Review by Allison T.

What if….Ah, the charm of the what-if story! What if Captain Ahab had said, “Screw it, I’m tired of chasing this hemm’d great fish—I’m going back to graduate school to get a degree in social work so that I can ameliorate the lives of Queequeg and his people”? What if Hamlet and Ophelia had scored some Prozac, hired a family counselor, sorted the Danish royal family, and gotten married to live happily ever after? What if Jane Eyre, upon hearing of the mad wife in the attic, had said, “Oh, hell, Edward, let’s chuck Victorian morality and Evangelical Christianity and go live in sin in southern France!”? What if Darcy refused to take Elizabeth’s “No” at Rosings, followed her back to Longbourne within a month or two of her initial refusal, and, by dint of snogging her (as our friends across The Pond so undeliciously put it) at every opportunity—snogging in the shrubbery, snogging in the wilderness, snogging in the churchyard—causes Elizabeth to sleep with him before marriage while staying at Pemberley with her aunt and uncle Gardiner, and otherwise changes the story that Austen gave us? For such is the plot of Abigail Reynold’s Impulse & Initiative; A Pride & Prejudice Variation—“What if Mr. Darcy didn’t take ‘No’ for an answer?” (more…)

The Telegraph breathlessly reports that–ZOMG PONIES!–Mr. Darcy’s dive into the pond was performed not by Colin Firth but by *gasp* a stuntman!

Um…not news, guys. Bridget Jones scooped you almost twelve years* ago.

BJ You know in Pride and Prejudice?

CF I do know in it, yes.

BJ When you had to dive into the lake?

CF Yes.

BJ When they had to do another take, did you have to take the wet shirt off and then put a dry one on?

CF Yes I, I probably did have to, yes. Scusi. Ha vinto. E troppo forte. Si grazie.

BJ (BREATHING UNSTEADILY) How many takes did they have to do?

CF (COUGHS) Well. The underwater shots were a tank in Ealing Studios.

BJ Oh no.

CF I’m afraid so. The -um - moment of being airborne - extremely brief - was a stuntman.

BJ But it looked like Mr Darcy.

CF That was because he had stuck on sideburns and a Mr Darcy outfit on top of a wet suit, which actually made him look like Elvis as you last saw him. He could only do it once for insurance reasons and then he had to be checked for abrasions for about six weeks afterwards. All the other wet shirt shots were me.

Simon Langton, the director of P&P95, does provide one amusing bit of detail, however:

Director Simon Langton said there were difficulties with the actor’s insurance and special arrangements had to be made so that Firth didn’t enter the lake.

He said: “It was a stuntman.

“We didn’t want our leading man to catch Weil’s disease, which can be caught from rat urine in water.”

Hee hee heee heeeeee! But this bit gave us the What The Ferrarses:

But fans are assured the footage of Mr Darcy striding out of the water in his drenched clothing was all shot using Firth.

WHEN IS HE EVER, EVER SHOWN STRIDING OUT OF THE WATER THAT HE WAS NEVER IN? Can the ignorant, ill-informed media please, for the love of the Editrix’s blood pressure, please stop talking about Darcy “emerging from the lake” and “climbing out of the lake” because IT NEVER HAPPENS. You see him swimming, cut to Lizzy looking at the portrait, then you see Darcy walking along LEADING HIS HORSE, AFTER HAVING PICKED UP HIS DISCARDED CLOTHING. We actually just checked the DVD in case there was a scene we missed somehow. It’s not in the book and it’s not even in the bally movie. If you’re going to mock the silly Janeites, at least get your bleeding facts straight.

Thanks to Alert Janeite Lisa for the link, and we hope she is following up with a bottle of Tullamore Dew.

*Holy cr@p! It’s been twelve years? We feel terribly elderly all of a sudden.

This is especially dedicated to Heather L., Julie B., Laurel Ann, and all our Gentle Readers in the Frozen Pacific Northwest! Brrrrr!

Lydia Bennet is not what one would consider an attractive character. “Vain, ignorant, idle, and absolutely uncontrolled!” her sister Elizabeth cries about her in a trying moment, and the reader tends to sympathize. Lydia does share DNA with Jane and Elizabeth, so it stands to reason that she must have some redeeming qualities; yet fan fiction writer after sequel writer (including your humble servant) uses Lydia only as a convenient punching bag and plot point. However, Jane Odiwe has given Lydia Bennet a plausible backstory that, if it doesn’t redeem her, at least gives her the benefit of the doubt; and a happier ending than one would expect, and happier than the cynical Janeite might think she probably deserves.

The first half of the book tells the events of Pride and Prejudice from Lydia’s point of view. She is wild for officers and sexually precocious. She fixes on George Wickham, and is disappointed when he goes after nasty, freckled Mary King and her ten thousand pounds. Wickham has much to answer for in this story. He awakens Lydia’s sexuality and takes advantage of a young girl in full hormonal overload. He knows exactly what he is doing, and while Lydia certainly knows better, anyone who remembers being fifteen and in the throes of one’s first relationship can perfectly understand how she is led astray by a manipulative, self-centered man. This part of the story is absorbing and well-written, sexy without being explicit, and like the best of such alternative-viewpoint Austen paraliterature, we get a new, thoughtful, and sympathetic perspective on a well-known, well-loved classic.

We all know the story: Lydia is married, her sisters are married, Mrs. Darcy and Mrs. Bingley live happily ever after and Lydia not so much. The End, right? But the tell-tale lack of compression of the pages tells us that the book is only half finished. There is more to come, and the second half of the book is where we fear some Janeites will have to work hard to suspend their disbelief. (We had to club ours into submission and lock it into the closet for a few hours.) The Wickhams’ marriage is much like one would expect: he gambles and whores around, and she alternates between self-delusion and pitching the occasional hissy fit. However, there is not much story there, so Ms. Odiwe tosses in a shocking twist that we’re sure Jane Austen never intended but allows her to give her heroine as happy an ending as she could want. While the second half is well-written and enjoyable, we fear many Janeites will find it too much out of canon. However, if the reader is comfortable with non-canonical Austen paraliterature, we think she will find Lydia Bennet’s Story an absorbing read; and those who think they are not comfortable with such stories might enjoy it in spite of themselves.

We heard from Alert Janeite Melinda, who let us know that Reginald Hill’s latest Dalziel and Pascoe book is out in the U.S. In the UK it was called A Cure for All Diseases, but in the U.S. the title is The Price of Butcher’s Meat (part of a quotation from Sanditon). Melinda wished to draw our attention to the dedication:

To Janeites everywhere

and in particular to those who ten years ago in San Francisco made me so very welcome at the Jane Austen Society of North America’s AGM, of which the theme was “Sanditon–A New Direction?” and during which the seeds of this present novel were sown. I hope that my fellow Janeites will approve the direction in which I have moved her unfinished story; or, if they hesitate approval, that they will perhaps recall the advice printed on a sweatshirt presented to me (with what pertinence I never quite grasped) after my address to the AGM

–Run mad as often as you chuse, but do not faint–

and at least agree that, though from time to time I may have run a little mad, so far I have not fainted!

This made us squee, naturally, and we ran (figuratively) to BooksonBoard and purchased the ebook version. We’ve read a few chapters, and it is definitely following along the plot of Sanditon. It’s quite cleverly done, with the chapters alternating between e-mails from Charlotte Heywood to her sister telling of the arrival of Mr. and Mrs. Parker at her father’s farm, and their travel to Sandytown, as it is called in this book, and Andy Dalziel, severely injured in a terrorist blast (in a previous book), arrived in Sandytown to convalesce, narrating his part of the story into a recording device as part of his therapy. Charlotte and the Parkers run into Andy (quite literally) and that’s where we stopped reading, as we have some more books to review first. But we are excited to pick it up again. The humor is earthy and the language can be vulgar, as a warning to those who do not like such things. There’s also a review of the book in Seacoastonline.com; the reviewer thinks reading some of the previous books might be useful for newbies to the series, of which we are one, but that’s what Wikipedia is for. Actually, if we enjoy the rest of this book as much as we did the first few chapters, we probably will look up some of the previous books.

As the title said, this has been a Mini Weekend Bookblogging, so always remember, Gentle Readers, as we’ve been saying all week: Books Are Nice!

The headline says it all–the Telegraph chose Sense and Sensibility 2008 as one of its top ten television productions of 2008.

4 Sense and Sensibility (BBC1)
Little Dorrit and The Devil’s Whore deserve mentions but it is Andrew Davies’s Sense and Sensibility that takes the 2008 costume drama honours. This delicate, heartfelt take on Austen’s tale looked gorgeous, but was still grubby in the right places, and contained a performance of great tenderness from Hattie Morahan (right) as Elinor. Bears comparison happily with Ang Lee’s excellent film from 1995.

Comparison? Oh yes. Thanks to Alert Janeite Lisa for the link.

A while back we are pretty sure we had a post or a comment about the then-mysterious Rocketbook Pride and Prejudice DVD, but have not been able to find it. At the time, there was no information on the item at Amazon. What was it? we wondered. Many months later, it popped up as a recommendation in Netflix, and we thought, “Why not?” and dropped it into our queue.

Looking at the Amazon page now, it’s fairly obvious that it is a sort of Cliff’s Notes on DVD, clearly geared towards the short attention span crowd. Each section contains a plot summary of three or so chapters of the novel, illustrated with folk-art style illustrations, then an analysis discussing literary conventions such as themes and motifs, and then a pop quiz covering both the plot and the analysis. The analysis seems geared towards high-school level or perhaps a very introductory university survey course. Social details, such an entailment, are explained, but so simplistic that the definitions are nearly incorrect. And we were amused by the comment, “Darcy is totally impressed by the brilliancy of her complexion.” Dude. Totally.

Most Janeites being intimately acquainted with the novels, the Rocketbook DVD is totally a waste of time, but we dare say freshmen might find it useful, though we hope they would be getting most of the information contained in it from their teachers–along with reading the book, of course.

For the final contest of Books Are Nice Week, we have a copy of the Editrix’s own little work, The Jane Austen Handbook: A Sensible Yet Elegant Guide to Her World, which will be inscribed to the winner’s specifications and autographed by the Editrix, and a Jane Austen Cameo Doily (a sample pictured left; click for a larger image; the one you will win is actually a little nicer), handmade by the Editrix from her own design. (We like to think that Mr. Bingley would consider us a very accomplished young lady.)

To be entered into the drawing, send an e-mail to austenblog AT gmail DOT com with your full name, mailing address, and how you would like the book to be inscribed, and tell us if Mr. Bingley (and Mr. Darcy!) would consider you an accomplished lady (or gentleman)! Because of the upcoming holidays, we’ll give a little more time; all entries received by 8 p.m. on Monday, December 29 will be entered into the drawing.

…and there’s one more bit of swag to give away, so stay tuned!

Congratulations to the winners!

Edmund Bertram’s Diary - Lynn S., who in answer to our question opined, “Edmund Bertram? C’mon! He’s at the top of Santa’s nice list. But I like this book because it’s makes him more appealing and less the Lord High Mayor of Wankerville!” (Very true!)

Notecards - Amy M., who sent the following birthday message to Jane Austen: “Happy Birthday, Jane Austen! You and your writing have aged so well! May there be many more happy days to come!” (Hear, hear!)

Inscribed copy of Confessions of a Jane Austen Addict - Chi, who confessed, “I would certainly be on Jane’s “naughty” list, but someone has to be the bad girl :D” (So true!)

Two Guys Read Jane Austen - Janice Y., who would like to discuss novels with Catherine Morland (which would be fascinating indeed!) and Katharine T., who said, “I was going to say Emma, but she never finishes books. So I’ll say Henry Crawford instead. It would be sure to be amusing, right?” (Oh, we’re sure of that!)

If you got an e-mail from the Editrix, you are a winner! (If you’re not sure–check your spam e-mail box!) Thanks to all for participating and for being such good sports about our silly contests. We like to make you earn your swag around here. We really got a kick out of some of the entries and it’s clear you had fun with them as well. AustenBlog readers are the best!

Review by MJ Ryan

Published originally in 1949, Pemberley Shades has the distinction of being the second sequel to a Jane Austen novel. It’s difficult to decide if it is a more impressive to be the second or the fact that there was a gap of 37 years between the two. Considering the stack of Austen-inspired books I have on my desk to review for AustenBlog, I’m leaning toward the latter.

A “lightly gothic” tale, Pemberley Shades isn’t lighthearted enough to lift your spirits or gothic enough to instill terror or conjure up a sense of dread. It appears to be trying more for the latter by including many of the hallmarks of a gothic tale; a double of questionable sanity, a fainting fit, a derelict house and superstitions. But, all of these have logical, rather dull explanations; the double isn’t crazy, he’s artistic; Elizabeth faints due to a benign conversation (but it was in a dusty attic, natch), the house is more dated in décor than derelict. As I write this is occurs to me that the author was trying for the mood Austen set so brilliantly in Northanger Abbey. However, these are the characters from Pride and Prejudice, after all, and flights of gothic fantasy do not come easily to them. Add that to the fact that the comparison is just now coming to me, two weeks after finishing the book, and you get the idea of how far off the mark the author hit.

The book isn’t completely without merit and was, I confess, marginally entertaining. However, the lasting impression I have of the book is one of lost opportunity; the story idea was a good one, but the execution was flat.

We have TWO copies of Two Guys Read Jane Austen to give away. There’s not much information at Library Thing so we’ll tell you a little about the book. It’s an e-mail conversation between two men, lifelong friends, who read Pride and Prejudice and Mansfield Park together and exchange their opinions about them. (Don’t worry, they like them.) We’ll have a review very soon; in the meantime, check out the review at Jane Austen Today.

To enter, send an e-mail to austenblog AT gmail DOT com with your full name and mailing address, and let us know which Jane Austen character you would like to discuss her novels with via e-mail. Or handwritten letter, as the case may be.

Privacy policy: we ask for the information to make it easy to send the prize if you should win. We do not collect the information for any other reason. Only the Editrix will see it, and once the contest is over, the information will be permanently deleted.

TV One in New Zealand will broadcast Lost in Austen on December 28 and 29. Let us know if the “Downtown” scene makes it or if ITV cheaped out on paying the royalties again.

Also, there’s an interview with Jemima Rooper, including a couple of audio clips.

By “technical difficulties” we mean the Editrix attended her department holiday party yesterday and fell asleep on the sofa as soon as she returned to AustenBlog World Headquarters, and Dorothy neglected to wake her. However, we’ll be back tonight with extra stuff and another giveaway. In the meantime, check out Jane Austen Today, where Laurel Ann and Ms. Place are giving away Naxos audiobooks of Jane Austen’s novels, one of each novel to six lucky winners. The contest ends December 31, 2008.

The Winter 2008 issue of Persuasions On-Line, the electronic journal of the Jane Austen Society of North America, has been posted, as always, on Jane Austen’s birthday. This latest issue contains several papers that were presented at the Chicago AGM in October as well as some “miscellany” that look nonetheless fascinating. This is a free, fabulous resource for Austen fans and scholars and we encourage you to check it out!

Review by Allison T.

The unpolluted golden shades of Pemberley surround familiar and new characters in The Women of Pemberley, volume 2 in The Pemberley Chronicles, a work that is “devised and compiled” by the pseudonymous Rebecca Ann Collins. Here, readers who can’t get enough of Elizabeth and Mr. Darcy can explore the fates of the various children and even grandchildren of the principal characters of P&P: Emma (Jane’s daughter) who is caught in a bad marriage; Cassandra Darcy, who is courted by her cousin Richard Gardiner; Emily Gardiner, seeking a second husband after her first dies of TB; Robert Gardiner, who finds himself smitten by Rose Fitzwilliam (daughter of the colonel, who we are happy to see has made a satisfactory marriage); Isabella Fitzwilliam, who is the heroine of a mine collapse; Josie Tate (oh, dear, I forget how the Tates figure into things; perhaps Josie’s mother is a Collins daughter?); and Jonathan Bingley, who ends up with a Collins girl. Lizzie & Darcy make fleeting appearances, sometimes acting as deii ex machina; sometimes reacting with anguish and sorrow at the train of events.

It is difficult to write a family saga—just ask Messrs. Trollope and Galsworthy, Mrs. Thirkell and Miss Thane. Where to foreshadow, how to weave in the back-story of a newly-introduced character, how to nestle one story inside another, how to jump from one cliff-hanger to the next—it is a challenging art and one arguably best performed by Le Mâitre, P.G. Wodehouse, in his Bertie & Jeeves stories. (Yes, yes, I know they aren’t really a family saga, per se, but his characters live full and busy lives in between and throughout the books and stories.)

While Miss Collins takes characters up to the American Civil War, occasionally interpolating political facts or mentions of the Brontës or Florence Nightengale, The Women of Pemberley is not, to my mind, a real family saga: it is a string of stories, rather like beads on a chain. Each protagonist in turn is presented with a problem—a vile husband, a sick child—and the problem is solved within a few pages and we move on to the next protagonist and her problem. I suspect that these stories were written over a period of time as stand-alone tales, and then somewhat woven together after-the-fact, not a good recipe for a sustained serial. The glamour (and I use this word in the Tolkein sense to mean “enchantment” or “spell”) of Pemberley hangs over all the tales, and most of the characters end up living on or near the estate. This glamour also causes most of them to follow Mr. Darcy’s lead in becoming a social reformer, building libraries and hospitals and refusing to enclose his commons. Commendable, but not all that believable, alas.

While Miss Collins has some interesting ideas—in particular, her examination of the upper middle class of the 1830s-1860s—she would have benefited by a tough editor who would have made her cut out some of the lengthy re-tellings (something happens; someone relates it to Elizabeth; Elizabeth relates it to Darcy, who reacts; Elizabeth relates it to Jane, who reacts; Elizabeth relays all these reactions to the original informant, etc.) and who would have urged greater melding of the separate stories into one, thereby enhancing the dramatic tension. Because each individual tale can cover varying numbers of years, we also jump back and forth in time, an exhausting effort, especially because it is so difficult to keep track of the characters, none of whom, I confess, I cared that deeply about. No, not even Lizzie.

The Women of Pemberley has some interesting aspects to it, but Miss Collins is an author whom I would like to see write more about her own characters in her own voice.

Tonight’s giveaway is pretty special: a copy of the paperback edition of Confessions of a Jane Austen Addict, personally inscribed to the winner by the author!

The companion book to Confessions, Rude Awakenings of a Jane Austen Addict, will be out in May 2009. We asked Laurie to tell us a little bit about it:

In CONFESSIONS, my 21st-century protagonist woke up one morning in the body and life of a woman in Regency England. In RUDE AWAKENINGS, the 19th-century woman awakens as the 21st-century woman in Los Angeles. Talk about culture shock.

If you would like to enter the drawing for the autographed book, send an e-mail to austenblog AT gmail DOT com with your full name, mailing address, how you would like the book inscribed (your name or the person to whom you will give the book) and, now that we’ve disposed with His Lordship, “confess” whether you would be on Jane Austen’s naughty or nice list! All entries received by 12 noon on Sunday, December 21, will be entered in a drawing to win the book (so it won’t arrive in time for Christmas, sorry). Incidentally, we’re getting a big kick out of all the contest entries. Our Gentle Readers are a stone riot.

Privacy disclaimer: We are collecting the name and address information to make it easier to get the prize to the winner. Only the Editrix will see the entries and after the contest is over they will be deleted. We will share the winner’s information with Laurie Viera Rigler as she has graciously agreed to mail the book as well as sign it (thanks, Laurie!).

Alert Janeite Laurel Ann sent us a link to a post honoring Jane Austen’s birthday at the No Fact Zone, a Stephen Colbert fan site, listing Stephen Colbert’s top three Jane Austen moments. We really can’t think of a better way to celebrate.

Steventon: December 17, 1775.

DEAR SISTER,–You have doubtless been for some time in expectation of hearing from Hampshire, and perhaps wondered a little we were in our old age grown such bad reckoners, but so it was, for Cassy certainly expected to have been brought to bed a month ago; however, last night the time came, and without a great deal of warning, everything was soon happily over. We have now another girl, a present plaything for her sister Cassy, and a future companion. She is to be Jenny, and seems to me as if she would be as like Harry as Cassy is to Neddy. Your sister, thank God, is pure well after it. - A letter from the Rev. George Austen to his sister-in-law

Happy Birthday, Jane, and thank you for giving us so much pleasure after all these years.

“By-the-bye, as I must leave off being young, I find many douceurs in being a sort of chaperon, for I am put on the sofa near the fire, and can drink as much wine as I like.” - Letter from Jane Austen to Cassandra, November 6, 1813

“Our Garden is putting in order, by a Man who bears a remarkably good character, has a very fine complexion & asks something less than the first. The shrubs which border the gravel walk he says are only sweetbriar & roses, & the latter of an indifferent sort;–we mean to get a few of a better kind therefore, & at my own particular desire he procures us some Syringas. I could not do without a Syringa, for the sake of Cowper’s Line.–We talk also of a Laburnam.–The Border under the Terrace Wall, is clearing away to receive Currants & Gooseberry Bushes, & a spot is found very proper for raspberries.” - Letter from Jane Austen to Cassandra Austen, February 8, 1807

When we visited the UK a few years back, a native said to us, “Welcome to England! If it’s not raining, it will be soon!” All that rain makes for lush landscapes, and the English love their gardens fiercely (and sometimes competitively). There is no doubt that Jane Austen enjoyed nature. It is an enjoyment she passed to several of her heroines, though it can be said that perhaps Marianne Dashwood loved nature not wisely but too well. But we never realized how truly pervasive gardens were in her work until we read In the Garden with Jane Austen by Kim Wilson. Like many similar close examinations of a single aspect of Jane Austen’s life and work, it illuminated aspects of her work while giving us a glimpse into a subject that Jane would have known intimately.

Every aspect of gardens and gardening, not only in Jane Austen’s novels but gardens like those she would have known, both in the country and in the city. The book is part literary criticism, partly history, and partly travelogue; Ms. Wilson painstakingly takes us through the various types of gardens Jane Austen would have experienced, from kitchen gardens to pleasure grounds, from great public gardens to walled-off private gardens, from the cottage at Chawton to a tiny slice of city garden to the formal gardens of a gentleman’s estate, and how she incorporated each of these into her work and her life. There are plenty of examples of period gardens, including some that we can visit now to get an idea of the many types of garden that Jane Austen would have known and written about, wandered in and worked in. Anyone planning a Jane Austen excursion to the UK should definitely check it out–you might want to add a few stops to your itinerary. Just be sure to change your stockings if they should become damp!

This book is a sensory experience, with full-color photography of luxuriant flower gardens and pleasure walks. In the Garden with Jane Austen livened up a gloomy, cold, rainy late-autumn day for us, reminding us of the beauty and fragrance of a summer garden.

In honor of Jane Austen’s birthday, and despite our obsession with electronic media, we are going old school for today’s giveaway. A lucky Janeite will win merchandise from the Editrix’s JASNA Region, Eastern Pennsylvania. The prize pack includes a package of Christmas cards featuring a classic image of Jane Austen clutching a sprig of holly, with a holiday greeting printed inside. There also is a package of notecards featuring the illustration of Jane Austen’s lace pattern that she drew in a letter to her sister Cassandra as well as a quotation from that letter. If you would like to win this prize pack, send an e-mail to austenblog AT gmail DOT com with your full name and mailing address and a short greeting for Jane Austen’s Birthday!

We are having a couple more giveaways this week, and you can enter as many as you like, but are only eligible to win one of them. We want to spread the swag around!

Privacy disclaimer: We ask for your full name and mailing address to make it easy to send you the goodies if you win. Only the Editrix will see the information. Once the drawing has taken place, we’ll delete everything.