Stephenie Meyer, author of the Twilight Saga series of young adult vampire novels, is a Friend of Jane.

What writers inspire you?
Jane Austen, William Shakespeare, and Orson Scott Card. I can’t go through a year without re-reading Austen.

Well, sort of. Alert Janeite Lisa sent us a link to an article on “the top 10 sporting bookworms” in which now-retired footballer Pat Nevin admits to enjoying auditory Jane.

6. Pat Nevin Almost a decade before Graeme Le Saux arrived at Stamford Bridge with all his fancy airs and graces, Nevin had already been nicknamed ‘Weirdo’ by those in the Chelsea dressing room for his unusual interest in politics, art and literature. The Scot has described Voltaire, Chekhov, Dostoevsky and Gogol as “wonderful” and in 1999 said that if he didn’t have time to read, he made up for it by “using talking books in the car. At the moment I’m listening to Pride And Prejudice”

That makes tremendous sense to us!

Lots of bookblogging to do this week! Huzzah! *AustenBlog Cheerleading and Dance Team begins chanting “Books Are Nice! Books Are Nice!”*

First up we have a real treat: photographs of a first edition copy of Pride and Prejudice! Julie T. tells the story in an e-mail to the Editrix:

My wonderful son is visiting his girlfriend at Wesleyan University. Today they went to the school’s rare book room, and look what Jake asked to see! It’s a first edition, and please note the name inscribed in the front cover, “Harriet Gardiner.” What could be more appropriate for the owner of this book (other than, perhaps, Elizabeth Darcy)

Click on the thumbnails below for larger images:

Photos by Jake Zien

Thanks so much to Jake and Julie for sharing the images, and for allowing us to post them.

Speaking of Pride and Prejudice, Laurie Viera Rigler continues her series at About.com’s Classic Literature blog with a really lovely entry on P&P. (more…)

T.C. Boyle is not only a Friend of Jane, he dated her! He tells the whole story in “I Dated Jane Austen,” now available to read on his website, with some funky woodcut illustrations. Check it out, it’s a riot.

Found via Knowledge Problem

Miss Austen Regrets makes two Jane Austen-related films for Olivia Williams, and she tells the Telegraph that she feels a responsibility towards the work, as she’s a big Jane Austen fan. We’ve heard that before, but we find Ms. Williams rather more convincing.

Miss Austen Regrets is a highly - maybe dangerously - speculative biopic, tracing a narrative out of the writer’s possible romantic near-misses. It is a bleakly accomplished little film, quite unlike last spring’s sprightly Becoming Jane, and Williams turns in a startling and muscular performance: spiky, self-assured and yet frequently stricken by the thought of what might have been.

‘Mmm, it’s very dangerous, isn’t it?’ Williams agrees, flinching a little. She hopes the Janeites who made such a fuss about Anne Hathaway’s Austen in Becoming Jane are still lying down in their darkened rooms, recovering, so that this film will pass without comment.

Ah ha ha ha as if.

However, she is a bit of a Janeite herself, so her own reservations surface with very little encouragement. Having trained herself to be ‘wily and flinty and mercenary’ over the years, which is presumably one reason why she signed up to the project, she couldn’t help being pained by it. She feels awkward about the intrusion into a modest and little-known life: ‘My ideal script would be quotations from the letters, brilliantly knitted together into perfectly natural scenes. Anything that you put into her mouth has to be brilliant, written by somebody who was as brilliant as Jane Austen, and that’s impossible, so to have her speaking in a way that is lazily colloquial to me was a mistake.’

So she has said lines that she feels uncomfortable with? ‘Did I say lines I was uncomfortable with?’ she muses, in a rather lawyerly fashion. ‘There was so much debate that most of the time we shot scenes two ways, so I’m subject to the editors. I feel I’ve done what I can, I’ve fulfilled my contract, and I’ve quieted my own conscience.’

We are half-twitchy and half-reassured by this. Thanks to Alert Janeite Lisa for the link!

The below reminded us of an e-mail we got from Alert Janeite Julie T. last week after attending a book signing with Michael Chabon, author of the marvelous Wonder Boys (a favorite at AustenBlog World Headquarters) among many others:

I just got home from a wonderful evening lecture/book signing with (Pulitzer Prize winning) author Michael Chabon. As we were getting our
books signed, my dear friend (and co-Vice Chair of the Wisconsin region of JASNA) Cynthia Kartman asked Mr. Chabon if he liked Jane Austen. He replied, with great enthusiasm, that he LOVES Jane Austen, and recently finished REreading her novels along with “a couple [he] hadn’t read before.”

squeeeeeeeeeeeeeee!

Squee indeed!

Novelist Paul Auster (whose books are usually snugged up against Jane Austen’s on the bookstore shelf) thinks Jane Austen is a genius. We concur!

“A strange thing happened to me, proving how personal reading is: when, aged around 20, I read ‘Pride and Prejudice’ by Jane Austen, who I consider a genius, I noticed as I read that all the novel’s action was taking place in the house where I grew up. I had transposed everything into my own world, into a familiar setting, all the more easily because Jane Austen is very parsimonious with descriptions.”

That’s a really great observation, and very true; and typical of a novelist to notice it, and not as typical as perhaps it should be to learn from it.

Thanks to Alert Janeite Lisa for the link!

The Cleveland Plain Dealer has a nice article on the popularity currently enjoyed by Jane Austen, featuring JASNA’s North Shore (Ohio) Region.

Jane Austen’s sarcastic, wry and pithy drawing-room dramas of curtsies and bows, pianoforte concerts, girls without dowries, meddling mothers and country dancing offer a comforting escape from the cold age of technology, said University of Cincinnati professor Barbara Britton Wenner. “E-mail does not equal missives delivered on a platter by a servant, and book clubs do not equal reading Shakespeare’s sonnets by firelight after dinner.”

And Jane isn’t chick lit. Manly Gregory Peck, who discovered her books at the age of 12, used to take all six of her novels with him on literary retreats. He said that reading Jane calmed him.

*gasp* Captain Hornblower! Oh, wouldn’t he have been an awesome Wentworth or Knightley?

We loved this story:

And lots of people read Jane. As she does before each Dec. 16, Fernberg went to Heinen’s to order a cake with which the club, whose 40 members range in age from 20 to 82, would fete their favorite author’s birthday. While Fernberg ticked off each of the novels to chronologically depict in frosting, the clerk behind the bakery counter corrected the order. “She said, “No, Emma’ came before Persuasion,’ ” said Fernberg.

*applauds*

But most of all, Jane — who celebrated the women who often were not the prettiest in the room, but the smartest — invites readers and moviegoers to imagine eventually being adored, just like Elinor Dashwood in “Sense and Sensibility,” or Elizabeth Bennet in “Pride and Prejudice,” said Fernberg. “All of us would like to think there is someone out there who thinks we are special.”

Awww! Congratulations to the North Shore Region for a great article! The Plain Dealer also had a sidebar about various film adaptations.

We probably shouldn’t point this out since he doesn’t like attention, but Alert Janeite Jessica Irene let us know that J.D. Salinger, author of The Catcher in the Rye among other works, named Jane Austen as one of the writers he “loves.”

*whispers “ease his pain!”*

TheHype* is concerned that just by mentioning the name *whispers* Jane Austen he might start leaking testosterone out of his ears.

Well, we’ve got two words for you, plebe:

Dwyane Wade.

We believe the proper term to be used at the present juncture would be “pwn3d.”

*Ungentlemanlike language warning.

The Chicago Tribune (you need a password to read it; try BugMeNot) has a profile of presidential candidate Dennis Kucinich, who described his latest “three-dog” movie thus:

MOST RECENT 3-DOG SELECTION: “Pride & Prejudice.”

CAPSULE REVIEW: “Mr. Darcy! Mr. Darcy!” (yelled in an English accent). Kucinich explains that he took a nap during the movie and that’s all he remembers.

Despite appearances, there are some who would say that makes him very much a friend of Jane indeed.

Thanks to Alert Janeite surreyhill for the link.

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…)

(On Saturday once again! We are determined to be caught up today.)

There are not just new Austen-related sequels and biographies and other works coming out these days, there also are new editions of her novels. Premier Books has released a set of the novels in Canada (they seem to only be available at Chapters) that have covers with a modern feeling: Sense and Sensibility, Pride and Prejudice, Mansfield Park, Emma, Persuasion, Northanger Abbey. One might also say they echo the film posters for P&P05 and Becoming Jane. Also, the Adventures in Reading blog posted new covers for the Vintage Classics Series editions that are taken from period fashion plates. We like those very much, even though the periods displayed might not match the setting of the book.

What do you think of these new book covers? And how many editions of the novels do YOU own? (We have: one set, Chapman editions; one set, softcover Everyman Library editions given out by the Daily Telegraph earlier this year, courtesy of Dear Friend of AustenBlog Kathleen; several Brock illustrated antique editions of various novels; assorted paperbacks that we pick up at the book swap to lend/give away, which are currently all with a co-worker; e-books in eReader and Mobipocket versions.) (more…)

Alert Janeite Lisa spotted a USAToday article with a reference to President James Garfield’s affection for our favorite authoress.

“After college, Garfield briefly taught classical languages. Books remained a favorite refuge whenever politics became unbearable. He was particularly fond of Jane Austen. During his short stay in the White House, Garfield installed a library with 3,000 volumes. Given his distaste for the modern literature of his day — ‘highly spiced with sensation,’ he called it — his students could expect a large dose of Miss Austen and her peers.”

Sounds good to us!

Alert Janeite Alana sent us an article in the Ottawa Citizen that points to a rather interesting website in which Yann Martel, author of The Life of Pi, sends Stephen Harper, the prime minister of Canada, various books that he might like to read along with a letter explaining why it is of interest. The latest novel Mr. Martel chose was The Watsons, accompanied by a thoughtful letter.

But back to Jane Austen: boxed in, left only to play card games, look forward to the next ball and keep an eye out for eligible bachelors, surrounded by green pastures and rolling hills, does this strike you as promising grounds for great art?

Well, in the case of Jane Austen, it was. Because she had the great and good luck of having a loving and intellectually lively family, and she was blessed with a keen and critical sense of observation, as well as an inherently positive disposition.

Yes! We think this is often forgotten in the modern lust for melodrama. Some people are overwhelmed by tragedy and things going wrong in their lives, some struggle but get through, and some prefer to focus on the positive. Jane Austen always strikes us as having been a glass-half-full kind of person (admittedly perhaps a bit of projection, as we are the same way). If she was made unhappy by, oh, the failure to find her Mr. Darcy (gag), she didn’t wallow in it. Instead she turned it inside out and wrote hilariously funny novels. This is different from being some kind of Pagliacci, writing comedy as she despaired; her letters, the remembrances of her family, and most importantly her novels paint a picture of a relatively happy person. That does not diminish her genius. One really does not have to suffer for one’s art, you know, no matter what the poets and the lit-crits and the Hollywood filmmakers tell us.

We were perusing our copy of JASNA News tonight and were delighted to note that Maggie Grace, who plays Allegra in the film adaptation of The Jane Austen Book Club and formerly was a cast member in the television program Lost (though nobody ever really leaves the cast of Lost, do they?) loves Jane Austen’s novels, particularly Pride and Prejudice. We take back all those mean things we said about Shannon now. (Stop giving us that “told you so” look, Dorothy.)

Alert Janeite Faith-Anne wrote to tell us that Stephenie Meyer, author of several novels for young adults, lists Jane Austen as one of her favorite authors.

The Spoof reports that Irvine Welsh, author of Trainspotting, will complete a previously undiscovered manuscript by Jane Austen.

Speaking from his offices, a Spokesman said: “This is a literary marriage made in Heaven. We will be inventing a brand new genre, Grit Chick Lit, and it should have something to appeal to both men and women, young and old, and all points in between”

When asked if this was really such a good idea, the spokesman denied that they were cashing in on a recent upsurge in an interest in the work of Ms Austen, but he did say that Gwyneth Paltrow, Kate Beckinsale, Robert Carlyle and Ewan McGregor were in talks to star in the film.

This is a satire, of course, but we wonder if they knew that Irvine Welsh was an Friend of Jane before they wrote it?

Alert Janeite Natalie sent us a scan of a blurb from an article in Entertainment Weekly about J.K. Rowling’s “Secret Ingredients”–her influences while writing the Harry Potter novels. Our Gentle Readers can probably guess one of the influences.

(It’s our birthday party and we’ll shamelessly self-promote if we want to. Dorothy is serving cake and iced rooibos in the conservatory.)

Two articles about Jane Austen, Janeites, and the upcoming films Becoming Jane and The Jane Austen Book Club mention AustenBlog and The Jane Austen Handbook, and we are thrilled about it! (more…)