A lock of (allegedly) Jane Austen’s hair made into mourning jewelry will go up for auction next week in Wiltshire.

The fine brown hair has been been made into a weeping willow, an often used symbol of mourning and also resurrection, with branches shading the decorated gravestone of Jane Austen.

Her name is lettered in hair strands on the gravestone.

While the willow/gravestone motif was not unknown for mourning images in Jane Austen’s time (we’ve seen some pieces of embroidery from the late 18th and early 19th century that use that motif), we think of hair jewelry such as that described as being more of a Victorian thing. Though check out this page–scroll down for a mourning ring that has a painting of the willow/gravestone motif and a lock of hair–but it’s not hair embroidery, like these pieces. The piece up for sale seems closer to the hair embroidery pieces from the description. If it really is using Jane Austen’s hair, perhaps one of her nieces or nephews had it made up years later. I believe Cassandra said in one of her letters that she saved several pieces of Jane’s hair for various people.

ETA 10 p.m.: In comments, Alert Janeite Chris added,

The auction date is actually 18th June and the Company is Dominic Winter Book Auctions. Their website has fully illustrated catalogues available ten or more days before the auction when close-ups will be viewable. The story has also appeared in a slightly longer version with a small picture in the Western Daily Press last Wednesday.

That article is very informative and shows a photo of the piece. There’s a little more about the piece; the provenance still seems rather sketchy. We’ll keep an ear to the ground for the results of the auction.

Cub Reporter Heather L. sent us a link to a page on author Candice Hern’s website, which has a photo of a similar piece of jewelry from 1792 all the way at the bottom of the page, so it seems to be proper to the period. This is all very interesting!

We already knew that Henry Tilney was profound. It’s nice pleasant when the rest of the world notices, however.

The last 10 years have been a “nice” decade, according to Bank of England governor Mervyn King.

He was of course using the word in an acronymous and strictly economic sense, a shortening of Non-Inflationary Consistent Expansion.

Oh, dear. We suspect Mr. Tilney would not approve.

That ambivalence is reflected in the origin of the word itself. Look in the Concise Oxford Dictionary and you see “pleasant, agreeable, satisfactory” and “(of a person) kind, good natured”. Look in the concise’s big brother, the Oxford English Dictionary, and you see an avalanche of meaning.

Dr Philip Durkin, principal etymologist for the OED, describes “nice” as having “one of the most complicated semantic histories in English”.

It’s a word that has come to mean almost the exact opposite of its first usage 700 years ago. Derived from early French, it originally meant “foolish” or “silly”.

Soon, it came to mean “wanton” or “dissolute”, mutating by stages to “showy” or “ostentatious”, and thence to “finely dressed” or “elegant”, then precise (as in “a nice distinction”) to “refined” and finally “respectable” or “decent”.

Now, says Dr Durkin, the meaning of “nice” has become maddeningly woolly: “It is a catch-all word,” he says.

There’s a telling bit of humour in Jane Austen when the Northanger Abbey character Henry Tilney ruminates on the word.

“It is a very nice word indeed,” he says. “It does for everything… now every commendation on every subject is comprised in that one word.”

No, he doesn’t approve.

A fellow’s written a book about nerds (how cute) that, we think, includes Mary Bennet. At least the article about the book included Mary Bennet.

Like Mary Bennet, the bookish, priggish younger sister in Jane Austen’s “Pride and Prejudice,” and Gussie Fink-Nottle, Bertie Wooster’s newt-obsessed chum in P.G. Wodehouse’s Jeeves stories, these boys fit neatly into Mr. Nugent’s machine category. Their passions don’t “revolve around emotional confrontation, physical confrontation, sex, food, or beauty”; their speech is oddly formal; they favor “logic and rational communication”; they are rule-bound, code-bound life forms.

They also are meant as comic characters with rather stunning personality flaws (at least Mary Bennet; we are rather fond of Gussie Fink-Nottle).

A production of Emma will be staged at the Bristol Old Vic in late June. It looks like there only will be four performances, so make your plans now if you wish to attend!

The Dorset Corset Theatre Company (oh my) will take a production of Northanger Abbey on the road to various theatres in the UK this autumn, fittingly starting in Basingstoke in September and running through November. It’s unclear if this is a new adaptation or one of the existing plays. It looks like auditions are in June and July, if anyone wants to try their hand.

The Pear Avenue Theatre in Mountain View, California, is presenting a stage adaptation of Northanger Abbey, which began May 16 and runs through June 8.

MetroActive has an article about the play.

The line between narration and dialogue blurs often, especially since actors narrate partly to the audience and partly to other characters. MacLeod is especially gifted in split-purposing narration to imply dialogue. At its most seamless, the device disappears, as when Catherine and Henry Tilney (Michael Barrett Austin) are riding together in a carriage and their third-personing each other comes off as intimate pet-talk. At its weakest, the narrative device gives the sense of repeated interruption that makes it difficult to fall into the world of the story. This, plus the lack of any dire drama in Austen’s story, recommends some trimming.

But Austen is meant to be sipped on a lazy afternoon, and this cast has the charm to make a pleasant sipping tea.

We hope to have a first-person report on the play eventually.

From an advice column: the querent asked about a friend whom she once wished to date, but he confided that he was in love with another woman–whom he had never dated. The advisor helpfully invokes…Lady Catherine de Bourgh.

Johanna, many people nurture a fantasy because it confers a mental gain for them. It may not be a productive way to live, but they reap a psychic benefit from doing it.

In Jane Austen’s “Pride and Prejudice” there is a noblewoman named Lady Catherine de Bourgh. Lady Catherine is a laggard whose only accomplishment in life was being born to a wealthy family. In one scene in the novel, during a discussion about playing the piano, Lady Catherine remarks, “If I had ever learnt, I should have been a great proficient.”

Lady Catherine’s fantasy allows her to overlook her own laziness and to pretend she owes her lofty position to intrinsic merit rather than an accident of birth.

What?