Alert Janeite Mary sent us a link to an interview with Gina Fattore, staff writer for the television show Californication, on Studio 360 in which Ms. Fattore talks about how she was inspired by Jane Austen, via Clueless, to become a screenwriter. She talks about the universality of Jane Austen’s novels and how seeing Clueless made her realize that they are not just about “horses and carriages and corsets.” Nicely said!

All kinds of book news this week! (Actually we’ve been saving it up.)

Alert Janeite Carol let us know that romance author Mary Balogh is working on an Austen-related anthology project with several other authors.

And I have just agreed to participate in another anthology, this one the brainchild of Susan Krinard, who thought it would be fun to write paranormal novellas based on various Jane Austen novels. She had already recruited Colleen Gleason and Janet Mullany by the time she asked me. I was hesitant as I have never written anything paranormal, but I always find it difficult to resist a challenge, especially when it involves nothing more arduous than using the imagination. And so I have my sights set upon making something paranormal of the basic plot idea of Persuasion. The tentative title for the anthology is Bespelling Jane, and it will contain two historical and two contemporary novellas. You may watch for it some time in the future–if we can catch the interest of a publisher, that is!

Keep your tongues in your cheeks, ladies, and we suspect it will work a lot better.

Hot on our discussion the other day about Austen first editions and memorabilia, we have the results of an auction of a collection of first editions at Bloomsbury Auctions, which went for a lot less than you might expect.

Other highlights included a group of privately owned first edition Jane Austen books. Austen’s first book, Sense and Sensibility , 1811, had a contemporary author attribution of “Miss Austen,” and it sold for $24,200. Pride and Prejudice, also in three volumes, made $33,300; Mansfield Park fetched $6,460, Emma made $11,400, and Northanger Abbey sold for just above its higher estimate at $7,250.

Again, unclear if the listing of NA included Persuasion; most likely, as that book is not otherwise mentioned in the collection.

EADT has an article about the influence of playwright Elizabeth Inchbald (author of the infamous “Lovers’ Vows”) on Jane Austen’s work.

The latest edition of the Jane Austen Podnovel is now available.

Alert Janeite Amo sent us an article about a spoof rewrite of Shakespeare in “yoof-speak.” The author of the piece takes it to the logical conclusion and rewrites a certain opening sentence.

“It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife” could become “You’re loaded, but got no bird. You some sort of bender?”

On that note, Gentle Readers, that’s it for Friday Bookblogging. Until next time, always remember: Books Are Nice!

Alert Janeite Mari Carmen let us know that Spanish-language commentaries on Pride and Prejudice are available on Radio Programas del Perú (scroll down to “Orgullo Y Prejudicio”).

Mari Carmen also let us know that an abridged version of the novel was broadcast over the weekend, but we missed it and will be more alert next time. *blush*

Norm Geras has linked to a broadcast on BBC Radio 4 Woman’s Hour with a visit to Jane Austen’s House in Chawton, Hampshire.

Alert Janeite Lisa sent us an editorial from the Sydney Morning Herald about the importance–and pleasure–of reading, wisely quoting the Rev. Mr. Tilney, which is always a smart thing to do in our educated opinion.

The novel Northanger Abbey, one of Jane Austen’s less read works, has a gentle dig at the contorted plotlines and melodramatic expression of the gothic novels popular in the author’s day.

But still Austen offers a defence of the novel, having her hero Henry Tilney say, “the person, be it gentleman or lady, who has not pleasure in a good novel, must be intolerably stupid”.

Today’s students need Jane Austen (and other authors who have stood the test of time) as much as ever. Good fiction is not a waste of time.

Preach it!

As well as helping us understand the world, fiction helps us understand ourselves. Jane Austen’s heroines are appealing (except, perhaps, the insipid Fanny Price)

Uh-oh….*runs as enraged Fannyfans burn down Sydney Morning Herald building*

Lisa also sent us a really funny article in the New Statesman by Sophie Gee, who has found a great new way to choose Christmas gift books: apply the Sir Walter Elliot test!

This new approach was suggested by the opening sentences of Jane Austen’s Persuasion, which give the best description of reading I know:

Sir Walter Elliot, of Kellynch Hall, in Somersetshire, was a man who, for his own amusement, never took up any book but the Baronetage; there he found occupation for an idle hour, and consolation in a distressed one; there his faculties were roused into admiration and respect, by contemplating the limited remnant of the earliest patents; there any unwelcome sensations, arising from domestic affairs, changed naturally into pity and contempt as he turned over the almost endless creations of the last century; and there, if every other leaf were powerless, he could read his own history with an interest which never failed.

Even as we laugh at Sir Walter for his snobbishly trivial turn of mind, we admire Austen for putting her finger so exactly on what gives reading its delight: “occupation for an idle hour and consolation in a distressed one”. Which of us doesn’t have an equivalent of the Baronetage to take down in hours of need, hoping that nobody is looking?

Well, that would probably be Jane Austen’s books for us! And a few select titles by Georgette Heyer. Do read the whole article, it’s really fun.

The audio version of Laurie Viera Rigler’s Confessions of a Jane Austen Addict got a great review in Publishers’ Weekly:

Orlagh Cassidy is delightfully fun as Courtney Stone, a modern Los Angeles girl nursing a heartbreak who wakes up to find herself inhabiting the body and life of a Jane Austenesque Regency girl. Cassidy is spot-on with Courtney’s California accent, modern-day moaning about men, self-analysis and doubt, and sarcasm—and then, without missing a beat, flips easily into the proper, upper-class English tones of Jane (the Regency girl Courtney has replaced, whose accent came with the body), her pompous, controlling mother, her desperate suitor and her sympathetic best friend.

We are pleased to report that the U.S. release of Captain Wentworth’s Diary by Amanda Grange is available for preorder and will be released on May 6, 2008. Check out the cover on Amanda Grange’s website.

Lastly, we heard from Professor Janet Todd, who gave a great plenary talk at the JASNA AGM in Vancouver this past October. She has written a book called Death and the Maidens about the Wollstonecraft-Godwin-Shelley-Byron circle of Jane Austen’s lifetime–authors, poets, and amazing and sad lives. Prof. Todd found some kinship between Fanny Wollstonecraft, who committed suicide at 22, and Fanny Price. It sounds like a really interesting book, and insight into a very different kind of lifestyle than that which Jane Austen and her family–and even her characters–led.

That’s it for Friday Bookblogging this week, Gentle Readers, and always remember: Books Are Nice!

Alert Janeite Lisa sent us an article in the Guardian that describes Audiobooks Online, a Netflix-like service for audiobooks (what a great idea!), including unabridged audiobooks of Jane Austen’s novels. The article also suggests giving audiobook sets as holiday gifts, including the unabridged Austen library from Naxos.

Alert Janeite Joan sent us a link to a radio interview with Dr. Janet Todd, who is general editor of the new Cambridge editions of Jane Austen’s novels and was a keynote speaker at the JASNA AGM in Vancouver last month. The interview was broadcast during the AGM and is now available in the CBC archives. Joan kindly gave us a very detailed rundown of the 15-minute interview, which included Dr. Todd’s thoughts about the AGM, about Jane Austen in popular culture (yay!), editing the Cambridge editions, Jane Austen in her own time, modern film versions of the novels, and quite a bit more! (If any kind Janeite could deliver it to us in a format that is NOT Real Player, we should be very grateful.)

Alert Janeite Chris sent us a link to a radio play on BBC Radio 4 this Tuesday at 2:15 p.m. called “A City Full of Swindlers.” It might not sound like it has a Jane Austen connection, but read the description:

Cassandra Austen narrates the shocking story of her aunt’s arrest and imprisonment for stealing a piece of lace, a story which reveals Georgian Bath to be a far less decorous place than it appears in her sister Jane’s novels.

Oooh! That sounds good. You can listen live online and it looks like they archive for seven days after broadcast.

We just finished a long-overdue updating of our sidebar items, and the press’ fascination with Jane Austen does not seem to be subsiding; the press groans with upcoming volumes, with everything from scholarly commentary to biography to paraliterature. Let’s get to it!

Recent releases include Just Jane by Nancy Moser and its companion edition of Pride and Prejudice as well as The Lost Memoirs of Jane Austen by Syrie James; we will have reviews (and giveaways) of these books soon. Also look for a review of Lovers’ Perjuries; Or, The Clandestine Courtship Of Jane Fairfax and Frank Churchill: A retelling of Jane Austen’s Emma by Joan Ellen Delman, which has considerably brightened our daily commute for the past two weeks. On the nonfiction side, Lori Smith’s book A Walk with Jane Austen: A Journey into Adventure, Love, and Faith is available; read the AustenBlog review, and congratulations to Jenny, the winner of our giveaway for a copy of the book.

The upcoming books cross all areas of Austen-related interest, from nonfiction to fiction. On the nonfiction side, there are re-releases of Jill Heydt-Stevenson’s Austen’s Unbecoming Conjunctions: Subversive Laughter, Embodied History and Park Honan’s biography Jane Austen: Her Life. We’re looking forward to In the Garden With Jane Austen by Kim Wilson, author of Tea With Jane Austen. Harold Bloom’s How to Write About Jane Austen should be, um, interesting. Other nonfiction titles include Critical Companion to Jane Austen: A Literary Reference to Her Life and Work by William Baker; Hypocrisy and the Politics of Politeness: Manners and Morals from Locke to Austen by Jenny Davidson; Jane Austen (Brief Lives) by Fiona Stafford; Jane Austen (Writers and Their Works) by Andrew Haggerty; Jane Austen & Charles Darwin: Naturalists and Novelists by Peter W. Graham; Reading the Nineteenth-century Novel: Austen to Eliot by Alison Case and Harry E. Shaw; and Writer of Fancy: The Playful Piety of Jane Austen by Peter Leithart.

On the fiction side, there are several new paraliterature titles coming up, including Ball at Pemberley: A Gentle Joke, Jane Austen Style, an intriguing title, by Elizabeth Newark; Emma & Knightley: The Sequel to Jane Austen’s Emma, by Rachel Billington, which we guess is a reprinting of the book by the same author titled Perfect Happiness; a reprint of Emma Watson: Jane Austen’s Unfinished Novel Completed by the late Joan Aiken; and Mrs. Darcy’s Dilemma by Diana Birchall.

We also noticed that Signet has overhauled their low-priced paperback versions of Jane Austen’s novels with new covers and afterwords by various romance novelists; so far Amazon is listing Pride and Prejudice, Emma, Northanger Abbey and Persuasion. (Why the pic of a birdcage on P&P? It seems to us more fitting for MP. I can’t get out, said the starling.)

Speaking of editions of Jane Austen’s novels, Alert Janeite Laurel Ann sent us a slightly risqué cover image from a French translation of Sense and Sensibility; link might not be safe for work.

Lastly, Emma Campbell Webster, author of Lost in Austen: Create Your Own Jane Austen Adventure, wrote an article about happy-ever-after endings for the Guardian.

Austen always gives her protagonists at least one opportunity to say no to marriage before they finally agree - highlighting the seriousness of the decision - and I found it more and more disconcerting that, when the lead character does take the plunge, her story suddenly ends. It dawned on me that this convention sends readers a dark subliminal message - that marriage equals “The End”. Which raises the question “Just what, exactly, is it the end of?” Is it simply the end of the book, or could it signify the end of life worth reading or writing about?

Judging by some of the things Jane Austen told her nieces and nephews about the later lives of her characters, we think not.

That’s it for this week’s Friday Bookblogging (actually on a Friday!), and always remember, Gentle Readers: Books Are Nice!

Alert Janeite Julie T. wrote to tell us that Jane Austen made an appearance on “Old Harry’s Game,” a radio show on BBC Radio 4 hosted by, uh, Satan, apparently.

The show requires Real Player to listen, so we haven’t yet…do let us know what you think!

Mark Thwaite of the Book Depository is offering a download of a free, unabridged BBC audiobook of Persuasion read by Greta Scacchi. To download the file, register at Audible UK. You must be 18 or older and a resident of the United Kingdom.

Friday was a bit fraught here at AustenBlog World Headquarters, and we spent Saturday recovering on our fainting-sopha, so here we are on Sunday with all the latest news about Jane Austen’s novels and books related to them.

Alert Janeite Kay sent us a link to Minnesota Public Radio’s program with David Shapard, editor of The Annotated Pride and Prejudice. Unfortunately we were unable to listen to the program as we don’t have the Real player on our computer; we confess we are wondering why there is an image of a different edition of Pride and Prejudice displayed, and even more concerned that the author is listed as “Jane Austin.” Surely an edition of P&P edited by Claudia Johnson doesn’t have Austen misspelled on the cover, does it? Surely not!

Cheryl Klein has a great post on her blog about reading Jane Austen’s novels at particular seasons. Book groups could find this very useful, and we think any Janeite could as well.

If you would like to try some audio versions of Jane Austen’s novels, Nikolle Doolin continues her series of podcasts of individual chapters of Persuasion.

We stumbled across a blog post at The Spectacled Bear announcing a new version of Persuasion in Portuguese.

And here’s the best bit: It’s a parallel text edition, which means you get the Portuguese text alongside the original.

How cool is that?

Alert Janeite Lisa sent us an article about how, rather than the usual Dead White Men whose work predominates in Western culture, lately the ladies have had their share in the conversation, and of course Jane Austen is included.

Take Dead White Female author Jane Austen. She might still not be on every freshman English major’s first-semester required reading list, but her work has been heartily consumed by the entertainment industry: serious BBC adaptations, tongue-in-cheek contemporary reinterpretations, and, most recently, a glamorized pseudo-bio of Austen’s own life called Becoming Jane (in theaters now) that turns her into one of her own heroines. There are also Austen-themed tarot cards, blogs edited by devoted Janeites,

Hey!

fan fiction, musicals, even YouTube mash-ups that dub contemporary shows such as Gilmore Girls with Regency-era dialogue.

And lastly, we received two new books at AustenBlog World Headquarters: Just Jane by Nancy Moser, a fictionalized biography of Jane Austen, and an annotated version of Pride and Prejudice that is being released concurrently by the same publisher, Bethany House. Here is a review of Just Jane, and look for AustenBlog’s reviews of both books (as well as a giveaway).

In the meantime, don’t forget to register for the drawing to win a copy of Letters From Pemberley. You have until Monday night at 10 p.m. Eastern time.

The Editrix will be a guest on Radio Times on WHYY 91 FM in the Philadelphia area on Monday, August 20, from 11 a.m. till noon Eastern time (adjust for your time zone). You can listen online, or download a podcast of the program later. Paula Marantz Cohen, author of Jane Austen in Boca and Jane Austen in Scarsdale and a professor at Drexel University, also will be a guest on the show. We will discuss the current enthusiasm for all things Jane Austen.

Voice actor Nikolle Doolin is presenting Persuasion via podcast at her Weblog, Audio Literature Odyssey. It’s unclear if she will have the whole novel and whether it is just a reading of the novel or commentary as well, but chapters one and two are posted; check it out!

For all of you who were camping out for iPhones last week (not us; we’ll stick with our old pal Enrico) and need something to fill your 8G of memory, an unabridged audiobook of Pride and Prejudice is among the Top 100 podcasts on iTunes.

A free chapter-by-chapter reading of “Pride and Prejudice” and a series called “The Classic Tales Podcast,” featuring works by Edgar Allen Poe, Arthur Conan Doyle and Hardy, both made it onto iTunes’s top 100 podcasts list.

The podcasts, which are unabridged, aren’t exactly quick listens. “Pride and Prejudice” runs about six hours, while Plato’s “Republic” is even longer, at 375 minutes. While Hollywood actors are increasingly popping up on audiobooks, the voices on the podcasts are mostly those of no-name professional book readers.

If anyone downloads it, send a review! Thanks to Alert Janeite Lisa for the link.

We found a review of The Companion Chronicles, audiobooks of Dr. Who adventures narrated by four of the companions of the various incarnations of the doctor. What does this have to do with Jane Austen, you may well ask?

Frostfire is the best of the four. Marc Platt is the author: he lands the Doctor, Vicki and Steven in the frozen London of 1814, where they team up with Jane Austen - Jane Austen - to defeat a nefarious force that threatens to suck the energy out from the whole of London, and maybe the world. Platt and through him Maureen O’Brien (playing Vicki for the first time in over forty years!) between them catch the First Doctor’s voice perfectly, though poor Steven doesn’t get much to do. It’s nice to have a framing narrative of Vicki - now Cressida - reminiscing about the events of years before, for her subjective time line, or three thousand years in the future, by Earth time, and it turns out to have more relevance to events than anticipated. There is a typical Marc Platt paradox by way of plot resolution, and you have to swallow the concept of Jane Austen as woman of action, but it is tremendously enjoyable.

We found Frostfire for sale at play.com, if you would like to check it out.

For audiobook fans, LibriVox has announced that Sense and Sensibility is now available for download. Enjoy!

(Hat tip to Open Culture)

JASNA has received permission from the Modern Language Association to offer a recording of the “What’s the Word?” radio program on Pride and Prejudice, broadcast this past week (and which will be broadcast on other public radio stations throughout the U.S.) featuring Austen scholars Marcia McClintock Folsom, Rachel Brownstein and Susan Staves. The program is 30 minutes long and discusses the plot and social context of the novel. Do check it out–it’s quite good. (As the site points out, only those with broadband should attempt to stream it–but those with dialup and lots of time can try downloading it.)

The JASNA Web site is becoming a really impressive resource for Jane Austen fans! (And the RSS feed is keeping us up to date on the latest additions!)

(Hey, they mention Buffy, and the references suggest themselves.) Alert Janeites Ann and Kirsten sent us a link to a conversation with David Shapard, the editor of The Annotated Pride and Prejudice, on NPR’s “Talk of the Nation,” discussing the historical context of the novel and how the footnotes illuminate the text. Follow the link to listen to the conversation online.

Philip Sheppard, composer of the ITV Jane Austen season trailer and web site music, writes to tell us that Crystallised Beauty is now available on his MySpace profile, so you may link or add it to your own pages if you wish. The sheet music is being prepared and will also be available from his web site as a free PDF. Last, an iTunes release for the complete set of ten piano pieces is in progress, release date to be announced.

Thanks for the update!