been separated for seven years, it is a heart-stopping moment. Amanda Root played Anne Elliot and you could see what she was thinking, her hopes disappearing. It is a very good moment in drama.

We concur!

Olivia Williams Actress

Persuasion (1995)

I know the book embarrassingly well and the adaptation just nailed it all the way. It seemed to incorporate every important phrase and every performance got the characters as they were written in the book. There’s a tendency with adaptations to lighten things up; the perception is that people don’t want to watch something depressing on a Sunday evening. But here it was uncompromisingly horrible when it needed to be; Anne Elliot’s father and sister are truly unpleasant. And visually, the characters’ hair was falling down, men had a five o’clock shadow and the scenes were dark and shadowy - you felt they were genuinely operating in candlelight.

They were, actually.

Recently, there has been a move to embrace the fantasy side of adaptations and become very filmic, using flashback and special effects. It’s a tough one: are you trying to present the book? Are you saying this is a separate entity? And there will always be people who have got the book open on their lap. But I think that anything that shakes up the genre is good.

It occurs to us that Olivia Williams would have been a wonderful choice to play Anne Elliot.

Imelda Staunton Actress

Persuasion (1995)

It was shown on an Easter Sunday and I had had a lot of people over and I thought: ‘I’m knackered. I’ll watch the first few minutes and then record it.’ And within the first five minutes, I was hooked. It was extremely passionate and a bit messy. There was something earthy about it, unusually because we’d been fed a lot of perfect chocolate-box costume dramas. I like nothing better than a really good adaptation. I always get proud of seeing all these wonderful actors doing this sort of work because I think we do it really well in this country. We don’t do The Sopranos, but we do this and it is equally potent.

Hear, hear!

Thanks to Alert Janeite Lisa for the link.

She did.

We have wondered, off and on, in our copious free time, about That Other Mr. Darcy’s Diary, and the Daily Mail helpfully fills us in.

It’s an awfully good idea, one of those obvious ones which makes you wonder why it hasn’t been done before — the fictional diary of Mr Darcy

Probably because it has. Three or four times. Where you been, plebe?

Mr Darcy’s Diary’s strengths come from being carefully researched and full of painstaking period detail.

Well, that sounds like a plan!

And Slater adds colour to her hero by giving him lots of interesting friends and acquaintances: Lord Byron is one, trying ever to draw Darcy into acts of madness and badness.

Yeah, right. That’s why he’s hanging around Hertfordshire with Charles Bingley, Son of a Tradesman. Uh-huh.

He succeeds a couple of times, most spectacularly when — in a scene as far from the home life of our own dear Longbourn as it is possible to imagine — Darcy gets busy with two blondes during an orgy at Newstead Abbey.

*falls over laughing*

Honestly, it’s not even shocking anymore. It’s just hilarious. And not in a good way. “Oooh, Darcy has S-E-X! Sexy sex! With whores!” Honestly, this is written by an adult?

More endearing is the Jeeves and Wooster relationship between Darcy and his valet, Peebles

Peebles? Sounds more like his cat. Oh, and making Mr. Darcy into Bertie Wooster? Much as we adore Bertie, we don’t think so.

…who longs to get his master into more blingtastic attire.

That Darcy, he just screams “bling,” doesn’t he?

But then Slater’s Darcy is more of a New Man than Austen’s. He’s emotionally literate and perceptive; his reading of Lydia Bennet as tragic heroine and sacrificial lamb, for instance, borders on the revolutionary. He’s interested in good cooking, sensitive to his men-friends and into social justice and ethical investing (he won’t put his money into the slave trade). He’s cool with homosexuality, too.

In the fan fiction world, recreating a canon character to be The Man You Want Him To Be would fall under the category of Mary Sue and be righteously mocked for the immaturity and just plain bad writing that it represents. That’s right up there with making Legolas a vegetarian Buddhist who falls in love with the indigo-eyed teenaged human girl with flowing raven hair who falls through a time/space/logic anomaly in gym class and ends up in Mirkwood. Just because you’re not a lovestruck fourteen-year-old doesn’t mean you get away with it. We call Mary Sue.

Thanks to Alert Janeite Lisa for the link.

Alert Janeite Chris sent us a link to a radio play on BBC Radio 4 this Tuesday at 2:15 p.m. called “A City Full of Swindlers.” It might not sound like it has a Jane Austen connection, but read the description:

Cassandra Austen narrates the shocking story of her aunt’s arrest and imprisonment for stealing a piece of lace, a story which reveals Georgian Bath to be a far less decorous place than it appears in her sister Jane’s novels.

Oooh! That sounds good. You can listen live online and it looks like they archive for seven days after broadcast.

Alert Janeite Franka sent us a link (in Dutch) to an exhibition at the Centraal Museum in Utrecht. The exhibition is called “Script” and will include props and costumes from various films, including Sense and Sensibility 1995. Franka wrote,

The interesting bit is that you can take a picture of yourself in the filmsets, so you can ‘play your own part’ in for example S&S.

That sounds like fun!

The exhibition will be in the museum from December 2007 through August 2009, and the items will rotate; it is unknown when the items from S&S will be there.

The Independent has a report on Jane Austen Weekend in Lyme Regis. Unfortunately the piece smacks a little of let’s-mock-the-weirdo-Janeites. Surely there were some reasonable, ordinary Jane Austen fans who wanted to hang out together in Lyme?

Shervington speaks of the unflinching realism of Austen’s observations (”If you have wealth, it doesn’t mean you’re virtuous! Not at all!”), the radical nature of her authorship (”Until then, novels had been just on one subject! They were not respectable!”) and the courtesies afforded her by persons of distinction (”The Prince Regent invited her to Carlton House – which wasn’t open to the public at all!”).

She says that Austen’s few but pointed comments on the Peninsular War have been praised by historians. She then spreads out her treasures – the rose-coloured cockade of egret’s feathers that Austen wore to celebrate Nelson’s victory at the Nile, a thimble in an ivory case, and a collar in white cotton lawn, embroidered by her very own fingers.

Is it really that difficult to believe that seeing such artifacts would be incredibly interesting to a Jane Austen fan?

Whether their appreciation goes very deep, however, is another question. The man to whom I mention my dislike of Mr Bennet for his selfishness and irresponsibility is startled and says: “I think you’re being a bit postmodernist there.”

Why is that not deep? He disagrees with you. He’s allowed. The Editrix is a strong defender of Mr. Bennet in Janeite circles; though we acknowledge he’s not Father of the Year, we enjoy him as a character, and don’t think he is meant to be utterly condemned.

At one point there is music behind his words, as the memorial parade approaches with its marching band – an obbligato like that of the wars being fought at the time of the Austen heroines’ teatime flirtations. They file along the next street, visible through a gap in the houses. And as we glimpse them, we are reminded that some aspects of the world of Jane Austen are still with us and, sadly, always will be.

That’s not bad, but don’t think Jane Austen or her characters were unaware of the war, just because they did not talk of it much.

Germaine Greer’s wonderful columns in Radio Times during the ITV Jane Austen season were some of the most sensible things we can remember associated with those films, so we were pleased to see her essay in The Age related to her appearance at next week’s Jane Austen and Comedy conference in Melbourne; however, we were disappointed in some parts of the essay.

In Pride and Prejudice, Elizabeth Bennet has a real father, but he’s a bit of a bumbler who has made a foolish marriage and is incapable of governing his unruly gang of daughters. When Lydia runs off with the worthless Wickham it is Mr Darcy who fulfils the father role, by saving the family from disgrace and seeing that Lydia is properly provided for.

Mr Darcy is tall, haughty, unbending, unsmiling and master of Pemberley, while Mr Bennet is not even master of his own household.

Tall and haughty, yes; unbending, not so much by the end; but unsmiling? We protest! That is a libelous myth.

“It is your turn to say something now, Mr. Darcy. — I talked about the dance, and you ought to make some kind of remark on the size of the room, or the number of couples.”

He smiled, and assured her that whatever she wished him to say should be said.

and

“And your defect is a propensity to hate every body.”

“And yours,” he replied with a smile, “is wilfully to misunderstand them.”

and

Darcy smiled, and said, “You are perfectly right. You have employed your time much better. No one admitted to the privilege of hearing you, can think any thing wanting. We neither of us perform to strangers.”

and

“Of a fine, stout, healthy love it may. Every thing nourishes what is strong already. But if it be only a slight, thin sort of inclination, I am convinced that one good sonnet will starve it entirely away.”

Darcy only smiled, and the general pause which ensued made Elizabeth tremble lest her mother should be exposing herself again.

and

“It is a proof of your own attachment to Hertfordshire. Any thing beyond the very neighbourhood of Longbourn, I suppose, would appear far.”

As he spoke there was a sort of smile, which Elizabeth fancied she understood;

and

She paused, and saw with no slight indignation that he was listening with an air which proved him wholly unmoved by any feeling of remorse. He even looked at her with a smile of affected incredulity.

and

that she, his favourite child, should be distressing him by her choice, should be filling him with fears and regrets in disposing of her — was a wretched reflection, and she sat in misery till Mr. Darcy appeared again, when, looking at him, she was a little relieved by his smile.

and

Mr. Darcy smiled; but Elizabeth thought she could perceive that he was rather offended; and therefore checked her laugh.

He even smiles when he is offended!

In Emma, Mr Knightley has been in love with Emma Woodhouse since she was 13 and he was 30. For seven years he has blamed her and lectured her and she has “borne it as no other woman in England would have borne it”, so her reward is consummation with him.

Since she was 13? Not quite.

He had been in love with Emma, and jealous of Frank Churchill, from about the same period, one sentiment having probably enlightened him as to the other.

Really, if you’re going to claim that there is creepy Electra complex stuff going on in Jane Austen’s novels, it would behove one to ensure one has one’s facts straight.

Other parts of the essay are quite good and we recommend reading it. Once you get past the wth parts, it’s not bad.

Thanks to Alert Janeite Lisa for the link.

The collections manager for the Colchester and Ipswich museum society has a familiar sounding name…Jayne Austin. That actually is her married name. Imagine when she was dating Mr. Austin and began to think, “what if…?”

In 2001 she was married and found herself with the same name as a very famous writer.

She said: “Having a famous name was fun at first - it was an ice-breaker and good for getting people talking.

“Then it got a bit annoying but by now I am used to people commenting on it.”

The current exhibition at Ipswich Museum is quite applicable to The Other Jane Austen’s life as well.

Ipswich Museum is currently hosting an exhibition of items connected to the slave trade, focusing on the work of Suffolk abolitionist Thomas Clarkson.

Jane once wrote in a letter to Cassandra that had been in love with Thomas Clarkson, at least while reading his work.