Greetings, Gentle Readers! It’s time for another review of news items and posts about Jane Austen’s work to start off your weekend.

Scotland’s National Library is opening an exhibition featuring items from the John Murray Archive related to Jane Austen.

The display, which will open next week, includes a sales book showing that the second edition of Mansfield Park sold only 36 copies.

Oh dear! But we’re sure the exhibition will be fascinating. The exhibition is open every day; Monday-Friday from 10 a.m. until 8 p.m., Saturday from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m., and Sunday from 2 to 5 p.m.

If you’ve ever wanted to study Jane Austen’s work at Oxford but can’t afford plane fare, here’s your chance, sort of. Oxford University will present an online course on Jane Austen’s work from September through December 2008.

Many readers enjoy Austen’s novels but cannot define the qualities that make them so special and enduring. This course will help you to analyse Austen’s style and techniques, and give you a greater knowledge of the novels’ context, which will enhance your understanding and enjoyment of reading them.

Sounds like a great course, but a bit spendy for those of us outside the EU.

Writer’s Block discusses reading Jane Austen to improve your writing.

But what Austen did, that many writers, if not most, can and could not, was to not only encapsulate the spirit of the age, but she also captured the spirit of the human condition. Underneath all the 18th Century finery lays a picture stripped bare of all the outer pretension. There are just people: sensible people, vain people, silly people, innocent people, conflicted people, horrible people…and the list goes on. The outer aspects/attributes of them all might change, but the inner drives and motivations are remarkably unchanged from age to age. Pick up any Austen story, and you’ll find the emotions you felt when you were this age, or the exact sketch of your best friend or worst enemy at that age.

So true! And we say that all the time. Fashions change, societies change, but people do not, and Jane Austen wrote about people.

And a couple of fun blog posts to round off this week’s Bookblogging. First, Xantippe posts about the Amazing Jane Austen Diet. No, not white soup and negus, but listening to audiobooks of Jane Austen’s novels while on the treadmill! What a great idea! And the Baklava Shed Coalition tells us that Jane Austen is selling off her plants. She’s selling off her plants kind of like how That Lefroy Boy is Mr. Darcy, but at least he admits he’s delivering his content with a wink!

That’s it for this week’s Friday Bookblogging. Until next time, Gentle Readers, remember: Books Are Nice!