Weekend Bookblogging: Small Tables Edition
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.
July 14th, 2008 at 8:09 am
I know nothing about Jemima Khan and Hugh Grant’s romance, but I found Bucknell’s essay very well done, indeed. Most perceptive!