March - 2020

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Tripping

Mar 30, 2020

Tripping

Plans are apparently progressing for Trip, a gay-themed Pride and Prejudice update set on the New York gay mecca of Fire Island and written by the American actor and comedian Joel Kim Booster. Quibi, a forthcoming video subscription service that will deliver ten-minute-long episodes (i.e., “QUIck BItes”) via phone app, has officially ordered up the series, which has been in the works since last fall. Trip “centres around two best friends who set out to have a legendary week-l

Jane in the time of coronavirus

Mar 26, 2020

Jane in the time of coronavirus

For Austen fans everywhere, it’s a burning question: WWJD (What Would Jane Do) in the time of coronavirus quarantine? Luckily, we now have our answer, reported via Twitter just yesterday: “Over breakfast, Jane announced she'll be finishing Sanditon in order to give that Andrew Davies more to work with. ‘Poor man’s been playing without a net.’ ” This welcome insight into Austen’s productive response to global pandemic comes to us via Pride & Plague, a delightful new Twitter

Restraint

Mar 23, 2020

Restraint

I like to think that I do not “rant” about Jane Austen-related error. I merely point it out, in a snarky yet restrained way. At times, it may be true, I do allow my annoyance at the total sloppiness that surrounds us at all times and would be so easy to avoid if only people would avail themselves of the greatest research tool ever known to humankind which they all have at their very fingertips every moment of every single day. . . where was I again? Oh, yes. . . allow my anno

Silver linings

Mar 19, 2020

Silver linings

There’s an upside to everything, apparently – even a global pandemic that threatens to sicken and perhaps kill millions while tanking the world economy. Yes, the latest Jane Austen screen adaptation will be available for streaming tomorrow, months before anyone could have expected it. Arthouse films like Autumn de Wilde’s Emma., which opened in big cities last month and went into wide release on March 6, get clobbered when they don’t have time to build an audience through wor

Feverish

Mar 16, 2020

Feverish

No one in Jane Austen’s novels becomes infected with a coronavirus, but that doesn’t mean she has nothing to say on the subject that now occupies all of our minds. At least three important characters* in her novels experience significant bouts of infectious disease: --Harriet Smith “was very feverish and had a bad sore-throat . . . . ‘a throat very much inflamed, with a great deal of heat about her, a quick low pulse, &c.’ ” (Emma, ch. 13) In an early example of self-quaran

Immortal, beloved

Mar 12, 2020

Immortal, beloved

Twenty-five years ago this summer, we Janeites flocked to movie theaters to see a brand-new modernization of Emma, set among affluent Beverly Hills high school students. Since then, the costumes, music, and slang of the immortal Clueless have become indelible pop-culture touchstones, and just about everyone who loves Cher Horowitz has bought the DVD or, at the very least, subscribed to a streaming service that makes the movie available for right-this-minute viewing. Neverthel

On this day in 1814. . .

Mar 9, 2020

On this day in 1814. . .

Fifty-third in an occasional series of excerpts from Jane Austen's letters. It’s no secret that Jane Austen’s relatives, while immensely proud of her achievements, sometimes felt that her rough edges could use a bit of smoothing. Thus it was that her brother Henry, in the biographical notice appended to the first edition of Northanger Abbey and Persuasion, insisted that none of her unpleasant characters were drawn from life. Thus it was that her nephew James Edward Austen-Lei

Book nerds unite

Mar 5, 2020

Book nerds unite

I was a teenage book nerd. Also a pre-teen one. And an adult one. Basically, I’ve had my nose in a book (or, more recently, my eyes on a Kindle) since the age of five. I loved going to the public library on Saturdays, stacking my gleanings next to my bed, and watching the height of the pile drop precipitously over the course of the week. I loved school recess, because it meant I could curl up in a corner of the playground and read. My idea of heaven: a rainy weekend afternoon

Emma again

Mar 2, 2020

Emma again

Actor/playwright Kate Hamill has cornered the market on energetic, quirky theatrical adaptations of classic literature – Vanity Fair, Little Women, The Scarlet Letter – but she got her start with Jane Austen. (Even though Austen didn't write Dracula.) Over the past four years, Hamill's madcap versions of Sense and Sensibility and Pride and Prejudice had off-Broadway runs in New York and such vigorous afterlives in regional theaters that they helped turn Hamill into one of Ame