To celebrate the paperback publication of Confessions of a Jane Austen Addict by Laurie Viera Rigler, we are giving away a copy of the new paperback edition of the novel. To be entered in the drawing, send your full name and mailing address and your Jane Austen Addict confession to austenblog AT gmail DOT com. How have you embarrassed yourself for Jane Austen? (And yes, this is open to readers outside the U.S.) ETA: entries due by Saturday, May 10, at 10 p.m. U.S. Eastern time.

Congratulations to the winners of last week’s Spring Book Giveaway contest: Rebecca W. won a copy of The Darcys Give a Ball by Elizabeth Newark; Vicki R. (aka Baja Janeite) won a copy of Emma and Knightley by Rachel Billington; Marybeth won a copy of The Watsons and Emma Watson by Joan Aiken; Mariflor won a copy of Old Friends and New Fancies by Sybil Brinton; and Vicki K. won a copy of The Pemberley Chronicles by Rebecca Ann Collins. The winners all will receive notification e-mails shortly.

We recently added several titles to our collection of e-texts at Molland’s Circulating-Library for the reading enjoyment of all Janeites.

As a result of many user requests, we’ve expanded the section on Jane Austen’s work to include Lady Susan, Love and Freindship (which includes Love and Freindship, of course, Lesley Castle, The History of England, and other juvenilia), and The Watsons. We are considering adding Sanditon as well so it will be included in the all-texts search index.

One addition that we’re really pleased about is a subject guide to the third edition of Jane Austen’s letters, edited by Deirdre Le Faye. The index is meant to complement the existing biographical, topographical, and general indices in the letters. Del Cain, a retired librarian from Florida, made these notes for his own use on index cards, which he then typed up. He asked for our help in putting the index online, and we have arranged it by one letter of the alphabet per page. We are trying to think of a way to make the index downloadable and printable without it being a huge PDF.

Janeites who have been enjoying her work on the Internet for a long time will remember Cathy Dean’s e-texts archive, which included some biographies and introductions to various editions of Jane Austen’s novels. Word reached us last year that the site had gone dark, though the texts were still available via the Internet Archive (but for how long?). We managed to track down Ms. Dean and ask if we could transfer the e-texts to Molland’s, and she gave her permission. We thank her for it! Among the items we’ve transferred are two book-length Austen biographies, Jane Austen and Her Times by G.E. Mitton (which is very charming) and Jane Austen by O.W. Firkins (less charming, but interesting to read from a historical perspective).

We’ve also included two family biographical works: James Edward Austen-Leigh’s A Memoir of Jane Austen and Jane Austen, Her Life and Letters: A Family Record by William Austen-Leigh and Richard Arthur Austen-Leigh (the original 1913 text). There also are some new shorter pieces. We have a stack of other texts to scan and add to this growing collection, so stay tuned! In the meantime, we hope you enjoy reading some of these texts, which are fascinating from a historical perspective. The 21st and even the 20th century have no lock on Jane Austen scholarship. Also, we’re very interested in user feedback, so let us know how you use the texts and how they can be improved.

We’ve posted about this before, but since we talked about it as part of our presentation at the JASNA Super Regional event in Rochester this past weekend, we thought it was time to post it again: one of our favorite Jane Austen sites on the Internet, the Augusta Burke Notebooks at Goucher College Library’s website.

Augusta Burke was a Janeite who, beginning in the 1930s, amassed an incredible collection of Jane Austen first editions, letters, and other memorabilia, most of which she bequeathed to Goucher College, her alma mater. Part of the collection is a series of notebooks in which Mrs. Burke pasted articles and clippings that referenced Jane Austen and her work. She kept these notebooks from 1935 until her death in 1975.

The Jane Austen Collection website also contains a PDF of a booklet printed in 2000 for the 25th anniversary of the collection. The booklet includes a letter from Mrs. Burke’s husband, Henry, one of the founders of JASNA, to the director of the Pierpont Morgan Library in which he explains about the notebooks. We loved this quote:

Alberta started keeping notebooks where even the most casual Austen reference merited an entry. Approximately 2,800 items of this sort have found their way into 10 notebooks which are now a part of the Austen collection. Anything worth clipping was pasted into the notebooks…The three big items which almost filled a notebook apiece were the production of Helen Jerome’s Pride and Prejudice, the movie with Laurence Olivier and Greer Garson, and the musical First Impressions.

Other highlights of the notebooks include receipts for and correspondence about the items that the Burkes acquired for their collection–including a first edition of Emma, uncut and in boards (which means it’s never been read) for $135! A first edition of P&P for £15 8 shillings!

We encourage our readers to spend some time surfing around the notebooks. However, make sure you have several hours to kill–you’ll get lost in there.

The Telegraph has a piece about traveling to the places where Jane Austen lived, including Bath, Steventon, and Chawton. Of Bath:

But it’s still a glorious place. When we arrived it was flooded with light and filled with teatime chatter. A musical trio played in one corner, much as their forebears must have done when the heroine of Northanger Abbey, Catherine Morland, first walked in, open-mouthed in wonder, her eyes “here, there, and everywhere”.

We weaved towards the four-headed pump spouting its warm, sulphurous waters. From the window, we caught a glimpse of the Roman Baths below. For once we had the advantage over Austen, as the great watery Temple was only properly excavated in 1897, 80 years after the author’s death.

Thank you!!!! People forget that the Roman baths weren’t a feature of Bath in Jane Austen’s time–they were aware of them but they had not yet been excavated.

After a anachronistic “Minerva Smoothie”

Anachronistic? Wouldn’t that be kind of like a syllabub?

Alert Janeite Mary sent us a link to an interview with Gina Fattore, staff writer for the television show Californication, on Studio 360 in which Ms. Fattore talks about how she was inspired by Jane Austen, via Clueless, to become a screenwriter. She talks about the universality of Jane Austen’s novels and how seeing Clueless made her realize that they are not just about “horses and carriages and corsets.” Nicely said!

Perhaps we expect too much from a site called “On Line Opinion” (you know what they say about opinions and a certain vulgar body part…everyone’s got one) but this fellow’s essay about God in Jane Austen’s novels is rather ill-informed even for the World Wide Web.

It is safe to say that God does not appear as a character in the novels of Jane Austen. The church is certainly present as a respectable profession for second sons, but such sons are not moved by any religious sensibility but by the necessity of obtaining a place in society.

Clergy may be enthralled to worldly prestige and goods like Mr Collins in Pride and Prejudice or simply solid and noble like Edmund in Persuasion but they do not appear to be moved by the Spirit of God. Indeed they show little difference in character to any other character in the novels.

We would recommend that the author read Irene Collins’ fine works on Jane Austen, particularly Jane Austen and the Clergy, before attempting to write upon this subject again. (We also would recommend Jane Austen, the Parson’s Daughter.) He would then be informed that all of Jane Austen’s clergymen (yes, even Mr. Collins) are very much representative of the clergy of her time. We would also recommend Irene Collins’ books for our readers as well!

There still are some bits to finish up from last week’s UK broadcast of Miss Austen Regrets. The Telegraph’s Stephen Pile said:

At the start of the 21st century we are all madly interested in What Jane Austen Was Really Like, but the reports are confusing. In the cinema Becoming Jane showed us an intelligent woman who was nonetheless feminine and romantic, but television is not so easily fooled and has come up with something far more complex.

In Miss Austen Regrets (BBC1, Sun) she had an utterly different set of boyfriends from the film (Rev Bridges, Bigg-Wither and even, controversially, Dr Haden, but no sign of the racy Lefroy). What emerged was Jane Our Contemporary.

The Times’ Roland White seems less than pleased.

Yet the Jane Austen portrayed so brilliantly here by Olivia Williams was hardly a role model for today’s spiky, independent career girls. For all her bravado on the subject, she was obsessed by the one thing that eluded her - Mr Right. It was pretty much all she talked about: partly advising her niece and partly reflecting on her own lack of success.

We feel as though we should paraphrase Edward Austen from the film–”If that’s what you think it is about, perhaps you should watch it again.”

Whereas the Guardian’s Andrew Anthony is in raptures.

Surely not even the most devoted member of the Jane Austen Society would have thought that what British television needed just now was another costume drama of early 19th-century social manners featuring Hugh Bonneville. And yet Miss Austen Regrets was a sublime delight. Olivia Williams as Austen grabbed our sympathy with throwaway epigrams, and such was the spirit of the piece, that every visual cliche seemed almost fresh.