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Filming begins this month in the UK for an adaptation of Shannon Hale's bestselling novel Austenland, about a thirtysomething girl named Jane who's obsessed with Pride & Prejudice and receives an all-expenses-paid vacation to a British resort where guests live like the characters in Jane Austen novels. The film—which will star Keri Russell and Jennifer Coolidge—will be the directorial debut of Jerusha Hess, the woman who wrote the screenplays for Napoleon Dynamite and Nacho Libre. More »
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Ancestry.com has discovered that Kate Middleton, Duchess Of Cambridge, aka Princess Shinylocks™ and Jane Austen are are eleventh cousins, six times removed. You're thinking: Um, isn't everyone in the English upper crust related? That's just sense and sensibility! Yeah, but lead historian Anastasia Harman is psyched: "Finding this connection between the Duchess of Cambridge and Jane Austen is very exciting since, in many ways, Catherine is the modern Jane Austen heroine: a middle-class girl marrying the future King of England." [People] More »
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Many of the best-loved works of western literature feature catastrophically unhappy marriages — and, more specifically, women who marry — or almost marry — the wrong man. Why do we love reading about badly-married ladies? More »
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In a recent Guardian UK article, Hadley Freeman compared the modern New York City dating scene (with its rules, regulations, and awkward social customs) to "the ways of ye olde England" and predicts our nation's swift demise if we keep insisting on meeting potential suitors for a beer at a "bowling alley", just as Austen's character Emma so often did. More »
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There is always some individual who delights in taking a single audio book and mashing up its millions of words and sounds to create a wholly new version of said book. And so we come to Filthy Pride & Prejudice. Somewhere, an 11-year-old just found his or her new reason for living. More »
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Coming soon: A riches to rags flick, in which two posh sisters have to move in with their (Chicana) aunt after the death of their father. Inspired by Sense and Sensibility and starring Camilla Belle. Possibility of maid jokes: High. More »
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The Black List has released its annual list of the best-liked Hollywood scripts that haven't been made. Let's check out what bullets we likely dodged — and what we would love to see. More »
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Known "perfect stylist" Jane Austen might not have been so perfect after all, says an Oxford prof who studied the novelist's writings and found "blots, crossing outs and 'a powerful counter-grammatical way of writing.'" Also, a dude heavily edited her. More »
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It is not our place to ask why a book has a trailer. But we can wonder whether, after the Pride and Prejudice and Zombies prequel, Dawn Of The Dreadfuls, the regency horror remix crap will end. [Mediabistro] More »
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Jane Austen, "vicious gossip?" More »
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Jane Austen's death at the tender age of 41 has long perplexed scholars, doctors, and fans. And now, there's a lead: More »
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In Martin Amis' opinion, Pride and Prejudice would be improved by a "twenty-page sex scene featuring the two principals, with Mr. Darcy, furthermore, acquitting himself uncommonly well." (As if that's in question.) [USA Today] More »
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Of their landmark Jane Austen exhibit, a Morgan Library's curator explains, "There have been so many Jane Austen adaptations over the last 20 or 30 years. It seemed like a timely moment to show this collection." [BBC] More »
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Oh dear. There's a very troubling letter in today's Financial Times by a distraught citizen with a dodgy coworker. Really, there was nothing to do but get the opinions of a bunch of dead people, without delay. More »
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• A CDC advisory committee has recommended GlaxoSmithKline's HPV vaccine Cervarix, which is similar to Merck's Gardasil vaccine, for use in girls and women. But, some say Cervarix is overpriced because it offers less protection than Gardasil. • More »
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In case your book group needs guidance in analyzing Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters, the author has helpfully provided discussion questions. Sample: "Have you ever been romantically involved with someone who turned out to be a sea witch?" [NYT] More »
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A new book, Jane Austen: An Unrequited Love claims that Jane Austen might have been in love with a guy who might have been this guy and that she and her sister might have fought over him! Squee! More »
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Let's ask Dorothy Parker! More »
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Currently riding a wave of zombie-infested hype, Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice is given yet another form, thanks to Rita Award-winner Nancy Butler's comic adaptation of the novel, which was recently released by Marvel Comics. More »
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"…She saw Mrs. Long struggle to free herself as two female dreadfuls bit into her head, cracking her skull like a walnut, and sending a shower of dark blood spouting as high as the chandeliers." [NPR] More »
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"Elton John's Rocket Pictures is mounting Pride and Predator, about 18th century English people who find their flirtations and courtships interrupted by an invasion of monsters from outer space." [Ain't It Cool News] More »
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Lost in Austen, the BBC series about a Jane Austen fan who time-travels to the 19th century, is reportedly being turned into a feature film by Sam Mendes's production company. Is his wife involved? [Mirror] More »
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Apparently Jezebels aren't the only ones tickled by the idea of Pride and Prejudice and Zombies. The upcoming title that launched a thousand puns has become a viral internet phenomenon! [Media Bistro] More »
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Um. Seth Grahame-Smith's new novel, Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, is a "delightful comedy of manners" featuring Elizabeth, Darcy, and the undead. I'd say Jane was rolling, but she probably stopped caring long ago. [Mediabistro] More »
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The Jane Austen Society of North America celebrated its 30th anniversary recently with a Regency Ball at Chicago's Westin Hotel. More »
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There are Jane Austen fans. And then are people who love Jane Austen so much that they want their ashes scattered at the 17th century Hampshire Cottage where she wrote her novels. Indeed, the practice has become such a problem that the management of the Jane Austen House Museum has been forced to issue a statement. "While we understand many admirers of Jane Austen would love to have ashes laid here, it is something we do not allow. It is distressing for visitors to see mounds of human ash, particularly so for our gardener. Also, it is of no benefit to the garden!" [Daily Mail] More »
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It is a truth universally acknowledged that Jane Austen can be linked to everything, whether "everything" has anything to do with her or not. Now it turns out she invented baseball! In a new book, Can We Have Our Balls Back? author Julian Norridge a mention of "base-ball" in Northanger Abbey as evidence that baseball is an English game whose true origins were concealed by the jingoistic Albert Spalding (the hardball guy.) According to Norridge, Spalding set up a commission that ignored historical evidence of the sport's English antecendents and crafted the Cooperstown legend out of whole cloth. Stay tuned for Mr. Bingley's take on the 2008 elections. [Telegraph] More »
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There's a piece in Britain's Spectator about how Jane Austen weathered her own "banking crisis." Her brother was a banker who had business problems; it was stressful. In other words, it had exactly nothing to do with the global economic situation. Look, gang, I love Jane Austen as much as the next gal, but can we please have a moratorium on linking everything contemporary to the poor woman? (Yes, Maureen Dowd, I'm looking at you!) It's really getting ridiculous, and here's why. More »
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Esquire put up a slideshow of 75 books every man should read, and it is indeed a very good list. However, it's a very good list that's also extremely myopic. It relies way too heavily on the old white dude cannon (particularly the WASP angst end of it) with books by Updike, Cheever, Kingsley and Martin Amis, Hemingway, McPhee, Joyce, Roth, Mailer, and the token Russians. There are only four non-white men on the list (Ellison, Rushdie, Haley, Wright) and just one woman, the incomparable Flannery O'Connor with her classic book of short stories, A Good Man is Hard to Find. The only really offensive choice on the list is Bukowski. I've read Bukowski, and even though he's an old cuss, I like his writing. However, I would never call something so unapologetically misogynistic something men "should" read. Anyway, in light of Esquire's myopia, we decided to curate a list of 20 books every woman should read. You should fill in the other 55 in the comments! More »
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Jane Austen would have really enjoyed the feud that's taking place over which town has the right to call themselves her "real" home. Bath, which holds a Jane Austen Festival, claims that it is "internationally recognized" as the Jane Austen capital because the city is featured in several of her novels and retains its Regency patina. However, Chawton, Austen's home base from 1809 until her death eight years later, contains the cottage — Jane Austen's House Museum — where she completed all her novels. Says Tom Carpenter of Chawton, "They appear to be laying down the gauntlet. How does one gently correct them? Chawton was the place she called home. From a literary point of view, it all happened here." [Telegraph] More »
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Your "friends" are probably telling you not to read the indictment. (You know what indictment! The one charging your Ponzi sheming ex, Raffaello Follieri. Look, only 18 pages. It's not a script) And let me tell you something, Anne, and this is beside the point, but those same fucking friends avoiding the topic, telling you reading all the press will only be "painful" are also secretly ordering your light Frappuccinos REGULAR, and marking the side of the plastic cup with their own sharpies so that you THINK they're light even though they taste "deceptively" high fructose. Okay, maybe they're not, but the point is, I bet you are perceptive enough to distinguish a real Frappuccino from a Splenda-sweetened one but the man you loved held himself out to be the CFO of the Fucking Vatican and the whole time he was nothing but a uniquely shameless Italian con artist living in a $90,000 a month apartment with a $60,000 housecleaning service you NEVER KNEW THE DIFFERENCE. You, Anne, are kind of stupid; this is your intervention; most pretty girls in this country never get one so consider yourself blessed. Not that I know you, I am just speculating, not on the basis of the fact that you just likened making out with Steve Carell to a "yummy lollipop" but on the basis that you once called "charity work" such an "aphrodisiac," which would be an idiotic thing to say if your boyfriend was the Pope himself, but ha ha, no, you probably just thought he was friends with the Pope. Which brings me to my very fave part of this indictment: More »
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Calling all Jane Austen enthusiasts! The Governor's House in Hyde Park, Vermont, has scheduled a series of four Jane Austen-themed weekends during which her novel Persuasion will be discussed along with afternoon tea and carriage rides. Suzanne Boden, owner of the Governor's House, says of the weekends, "I'm hoping each weekend will be a mix of young people who might know only the movies and are ready to discover the original prose and readers who consider Jane an old friend and can't wait to argue the merits of the new interpretations over breakfast." This year: Persuasion. Next year: Pride and Prejudice. Knickers are a-twist in breathless anticipation! [UPI] More »
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One of the things that stuck in my craw about the Sarah Jessica Parker profile in New York Mag was when SJP claimed that Carrie didn't care about Big's money. "I really don't think that money was a criteria," Parker told writer Emily Nussbaum. "It never would have occurred to her to take money from a man." British writer and Candace Bushnell buddy argues that Carrie does indeed care about money. In fact, she and the other SatC heroines care so much about money that, Young writes, "once you remove the pixie dust of female camaraderie, contemporary New York emerges as an essentially pre-feminist society in which the courtship rituals are strikingly similar to those depicted in the novels of Jane Austen." More »
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A bunch of Jane Austen enthusiasts are going to get the vapors when they watch the forthcoming British drama about Jane's life, Miss Austen Regrets. You see, in Miss Austen, Jane is not portrayed as the chaste maiden auntie she's thought by many to have been. According to Reuters, the new drama "depicts [Austen] flirting, suffering from hangovers and reneging on the acceptance of a marriage proposal." Well I never! Fingers crossed that the scandalous show hits BBC America soon! [Reuters, Image via The Republic of Pemberley] More »
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Jane Austen enthusiasts are in for a treat: PBS is broadcasting The Complete Jane Austen, which includes adaptations of all of Austen's six novels, starting this Sunday. First up is Persuasion, which originally aired on British TV last year. Persuasion is the last, and generally thought of as the poorest, of all Austen's completed works. It focuses on heroine Anne Elliot, who fell in love with a poor naval officer named Frederick Wentworth years before the book's action takes place. Back then, Anne was convinced by her family that he was unsuitable for marriage because of his dismal economic prospects. Wentworth returns to Anne's seaside town of Bath: will he and Anne finally consummate their fractured love affair? It's an Austen novel: you figure it out. Anyway, I always found Anne to be the least interesting of the Austen heroines because she's sort of a sad sack, and the critics are similarly tepid about the performance of Sally Hawkins, who plays her. (The SF Chronicle says "her mouth twitches like a bass zeroing in on a tasty side order of plankton." Check out what the rest of the critical biddies had to say, after the jump. More »
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Missing today's installment of the book nerdy Fine Lines? Well, our writer is on vacation — so perhaps you can get your YA fix from this handy Radar quiz on teen novels. But! The Telegraph has a quiz to help you determine which character in Sense and Sensibility you are most like. Are you an Elinor ("Sense"), someone infinitely prudent and sort of repressed? Or are you a Marianne ("Sensibility") — histrionic to the point where a broken love affair causes you to end up near death? You could even be a Mrs. Jennings, the town gossip and a vulgarian at heart. Personally, when I read Sense in a college Austen course, I wanted to slap Marianne around. Bitch is whiny as hell! Then I took the quiz and discovered that I'm equal parts Marianne and Elinor. Does that mean I hate myself, or that my response to romantic rejection is weeping and occasionally hospitalization? As for the other Jezzies, Anna was also equally Elinor and Marianne, while Dodai and Slut Machine were Mrs. Jennings all the way. More »
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"[Catherine] was heartily ashamed of her ignorance. A misplaced shame. Where people wish to attach, they should always be ignorant. To come with a well-informed mind is to come with an inability of administering to the vanity of others, which a sensible person would always wish to avoid. A woman especially, if she have the misfortune of knowing anything, should conceal it as well as she can. —Jane Austen, Northanger Abbey (1803) [Harpers] More »
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Is this woman on crack? Emma Campbell Webster hypothosizes in her new book, Being Elizabeth Bennet: Create Your Own Jane Austen Adventure that Jane Austen's works send a subliminal message to women that they are better off staying single. Though Austen herself never married, her books have long seduced women into thinking that the world is full of Mr. Darcys who are just waiting to fight with them and then sweep them off their feet. Though Austen's work definitely sets up that love is the aversion to climax (which we guess some argue is another way to say "not getting married"), we don't know how many gals walk away with the message that they're best off single after seeing Emma Woodhouse and Elizabeth Bennett and Elinor Dashwood paired off. Carrie Bradshaws these girls ain't. [Guardian] More »
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A few years ago we were really really sick. Everything's all cool now, but to make us feel better, a friend of ours told us that we were a Jane Austen heroine and that we merely had a case of consumption as a result of broken heart. It was fun to practice a consumptive cough and fan ourselves. But we got to thinking, how is it that all these Austen heroines and the like would die out of the blue in these novels, seemingly over nothing more than some boy being all douchey and making them sorta sad? Boys have made us sad, but we're not dead yet! Recently the good folks over at the BBC brought in a team of physicians to evaluate the ills of 19th century literary heroines. Their reports, after the jump. More »
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We heart economists! (In fact, we were wondering why we never ended up having one night stands with them! More on that below!) Anyway, namely we love how they are always sprucing up the Dismal science by using their awesome powers of calculation for utterly pointless tasks like figuring out the net worth of, oh my god we wish we were kidding, Mr. Darcy, as in this story, wherein a FORMER MEMBER OF THE US TREASURY DEPARTMENT calculates that Fitzwilliam Darcy was worth a cool $6 mil in modern-day dollars (which sounds like middling private equity money to us until you remember shit like, you know, service was better being that they were still in the process of abolishing slavery.) More »
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