Greetings, Gentle Readers! It’s time for another review of news items and posts about Jane Austen’s work to start off your weekend.

Scotland’s National Library is opening an exhibition featuring items from the John Murray Archive related to Jane Austen.

The display, which will open next week, includes a sales book showing that the second edition of Mansfield Park sold only 36 copies.

Oh dear! But we’re sure the exhibition will be fascinating. The exhibition is open every day; Monday-Friday from 10 a.m. until 8 p.m., Saturday from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m., and Sunday from 2 to 5 p.m.

If you’ve ever wanted to study Jane Austen’s work at Oxford but can’t afford plane fare, here’s your chance, sort of. Oxford University will present an online course on Jane Austen’s work from September through December 2008.

Many readers enjoy Austen’s novels but cannot define the qualities that make them so special and enduring. This course will help you to analyse Austen’s style and techniques, and give you a greater knowledge of the novels’ context, which will enhance your understanding and enjoyment of reading them.

Sounds like a great course, but a bit spendy for those of us outside the EU.

Writer’s Block discusses reading Jane Austen to improve your writing.

But what Austen did, that many writers, if not most, can and could not, was to not only encapsulate the spirit of the age, but she also captured the spirit of the human condition. Underneath all the 18th Century finery lays a picture stripped bare of all the outer pretension. There are just people: sensible people, vain people, silly people, innocent people, conflicted people, horrible people…and the list goes on. The outer aspects/attributes of them all might change, but the inner drives and motivations are remarkably unchanged from age to age. Pick up any Austen story, and you’ll find the emotions you felt when you were this age, or the exact sketch of your best friend or worst enemy at that age.

So true! And we say that all the time. Fashions change, societies change, but people do not, and Jane Austen wrote about people.

And a couple of fun blog posts to round off this week’s Bookblogging. First, Xantippe posts about the Amazing Jane Austen Diet. No, not white soup and negus, but listening to audiobooks of Jane Austen’s novels while on the treadmill! What a great idea! And the Baklava Shed Coalition tells us that Jane Austen is selling off her plants. She’s selling off her plants kind of like how That Lefroy Boy is Mr. Darcy, but at least he admits he’s delivering his content with a wink!

That’s it for this week’s Friday Bookblogging. Until next time, Gentle Readers, remember: Books Are Nice!

An exhibition of the works of the artist Jennifer Dudley will open at Ramapo College in Mahwah, New Jersey, on February 5. The works include The Analyst:

The Analyst couples a double portrait painting and a psychoanalyst’s couch. The painting, Portrait of the Artist and Jane Austen, depicts a scene taken from director Ang Lee’s film adaptation of Jane Austen’s novel Sense and Sensibility.

The exhibit is representative of Dudley’s varied working process. The starkness of the painting and the psychoanalyst’s couch has the impact of the viewer making a deeply intimate connection to the painting.

In Portrait of the Artist and Jane Austen, the film’s two starring characters have been replaced. In their stead is a portrait of the artist fully absorbed in anguish and directing the emotion to a fictional representation of Austen, whose gaze is turned outward toward the viewer. The painting faces an analyst’s couch, which invites the viewer to inhabit the space of the psychoanalyzed patient and to view the painting from this position.

Dudley’s reincarnation of Austen’s fiction prods ideas about character identification and emotional authenticity, and questions our culture’s complicated relationship with history and authorship. The viewer of The Analyst is invited to participate in a similarly generative act by occupying the space of the psychoanalyzed patient on the analyst’s couch.

Tell Auntie Jane all your problems…

Thanks to Alert Janeite Lisa for the link.

Alert Janeite Franka sent us a link (in Dutch) to an exhibition at the Centraal Museum in Utrecht. The exhibition is called “Script” and will include props and costumes from various films, including Sense and Sensibility 1995. Franka wrote,

The interesting bit is that you can take a picture of yourself in the filmsets, so you can ‘play your own part’ in for example S&S.

That sounds like fun!

The exhibition will be in the museum from December 2007 through August 2009, and the items will rotate; it is unknown when the items from S&S will be there.