Laurie Viera Rigler has resumed her series of blog posts on Jane Austen’s novels with Emma.

These “a-ha” experiences are high on the list of reasons why I love Austen. I have this theory that if you read her works enough times and really contemplate the life lessons therein, you can pretty much give up your psychotherapist. You can even reduce your library of self-help books to Austen’s six novels. They are so much fun to read, so satisfying, so full of dramatic tension and hilarious commentary, that you hardly know you’re getting a life lesson at all. Which is exactly how I like my life lessons delivered.

We agree that much of the genius of Jane Austen (and her continuing popularity) lies in the truth of her novels. John Murray wrote to Walter Scott about Emma, “It wants incident and romance, does it not?” Silly, silly man!

Alert Janeite Sarah sent us a link to a very amusing article in the New Yorker about the recent trend of memoirs that turn out to be mostly invention (and invention is what delights us in novels, after all).

And when history books are wrong they can be miserably, badly, ridiculously wrong, a point that wasn’t lost on Jane Austen, who, in 1791, when she was sixteen, wrote a brilliant parody of Oliver Goldsmith’s four-volume, march-of-the-monarchs “History of England, from the Earliest Times to the Death of George II.” (Goldsmith, the author of the novel “The Vicar of Wakefield,” wrote history to keep out of debtors’ prison.) Austen called her parody “The History of England from the Reign of Henry the 4th to the Death of Charles the 1st, by a Partial, Prejudiced & Ignorant Historian.” It consisted of thirteen perfectly dunderheaded character sketches of crowned heads of England. Of Henry V, she wrote, “During his reign, Lord Cobham was burnt alive, but I forget what for.” Of the Duke of Somerset: “He was beheaded, of which he might with reason have been proud, had he known that such was the death of Mary Queen of Scotland; but as it was impossible that he should be conscious of what had never happened, it does not appear that he felt particularly delighted with the manner of it.” Of the allegation that Lady Jane Grey, Edward VI’s cousin, read Greek: “Whether she really understood that language or whether such a study proceeded only from an excess of vanity for which I believe she was always rather remarkable, is uncertain.” Once in a great while, Austen happened to bump into a fact or two, for which she apologized: “Truth being I think very excusable in an Historian.”

In other book news, Alert Janeites Laurel Ann and Lisa sent us a couple of links to an article about Penguin’s new endeavor with ebooks, which will be “enhanced” with “a filmography, period book reviews, recipes and black-and-white illustrations.” We were concerned about formatting, but the Publishers Weekly article claims the enhanced ebooks will be compatible with all readers. It’s a pretty good idea, as there are so many nicely formatted ebooks of public domain texts available in every format that publishers will have to offer extra content to get readers to pay money for them. Jimmy Guterman of O’Reilly disagrees.

Although ebooks should have extras, those extras should take advantage of the interactive medium, not merely deliver more — and inferior — text.

Inferior? Jane Austen? Harrrumph. Or does he mean etexts are inferior to paper? Trust us, as a dedicated ebook user, once you start reading and get lost in the story, the medium in which the story is delivered becomes completely transparent. And besides, “interactive medium” indicates a connection to the Internet, which all ebook readers (meaning the electronic devices) do NOT have, and which many ebook readers (meaning people reading books) don’t want.

What’s most galling, of course, is that Penguin isn’t attempting to increase interest in ebooks as a medium by making these classics, long past copyright, available in free, un-DRM-encumbered formats. In an old-meets-new mashup, publishers could use free distribution of still-in-demand classics to generate interest in a form, ebooks, that is still only in the earliest days of its potential public acceptance. Wouldn’t you be more likely to try something new if it was free?

As we already pointed out, there are already tons of free ebooks of public domain texts available everywhere in every format. The publishers have to do something different to get people to buy them. We would like to see some scholarly notes and essays along with the more fun stuff, by the bye; there’s plenty of room for all.

In other news, two recent entries in Norm Geras’ Writer’s Choice blog series on Normblog mention Jane Austen. Meg Rosoff discusses the different layers of Pride and Prejudice:

Above and beyond the love story - people who would never consider reading the book have swooned over various film and TV versions - Pride and Prejudice is actually a book about class, about fortunes on the way up and down, inherited wealth versus new wealth, good marriages and bad, gentlemen and bounders, and the emerging English middle class at the end of the 18th century.

…and Olivia Lichtenstein writes about the continuing fascination of filmmakers with Pride and Prejudice:

In the past decade alone, Pride and Prejudice has spawned a BBC costume drama, an Oscar-winning feature film, a Bollywood version (Bride and Prejudice), the books Bridget Jones’s Diary and Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason, its sequel - arguably amongst the biggest of recent publishing sensations - and, of course, by extension, the two feature films they engendered. This year, a spoof Pride and Prejudice is planned, Jane Austen Handheld, a film which is to star Stephen Fry, Russell Brand and Lily Allen. I wonder whether frequent repetition diminishes the value of the original work of art, or at the least, people’s perception of it.

Naaaaaah.

And lastly, Alert Janeite Lisa pointed us to the Blogger News Network, which has a review of Pemberley Remembered, a new P&P sequel; we’ll have a review here at AustenBlog next week.

That’s it for Weekend Bookblogging, Gentle Readers, so until next week, remember: Books Are Nice!