Baja Janeite sent us an eBay auction that might be of interest–P&P and NA comic books in Spanish! Bidding ends Friday at 8 a.m. Eastern time, so make haste!
Mr. Tilney looks like kind of a continental fellow–Roman hands and Russian fingers, if you follow us. 
(Or maybe that’s John Thorpe? Catherine looks pretty annoyed…or it’s Capt. Tilney hitting on Isabella, but then she shouldn’t look annoyed, should she?)
We had a great chat with Lori Bajorek, the producer of the musical adaptation of Pride and Prejudice, written by Lindsay Warren Baker and Amanda Jacobs, that will open on Broadway sometime next year. We attended a reading of the show last year; we went in curious, hopeful, wanting something great but still skeptical (it’s not like we’ve never been burned by a Jane Austen adaptation before) but were completely won over by the fun, funny, intelligent show, which is not just Pride and Prejudice but includes Jane Austen herself as a character. Jane discovers the rejection letter she received from Cadell for First Impressions, and decides to work on the book and try to get it published. She interacts with the characters, giving them direction but letting them tell the story. It’s a lovely, complex play, thankfully not a bit dumbed down, with beautiful music and memorable songs. We’re pretty excited about the idea of this going to Broadway, so we were also really excited to speak with Ms. Bajorek and hear her passion for the project. (Click on the photos for larger versions)
What attracted you to this play?
I’ve been friends with Amanda for ten years and I’ve watched her on this journey of writing it. When I went to see the show when it was produced by the Ohio Light Opera, I met a man who had been there three times. The last show was sold-out and standing room only, and I said, “I want to be part of this.”
Were you a Janeite before you became producer of this play?
I would not consider myself to be a Janeite, but I have a deep respect for people who are Janeites. Everybody I meet either is or knows somebody who is in love with this novel. My background is marketing, and I started to do research to find out why so many people liked Jane Austen. One out of a hundred would be good, but I found it was more like one out of two knew the novel. I didn’t realize what an icon Jane Austen was. I read the book in high school and never revisited it. When I decided I was going to do something with the show, I needed to quickly find out who was who in the story, so I rented Bride and Prejudice. I fell in love with it. My mother-in-law is a Janeite and has read the book about 17 times. She has every adaptation. I handed her the script and asked her, “Are we on the right track?” and she said she liked it. I didn’t have enough knowledge to base upon when there were so many people who knew more about it. I asked them, “Tell me what you think,” and they said we captured the essence of Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice. There are a trillion adaptation of this beloved novel, but this one was special.
I’m not a Janeite but I’m a woman who understands what it’s like to try to do something outside the box, and I became more obsessed with the Jane Austen character being a writer and trying to make decisions on her own, and having her novel rejected and then deciding to go ahead and work on it again and try again to get it published. If you get to the core of what makes a woman a woman and what makes Jane Austen an icon is that she went against the odds and did something amazing, though nobody was out there being her supporter, she was able to create a masterpiece that still exists today. She’s brilliant. The world needs to know that this was not an author who just wrote amazing love stories, this is a woman who was a pioneer, and that’s what inspires me about this play. (more…)
Alert Janeite Julie P. sent us a link to the next cross-stitch chart in the Jane Austen series: stitch up Rosings Park, and have a little bit of Lady Catherine with you all the time! We dare say Mr. Collins would admire it as it should be.
The Times has an article on Jemima Rooper, who is playing Amanda, the time-traveling character who swaps with Elizabeth Bennet in Lost in Austen. The article is mostly about the actress with only a little bit about the program–though we’re thinking that the timing of this article is not completely coincidental.
Her next role - and one that could be her breakthrough into living rooms across the land - is in ITV1’s primetime autumn spectacular Lost in Austen. Rooper plays a modern woman who steps into the plot of Pride and Prejudice. It gives her a chance to display a fine range, from serious to slap-stick: “I turn up at balls and don’t know the steps, but I’m pretty outspoken, so slowly start to influence other women and change the plot of the novel.”
Paging Mary Sue, Mary Sue, please pick up the white courtesy phone…
The blog What Would Virginia Do? (We believe that refers to Virginia Woolf) has an entry relating to the Telegraph article we posted the other day complaining about All Those Jane Austen Adaptations.
How can this character be based on Lizzie Bennett? Bright, sparkly, proud, sharp as a tack Lizzie; the young woman who loves her friends, despairs of her parents, and won’t accept the condescension of Mr Darcy - refusing him until he shows a little respect rather than humiliating herself as his feet. I expect I am just repeating what half the internet have said already but all my grated feelings came up again and I had to get them out.
Well, really, Bridget Jones isn’t supposed to be Elizabeth Bennet. We once wrote in a short review of BJD (the book) that while many of us modern girls wish we were Elizabeth Bennet, we were more likely to be Bridget Jones, trying to “have it all” and not quite succeeding, but learning to accept the small victories. Though in a way, that is like Elizabeth, who thinks she knows herself but does not–and learns to accept her shortcomings.
And really, who hasn’t been late for work because she was staring out a window for half an hour?
*crickets*
Here’s our weekly roundup of articles that didn’t quite make the cut for full blog entries, but we thought our readers might find interesting nonetheless.
Mark Blankenship finds P&P a “hot and sexy summer read” — but pray do not book a chaise to the charming village of High Dudgeon, Gentle Reader; it’s all in good snark.
There will be a 5K walk around Stoneleigh Abbey, once owned by Jane Austen’s cousin, in September.
This is also an open thread, so feel free to discuss the above articles or anything at all that’s going on in your part of Janeiteville!
A new musical adaptation of Pride and Prejudice (the fourth fairly recent one by our count) will debut this Friday, August 1, and run through August 16, 2008, at the SCERA Center in Orem, Utah. Tickets are $8-14 and are available online. As always, we would love a report from any AustenBlog reader who attends!
From the Sydney Morning Herald:
If she could bring back just one writer for a chinwag? She interrupts. “It would be Jane [Austen],” she says. “We’d have tea.” She takes a sip of the English breakfast. “And, of course, we’d talk about you.”
The Telegraph has an article about why-we-keep-adapting-Jane-yada-yada that contains the somewhat interesting news that Lost in Austen will be broadcast in ITV in September.
Lizzie enters our modern world through a portal in the Bennet wardrobe and ends up in a bedsit in Hammersmith; while Amanda moves into 19th-century Longbourn with the rest of the Bennet family. It’s every teenage girl’s fantasy: sleeping in a bed with Jane, curling Lydia and Mary’s hair. Bingley makes a pass at you, while Darcy smoulders and mentally ravishes you. The plot pretty much writes itself. You just step into the pages of your favourite book.
Why don’t they just name the main character Mary Sue and get it over with?
The audience’s desire for courtly love is fine. It doesn’t even matter if they play loose with the plot. Janeites are horrified by the inappropriate kissing, but the final frames of Adrian Shergold’s extraordinary 2007 film Persuasion, where Sally Hawkins literally ran to claim her love, pounding along the streets of Bath as the camera whirled and swooped, were brilliant.
Hmm.
The audience’s desire for courtly love is fine. It doesn’t even matter if they play loose with the plot. Janeites are horrified by the inappropriate kissing, but the final frames of Adrian Shergold’s extraordinary 2007 film Persuasion, where Sally Hawkins literally ran to claim her love, pounding along the streets of Bath as the camera whirled and swooped, were
brilliantreally weird.
There, fixed that for you.
And master adaptor Andrew Davies is a modern god for putting the sex and violence back into Austen’s novels.
Put it BACK into Austen’s novels? What?
The recent rape scene that opened Davies’ BBC adaptation of Sense and Sensibility stopped any of us swooning over Willoughby.
We were too busy trying to figure out what the heck was going on.
But you know casting is not the same as character. Impressionable middle-aged men may fawn over Keira in Pride and Prejudice, but casting Billie Piper (all tits and pout) in Mansfield Park was a grievous mistake. She’s a lovely young actress, but playing moralistic Fanny Price? Someone should be shot. So I’m not losing sleep over the Bond girl in Lost in Austen.
Casting is the least of their problems, really.
It’s late and we’re tired. Dorothy has the Cluebat; feel free to swing away.
Here’s this week’s lineup of local events of interest to Jane Austen fans. Check them out–one might be near your hometown!
July 26-7, 2008, Petworth House, West Sussex - Dandies, Duelling and Dancing…. Petworth in the time of Jane Austen, 1820 - Petworth House (”Dude…it’s PEMBERLEY!” she said, her eyes wide in astonishment) hosts a two-day historical event.
See a company of Redcoats, smugglers encampment, rural crafts, cooking demonstrations in the historic kitchen, music in the House, have-a-go activities such as fencing and archery, Regency dancing, square piano music and our resident hermit will also be here. Come back with us to the time of Jane Austen and enjoy a spectacular family day out.
Tickets are £3-8 and available at the door–no prebooking necessary.
August 8 and 11, 2008, Edinburgh: The producer of “An Evening at Pemberley,” about which we posted in last week’s edition, posted in comments about the reported problems with Fringe tickets and some information about getting the tickets.
Welcome to another Tuesday Open Thread. Here’s a few links that didn’t quite make the cut for full posts over the last week for various reasons, but we thought our Gentle Readers might find them interesting anyway. Or not.
So what’s new and happening in your patch of Austenville?
If so, perhaps you can help us out. Alert Janeite Cinthia spotted a post on the IMDB forum (and the same poster at the PBS forum) in which the poster claimed that certain scenes on the Region 2 DVD are missing on the Region 1 DVD. The missing scenes were described as:
The scenes that I remember are a scene where Colonel Brandon asks Elinor to speak to Edward about offering him a living on his estate. The other is when Marianne is ill, Mrs. Jennings comes in and has a conversation with Elinor.
If our Gentle Readers who own the Region 2 DVD can check if those scenes are on their DVDs, we would be most grateful.
(We know today is a sad day in some parts of Janeiteville, but we prefer to let other pens dwell on misery.)
Welcome to another edition of Friday Bookblogging, in which we discuss Jane Austen’s novels and related topics.
Scathing Book Reviews collects some, er, scathing book reviews of Pride and Prejudice from Amazon. Most of them seem to be from people who were forced! forced! to read it in school, clearly cruel and unusual punishment.
This story was written in the early Victorian era, and hence it is quite old. We need to move on from the old ‘classics’. They mean nothing to readers (are there many left?) of the modern society.
Early Victorian era. Elvis wept. But, in future, they might find the bluffer’s guide useful when it becomes clear that they should have paid more attention in English class.
I once confessed to not knowing what Pride And Prejudice was about (now I’ve seen the film so I know) and the person I was chatting to reacted as though I’d punched her.
Grace Wynne-Jones on a craze that could make a copy of Sense and Sensibility mellow out in California and then have it fly off to Florence, having been found in a phone booth in Prague. Wonder what Jane Austen would make of that?
She probably would have thought it the ultimate circulating-library!
That’s it for another edition of Friday Bookblogging, Gentle Readers. Until next time, always remember: Books Are Nice!
Here’s the latest listing of upcoming events of interest to Jane Austen fans. One of them might just be in your neighborhood! (And we love post-event reports!)
July 18, 2008, Pasadena, California: Laurie Viera Rigler will give a reading from her book, Confessions of a Jane Austen Addict, at Vroman’s Bookstore at 7 p.m.
August 8 and 11, 2008, Edinburgh: “An Evening at Pemberley“: As part of the Edinburgh Fringe Festival, soprano Patrice Boyd will sing music from Jane Austen’s time period.
The music features classical selections from Mozart, Handel, Haydn, Purcell, Bishop and other composers of the era. To complete the historical mood, Miss Boyd will perform in period dress in the handsome Georgian oval of St. Andrew’s and St. George’s Church, one of Edinburgh’s premier classical music venues.
Gentle Readers not in the environs of Edinburgh might want to scroll down to the bottom of the page, which has a list of upcoming concerts in North America.
Note: Getting Local With Jane will be published on Thursday from now on. All part of our ongoing improvement efforts here at AustenBlog World Headquarters.
Normblog has republished a lecture given to the Jane Austen Society in 2006 by Richard Jenkyns, author of A Fine Brush on Ivory and a descendant of Jane Austen’s brother James. Professor Jenkyns’s lecture is titled “Boredom and Jane Austen” and it’s quite interesting. A few tidbits from the first part:
In my childhood my great-aunts sometimes seemed to speak about her as though she were a lately deceased member of the family whom they had known themselves; and as they seemed to me enormously ancient - and indeed they were fairly ancient - it took me a while to work out that the novelist had died a full 60 years before even the eldest of them was born. But there was a sense of her abiding presence. In the drawing-room of the house shared by two of those great-aunts sat Jane Austen’s writing desk. After their deaths it passed to my cousin Joan Austen-Leigh, who later very generously gave it to the British Library. Many of us saw it when it came to Chawton for our annual gathering two or three years ago. I also attended the occasion at the British Library when the desk was formally presented, and I remember the sense of faint discomfort at realizing that I was no longer permitted to touch what had once been a friendly and familiar object.
Yes, but now we ALL can see it at the British Library! Behind glass, but still.
Jane Austen could not herself have used the words ‘boring’ or ‘boredom’: they do not appear until near the middle of the 19th century. The verb ‘bore’ originates as aristocratic slang in the mid 18th century and it does appear in her books, but her usual word is the standard term of her time: ‘dullness’. It is worth lingering on that word for just a moment, as its scope is, I think, somewhat wider than that which we would naturally give to boredom today. The invention of the word ‘boredom’ may indeed be the effect of a change in which certain forms of human unhappiness are understood and interpreted; or perhaps the appearance of the word helped in part to cause that change.
The lecture is spread across four blog posts (there are links leading to each one). Check it out!
Lori Bajorek, the producer of Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice: A Musical Play, has announced that the Broadway-bound production will have a one-night-only “sneak peek” preview on October 21, 2008, at the Eastman Theatre in Rochester, New York.
From the press release:
This special sneak peek of Jane Austen’s Pride & Prejudice, A Musical Play will feature a 16-piece orchestra made up of members of the prestigious Rochester Philharmonic Orchestra members, and Broadway cast members including Colin Donnell (Jersey Boys, Follies) as Mr. Darcy. As the Broadway production is slated for November of 2009, this Rochester-only showcase will not be the eventual full-scale production, but will feature costumes, lighting, simple sets and a professional New York City cast. A red carpet, “paparazzi” and other festivities will lend a Broadway feel to the one -night-only event.
Tickets for the preview are $35, $50, and $75 (the latter includes a post-performance reception with the performers). Tickets are available at 875 East Main Street in Rochester (Auditorium Theatre), by calling 585-232-1900, or online at www.tickemaster.com.
We attended a reading of this play last summer and loved it. We can’t wait to see it on Broadway (and maybe even in Rochester!). Do check out the website and all the information and snippets of music available there.
Author and JASNA member Joan Ellen Delman (who has been known to comment here at AustenBlog upon occasion) has written a quiz with quotations from Lord Byron and Jane Austen–see if you can tell which are which! The answers will be posted on the JASNA site later this summer.
We performed a routine upgrade on the blog software. Please let us know in the comments of this thread if anything doesn’t work. Unless comments don’t work, in which case e-mail us.
Random somewhat-related Austen links for the week:
It’s an open thread: discuss the above or what’s happening in your patch of Janeiteville!
Welcome to the latest edition of Weekend Bookblogging. Lots of news and items of interest about Jane Austen’s novels, books inspired by her novels, and books related to her novels.
Claire Tomalin writes in the Guardian about the table upon which Jane Austen wrote and revised her books.
Not long before her death, Jane Austen described her writing as being done with a fine brush on a “little bit (not two inches wide) of ivory”. Her novels are not miniatures, but she did work on a surface not so much bigger than those two imagined inches of ivory.
Marshymallow tells us about the day she met Jane Austen.
Katherine Bucknell compares the romance of Jemima Khan and Hugh Grant to Mansfield Park. Guess who is Henry Crawford.
Say Fanny Price is Jemima Khan. Say Henry Crawford is Hugh Grant. She is a journalist, and something of an intellectual, despite her beauty and her beautiful clothes. Her columns in the press and her public protests in Parliament Square bespeak a character preoccupied with justice, goodness, adherence to the truth, to actual facts. Her public deportment, inviting as her face and figure may appear, is poised and self-contained. And her marriage was to a man of religion for whom she converted. She is a serious person.
Book Club Girl had a chat with Laurie Viera Rigler about her novel, Confessions of a Jane Austen Addict.
The Louisville Courier-Journal has a review of Jane Austen for Dummies (which really isn’t for dummies).
We suspect some of our Gentle Readers might be interested in a bit of swag–not Jane Austen swag, but Georgette Heyer, which might be the next best thing. Word Candy is having a contest to give away one of the new Sourcebooks editions of Miss Heyer’s Regency-set novels to four lucky readers. Details are at the link, and let us know if you win one. We’re big Heyer fans here at AustenBlog World Headquarters. (Cotillion might be our favorite ever and makes us laugh until we cry.)
The Daily Mail has a review of The Seven Lives of John Murray by the late Humphrey Carpenter, about the seven generations of John Murrays who led the eponymous publishing house. The second John Murray published Emma, the second edition of MP, and NA/Persuasion posthumously.
Alert Janeite Paola sent us an e-mail to let us know that there is a possible French TV version of Pride and Prejudice being developed…
There’s a little news about French writer Véronique Olmi on this week Paris insert of Le Nouvel Observateur. She says: “This summer I’m staying in Paris to work on the adaptation of JA’s “Orgueil et Préjugés”, for France 2″.
Ooh la la!
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