We heard from Kate, who reviewed Seducing Mr. Darcy on her blog and thought our readers might be interested to read it. We agree, and are happy to post a link. The plot sounds AWFULLY familiar…

Flip has to straighten out the book. Not only will she have ruined it for every reader in the world, but even worse the book will alter and alter until she, her fears, her actions, and every emotion she has will be public knowledge. Unfortunately the only person who might be able to help is a visiting Austen scholar, Magnus Knightley, a Brit who’s so much a dry interpretationalist of Austen that he can’t fathom why anyone reads it if not for the social satire. He reluctantly joins Flip for the mind-altering massage and astoundingly finds himself as Colonel Fitzwilliam, counselling a Mr Darcy who has been scorned and rejected by Lizzie the mere night before they should be marrying in the novel. And to make matters worse, Flip’s ex-husband and new teenaged girlfriend show up on the scene, co-starring as Wickham and Lydia. Will Magnus get the stick out of his ass and fall in love with Flip? Will ex-husband get his comeuppance? But most importantly: can the most beloved novel of English fiction be set to rights?

What is this recent passion to rip it apart in the first place, we have to ask? Is it some weird passive-aggressive reaction to P&P overload?

Review: There’s a lot of sex in this book.

Heh.

A special note for strict interpretationalist Janeites: If you can’t bear adaptations or retellings, if you’re dead against ITV’s “Lost in Austen,” if you have no desire to see a mostly-naked Darcy (unless he’s Colin Firth, I understand), stay away.

*steps up on soapbox*

One does not have to be a strict interpretationist to be critical of these ancillary sort of projects. Do any other author’s fans go through such angst when popular culture occasionally co-opts their favorite? We’re with Karen Joy Fowler on this one: “Surely no one else’s fans have been scolded so often for so long over the wrong-headed ways they love her.”

However, we are of the opinion that these extraneous items should not be accepted just as they are, like Bridget Jones running through London in her knickers. Each should be judged and criticized on its individual merits. Every Janeite is not going to agree on the quality of a particular book or film or action figure, and some may wish to have nothing to do with them at all, but there is no reason to condemn them on general principles; but at the same time, we are impatient with the idea that “it’s not really Jane Austen so if you can’t say something nice, don’t say anything at all.” Just because one doesn’t like a particular book, that does not mean one must dislike them all, and just because we are critical of certain projects doesn’t mean we are toffee-nosed snobs who can’t abide any of it. We just like quality. Perhaps our notions of quality are different from other Janeites’.

The Austen diaspora is in a weird place when it comes to these ancillary items, and it is reflected in the either-or attitude. The Brontëans don’t hold their noses when they read Wide Sargasso Sea and the Shakespeare folks don’t freak out over A Thousand Acres or The Story of Edgar Sawtelle (at least we don’t think they do; feel free to disabuse us of our mistaken notions). But the Austen fandom hasn’t really had a Wide Sargasso Sea or A Thousand Acres or The Story of Edgar Sawtelle. The closest thing we’ve had, believe it or not, is The Jane Austen Book Club, which is probably the most literary piece of Austen paraliterature out there. Other fandoms have fan fiction, but you don’t find it for sale in Barnes & Noble. Quite frankly, we are presented with a lot of crap, and there is a tendency in some quarters to fall into a rather easy place of “if some of it is crap, it must all be crap.” And there is a tendency in some quarters to fall into another easy place of “I liked this movie with pretty people in nice costumes so I am going to like this other movie with pretty people in nice costumes, even if the plot has been manipulated so much that it no longer makes sense and it’s so cheaply done that one can see the metaphorical zipper on the back of the monster’s costume.”

We do support the creative folks who make these things–that’s why we started this blog! But we don’t think we’re doing ourselves or our fellow Janeites a favor by supporting projects uncritically. If we keep watching and reading and buying, The Powers That Be know we’ll take anything, and they don’t have to try very hard or spend much money or offer us the very top quality items. If, perhaps, we are critical of the lesser-quality items, if we maybe vote with our feet and our voices, we’ll get something better. Perhaps. Would it hurt to try?

(And this is not to pick on Kate–we really enjoyed the review!)

In reference to a long discussion that took place in the comments section of this blog a little while ago, we thought we would share the following passage from the introduction to Rise to Rebellion by Jeff Shaara, an historical novel about the events leading up to the American Revolution:

It has become fashionable in our modern, more cynical time to reexamine our history, to throw a supposedly new light on those who are famous for their accomplishments, to instead expose their faults, to topple the statue of the hero, to replace the honor and respect with the sensational and the shameful, as though it were the only meaningful way these characters can be relevant to today’s world. I most adamantly disagree. That we know so much about these characters today is a testament to their accomplishments, their extraordinary achievements, and, yes, their astounding heroism. That they can so easily become targets is a testament to their humanity. They are, after all, so very much like us. Measuring their behavior with the crystal clarity of hindsight, with twenty-first-century standards and judgments, is a convenient and cynical shortcut to learning history, but it does little to help us understand their character and why they deserve too be not only remembered, but revered.

We want to clear up a few rumors and misapprehensions we’ve seen bandied about the Intartubes the past couple of weeks.

1. Persuasion, Northanger Abbey, and Mansfield Park were two hours long when they were broadcast in the UK and only 90 minutes on the Masterpiece broadcast and Region 1 DVDs!

Those three films were all broadcast at 92-93 minutes (this is according to the Region 2 DVD cases). They were never two hours long. Ever. Even in script version. (We shall comment on that presently.)

1b. They would be so much better if we could see the whole thing!

From someone who has seen the “uncut” versions: Afraid not. Really.

2. Andrew Davies did a hack job on Mansfield Park and Persuasion!

Andrew Davies had nothing to do with writing the scripts for those two films. He also had nothing to do with Miss Austen Regrets, which has yet to be broadcast. The PBS press releases were confusing; we had previously corresponded with one journalist who claimed in an article that he wrote the scripts for “the four new films,” so we made bold to write her a friendly note correcting her error. She wrote back insisting, “That’s what the press release said.” It didn’t, but she thought it did. So there’s a lot of confusion on this point.

Don’t blame Masterpiece for the first three films only being 90-some minutes long. That’s what they bought. Blame ITV. Though why anyone thought 90 minutes was sufficient time for any of these is beyond us, and why limit the running time of a TV movie anyway? Why not make it a two-parter? Two 60-minute episodes? We can speculate, a little bit. We have a copy of the original script of NA, which is 89 pages long. The generally assumption is one page of script equals one minute of running time. The script that we have is nearly the one that was shot; minus one scene in which Catherine walks in on Henry while he is bathing and plus the visit to Woodston, such as it was. The apple-picking scene was not in the script, but there is a similar “montage of General-free fun at NA” sort of thing in there. But generally it is the same.

Cub Reporter Heather L. has a good history of the long journey from page to screen of this particular production in her NA review at Remotely Connected. The script came into our possession while it was owned by Miramax and seemed dead in the water. (Our understanding is that it was being seeded around the Internet to raise interest amongst Janeites. We’ve been complaining about it ever since. ) There were a few false starts, but nothing really positive until after the success of P&P05 and the resulting resurgence in interest, at least among the entertainment Powers That Be, in Jane Austen.

So we’re not sure why the script was written to be 90 minutes. It could be that Andrew Davies felt that the best length for the film. It could be that was the length he was originally given by London Weekend Television. In that case, one could hardly “blame” Mr. Davies for the length of the film. However, if he was unhappy with that length, why wouldn’t he then rewrite it to be, say, two 60-minute episodes? So we presume it’s exactly the length he thought it should be.

Further speculating (we stress that this is SPECULATION, but it makes an awful lot of sense): ITV bought one script at 90 minutes. It therefore would make sense that it would contract for the other two films in its planned series to be approximately the same length.

We also have comments on record from Mr. Davies that the BBC originally wanted his new version of Sense and Sensibility (which is getting good reviews, but many thought was a little too short for a TV series) to be four 60 minute episodes, but he thought three was better. Why? When Pride and Prejudice, a novel of similar length, required 6 50-minute episodes, or five hours? And even his Emma was 107 minutes, which is a little better (but still too short–the theatrical film is 120 minutes).

So, while we can’t place direct blame on Mr. Davies for Persuasion and Mansfield Park, it is clear that there is a pattern with him of contracting Jane Austen’s novels to short films–perhaps shorter than they should be–and we can speculate that the length of his script for NA dictated the length of MP and Persuasion, all of which, it is generally agreed, would be improved with at least an extra half-hour. One of the selling points of the ITV “Jane Austen Season” was that “each generation deserves its own Jane Austen adaptations.” Too bad this generation gets the short-attention-span versions.

Alert Janeite Lisa sent us this article, which had us scratching our head. It’s a typical “O Hai, Jane Austen Is Teh Hawt Right Now” sort of article, but he mentions the two P&P musicals; then at the end, a list of Friends of Jane that sounded, well, awfully familiar, as most of them had been mentioned at one time or another on AustenBlog.

We were a little put out at first that an article that had so clearly used AustenBlog as a source could not be bothered to mention us, but then on a re-read we realized that the list of F.O.J.s actually had come from Carrie Rickey’s article from earlier this summer, for which we were interviewed, and some information for which came from AustenBlog (which was, of course, mentioned in the article and was the reason we were invited to the screening and interviewed for the piece). Ms. Rickey is not credited, either.

The other curious thing about the article was the person quoted within it, “author and Austen fan Patricia Kennealy-Morrison.”

As Lisa wrote to us, “Who’s Patricia Kennealy-Morrison?”

We wondered, too; her name sounded vaguely familiar, so we thought she must have written a book related to Jane Austen at some point, and doesn’t the article sort of make it seem that way? We wielded our ninja-like Google-fu and discovered that Ms. Kennealy-Morrison’s main claim to fame is that she married Jim Morrison over the anvil. (The marriage ceremony performed at Gretna Green and other Scottish locations for the benefit of British lovers on the run in Jane Austen’s day was basically handfasting.) (And not that one could blame her. Dude. Jim Morrison. We wouldn’t wait for the banns to be cried, either.) (more…)

This is probably less a review and more of an editorial. Read Heather L.’s review on her personal blog, because it pretty much says what we would have. –Ed.

“You have drawn two pretty pictures; but I think there may be a third — a something between the do-nothing and the do-all.” - Emma, Vol. I, Ch. 1

Okay, okay, we know there’s not a whole lot to go on when it comes to Jane Austen biography. The perfidious Cassandra Austen burnt all her sister’s letters (no doubt full of breathless descriptions of love affairs and complaints about having to feed the pigs when she really wanted to be wandering aimlessly through the woods caressing trees and writing angsty melodrama) and the uptight Victorian relatives were better at dodgy past-laundering than Paris Hilton’s publicist, so what scarce material exists must be plumped out with speculation. In most biographies of Jane Austen, such speculation varies in adherence to the real story, some biographers venturing further afield than others. Those who do take greater liberties generally do so in the name of scholarship, so even if one disagrees with that biographer’s conclusions, one can, however grudgingly, accept the process. (more…)