Jane Austen, the Secret Radical by Helena Kelly

Summary from Goodreads:
A brilliant, illuminating reassessment of the life and work of Jane Austen that makes clear how Austen has been misread for the past two centuries and that shows us how she intended her books to be read, revealing, as well, how subversive and daring--how truly radical--a writer she was.

In this fascinating, revelatory work, Helena Kelly--dazzling Jane Austen authority--looks past the grand houses, the pretty young women, past the demure drawing room dramas and witty commentary on the narrow social worlds of her time that became the hallmark of Austen's work to bring to light the serious, ambitious, deeply subversive nature of this beloved writer. Kelly illuminates the radical subjects--slavery, poverty, feminism, the Church, evolution, among them--considered treasonous at the time, that Austen deftly explored in the six novels that have come to embody an age. The author reveals just how in the novels we find the real Jane Austen: a clever, clear-sighted woman "of information," fully aware of what was going on in the world and sure about what she thought of it. We see a writer who understood that the novel--until then seen as mindless "trash"--could be a great art form and who, perhaps more than any other writer up to that time, imbued it with its particular greatness.

I'd been hearing about this new book of Jane Austen criticism that posits Miss Austen would have been a radical.

OK.  I'm in (I was actually in at "new book of Jane Austen criticism" but "political radicalism" bumped it up the TBR). Hello, Jane Austen, the Secret Radical.

I really, really liked Kelly's analysis of Austen's work.  The arguments made about Jane Austen's political leanings (spoiler: she's not a Conservative) are interesting and worth thinking about, whether you agree or not.  I actually started wishing I had a physical copy of this book so I could do some annotating/arguing in the margins. However, the affectation of placing a fanciful, fictionalized scene from Austen's life at the beginning of each chapter, including the Introduction, is completely unnecessary and hypocritical after pillorying Austen biographers for creating saccharine, unsupported-by-evidence portraits of "our Dear Sweet Aunt Jane." Such a lazy device. The editor should have nixed those pages.

Dear FTC: I read a digital galley of this book from the publisher via Edelweiss.

Jane Austen's Names: Riddles, Persons, Places by Margaret Doody

Summary from Goodreads:
In Jane Austen’s works, a name is never just a name. In fact, the names Austen gives her characters and places are as rich in subtle meaning as her prose itself. Wiltshire, for example, the home county of Catherine Morland in Northanger Abbey, is a clue that this heroine is not as stupid as she seems: according to legend, cunning Wiltshire residents caught hiding contraband in a pond capitalized on a reputation for ignorance by claiming they were digging up a “big cheese”—the moon’s reflection on the water’s surface. It worked.

In Jane Austen’s Names, Margaret Doody offers a fascinating and comprehensive study of all the names of people and places—real and imaginary—in Austen’s fiction. Austen’s creative choice of names reveals not only her virtuosic talent for riddles and puns. Her names also pick up deep stories from English history, especially the various civil wars, and the blood-tinged differences that played out in the reign of Henry VIII, a period to which she often returns. Considering the major novels alongside unfinished works and juvenilia, Doody shows how Austen’s names signal class tensions as well as regional, ethnic, and religious differences. We gain a new understanding of Austen’s technique of creative anachronism, which plays with and against her skillfully deployed realism—in her books, the conflicts of the past swirl into the tensions of the present, transporting readers beyond the Regency.

Full of insight and surprises for even the most devoted Janeite, Jane Austen’s Names will revolutionize how we read Austen’s fiction.

Jane Austen's Names is a book I didn't even know I needed until I saw it on the shelf at Prairie Lights.  Come to mama, Jane Austen literary criticism nerd book.

I ❤❤ this book a lot - the minutiae of place names and personal names and etymology and how that commented on Austen's characterizations was so great.  She gets in a little dig at naming conventions in historical romance novels (which I totally get - sometimes those names are buh-nanas).  Recommended for Austen fans and people super-into English history. It's not quite perfect - there's a huge late digression during a discussion of place names in Mansfield Park which has an interesting premise but it feels much longer that discussion of the other novels so feels out of place (I could be biased, MP is not my favorite Austen novel). (And a strange statement about Erotic love in the Conclusion that seems to come out of nowhere....)

Finished book 1 of #24in48readathon! (Whee, academic writing makes for slow reading - BUT it was a good pick for Readathon since I was making time for long stretches of reading, which is what this book needed.)

Dear FTC: I bought my copy of this book OF COURSE.

Eligible: A Modern Retelling of Pride and Prejudice by Curtis Sittenfeld (The Austen Project)

Summary from Goodreads:
From the “wickedly entertaining” (USA Today) Curtis Sittenfeld, New York Times bestselling author of Prep and American Wife, comes a modern retelling of Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice. A bold literary experiment, Eligible is a brilliant, playful, and delicious saga for the twenty-first century.

This version of the Bennet family—and Mr. Darcy—is one that you have and haven’t met before: Liz is a magazine writer in her late thirties who, like her yoga instructor older sister, Jane, lives in New York City. When their father has a health scare, they return to their childhood home in Cincinnati to help—and discover that the sprawling Tudor they grew up in is crumbling and the family is in disarray.

Youngest sisters Kitty and Lydia are too busy with their CrossFit workouts and Paleo diets to get jobs. Mary, the middle sister, is earning her third online master’s degree and barely leaves her room, except for those mysterious Tuesday-night outings she won’t discuss. And Mrs. Bennet has one thing on her mind: how to marry off her daughters, especially as Jane’s fortieth birthday fast approaches.

Enter Chip Bingley, a handsome new-in-town doctor who recently appeared on the juggernaut reality TV dating show Eligible. At a Fourth of July barbecue, Chip takes an immediate interest in Jane, but Chip’s friend neurosurgeon Fitzwilliam Darcy reveals himself to Liz to be much less charming. . . .

And yet, first impressions can be deceiving.

Wonderfully tender and hilariously funny, Eligible both honors and updates Austen’s beloved tale. Tackling gender, class, courtship, and family, Sittenfeld reaffirms herself as one of the most dazzling authors writing today.

I had been having trouble with The Austen Project - current bestselling authors retelling/modernizing Jane Austen's novels.  I started with high hopes for Northanger Abbey by Val McDermid (reviewed briefly on Goodreads) and really got the "mehs" with Sense & Sensibility by Johanna Trollope (review).  I didn't even try Emma by Alexander McCall Smith.  They all seemed too pat, too tightly bound to their originals.  So what made me change my mind and read Curtis Sittenfield's retelling of Pride and Prejudice (which is my favorite novel)?

She changed the title.  To Eligible.  Just that one change made me hope that she would allow her characters to function in a twenty-first century setting rather than cram them into a nineteenth-century plot.

And this worked.  Eligible was my first read of 2016 and I enjoyed it immensely.  Sittenfeld chose to make Jane and Lizzy professional women in their late thirties - Jane is a yoga instructor, making the choice to have a baby as a single woman, and Liz is a successful journalist with a long-term (read: dead-end) affair with one Wickham (who won't leave his wife, for various and sundry weaselly reasons).  When Mr. Bennet has a heart attack, the two come home for a long visit and find that Mrs. Bennet is a border-line hoarder and compulsive shopper, the family income is dwindling, the house is falling apart, and their three younger sisters are freeloading (all of whom have college degrees).  So while the two lone responsible adults try to get the house repaired, their siblings gainfully employed, and keep their parents in good health they are trotted out to meet the two new doctors in town.  Enter, ER doctor Chip Bingley (recently the weepy bachelor on a shrill reality dating TV show called "Eligible" who failed to find a mate) and haughty-as-can-be neurosurgeon Fitzwilliam Darcy, who makes the mistake of slagging off Liz's hometown of Cincinnati.

This is genius.  Sittenfeld primed her characters with the traits and skeleton plot of Austen's Pride and Prejudice and then just let them go to find a way to a happy ending.  If a plot element from the original Regency era no longer fits in the twenty-first century, it's either changed or avoided.  For instance, the "ruination" of a young woman if she elopes.  It wouldn't have worked in this setting.  So Sittenfeld did something different for that point in the plot.  She even jettisons a prominent character from the original when he has outlived his usefulness.  The only bit that felt clunky was an Epilogue, that changes point-of-view to a different character to explain a few things. It was unnecessary.  We could have done without, leaving that character more mysterious, or maybe had that character talk to Liz (who provides most of the perspective throughout the novel, there are no other obvious shifts to another character's limited perspective).

I really enjoyed how Sittenfeld stepped out and did a real modernization of Pride and Prejudice. Twenty-first century people swear, over-expose themselves, and have sex.  So do these characters, including hate sex (I loved how that came about because it was so unexpected).  They are racists and bigots and utter garbage fires on occasion.  I loved how this version of Lizzy screws up, makes assumptions and mistakes that are really uncomfortable to read, and then apologizes and tries to do better.  The transition of Mr. Bingley from rich young man with an income to celebrity who failed to find a wife on national (international?) television was a great way to shift the setting from England's landed gentry to middle-class Americans (Mrs. Bennet only thinks she's upper class).  It's different and refreshing in the way that Bridget Jones's Diary and The Lizzy Bennet Diaries are refreshing while still telling the same story.

Eligible will be out tomorrow, April 19, in the US.

Dear FTC: I read a DRC of this novel via Edelweiss.

Sense & Sensibility by Joanna Trollope (The Austen Project)

Summary from Goodreads:
From Joanna Trollope, one of the most insightful chroniclers of family life writing fiction today, comes a contemporary retelling of Sense and Sensibility, Jane Austen’s classic novel of love, money, and two very different sisters.

John Dashwood promised his dying father that he would take care of his half sisters. But his wife, Fanny, has no desire to share their newly inherited estate. When she descends upon Norland Park, the three Dashwood girls—Elinor, Marianne, and Margaret—are faced with the realities of a cold world and the cruelties of life without their father, their home, or their money.

With her sparkling wit, Joanna Trollope casts a clever, satirical eye on the tales of Elinor and Marianne Dashwood.

Reimagining Sense and Sensibility in a fresh, modern new light, she spins the novel’s romance, bonnets, and betrothals into a wonderfully witty coming-of-age story about the stuff that really makes the world go around. For when it comes to money, some things never change....

Someone somewhere got a wild idea to get best-selling authors to "officially" rewrite Jane Austen's major novels for a twenty-first century audience.

Well, OK...Austen sequels, rewrites, updates, variations, and etc. have been an industry for years.  So sure, a few more won't hurt.  The series started with Sense & Sensibility by Joanna Trollope, continued with Northanger Abbey by Val McDermid (reviewed briefly on Goodreads), Emma by Alexander McCall Smith, and Pride and Prejudice by Curtis Sittenfeld should be coming out in 2015 (I don't have a US release date for that).  I decided I'd at least give the re-tellings a try.

Sense & Sensibility as told by Joanna Trollope is a perfectly every-day novel.  I've never read any of Joanna Trollope's novels so I can't compare to her usual style but S&S is adequate.  The sentence-level writing reads well and some of the plot updates (Marianne's illness, Brandon's military experience, the Ferrars obsession with money) work very well.

However, however...I was immediately put off by a change in Edward Ferrars's backstory and never got back on an even keel.  He is changed from a diffident, but upstanding young man interested in entering the Church to a vague, unfocused drifter who was sent to school in Plymouth after being expelled from Eton for being the lookout man in a drug ring.

Excuse me?

From there we get extreme examples of bad behavior from Fanny Dashwood, John Dashwood, Marianne, Margaret, and Mrs. Dashwood (here named Belle). Belle and Marianne are so incapable of recognizing that bills such as the gas and electricity must be paid it that it becomes irritating. The number of times Eleanor points out she needs a job and every one pooh-poohs the idea....  Margaret is now a caricature of a grouchy modern teenager. (Does anyone know if British teenagers use the "w" sign from the movie Clueless as "whatever? Because I haven't seen an American teenager use that since I was in college and that's about 15 years ago now)

Mrs. Jennings and Charlotte Palmer (among others) no longer just seem self-centered and silly.  Their teasing of Marianne reaches a level of mean-spiritedness that I didn't think possible.  In the scene where Marianne sees Willoughby in London - at a wedding reception that Charlotte has managed to "get them invited to" instead of a ball - the whole thing is recorded and put on YouTube (of course).  Charlotte shows up at her mother's house and insists on playing the video over and over for Eleanor and commenting almost gleefully about what happened.  There is a lack of authorial distance in this book - Austen uses the distance for ironic commentary in the original novel that is lacking in this re-telling and it makes the characters' actions simply nasty.

And then there is the same complaint that I had with Val McDermid's Northanger Abbey - the plot is in lockstep with the original.  There are absolutely no deviations, nothing allowed to develop organically to better fit with the modern time period.  As a result the story begins to feel clunky and boring.  Does Fanny immediately start redecorating Norland? Yes. Does Marianne like music and Eleanor drawing? Yes. Does Brandon immediately fall in love with Marianne? Yes. Does Marianne get caught in the rain, requiring dramatic rescue by Willoughby? Of course.  Does Willoughby give Marianne an expensive gift? This time it's a car. Is Brandon called away right before a picnic allowing Marianne and Willoughby to sneak off to Allenham?  Yep.  Is Lucy Steele out to marry money and almost sunk by the loose lips of her idiot sister? Yep (and the sister is actually one of the most annoying and least believable characters ever written).  Does Mrs. Ferrars bang on about some Morton girl marrying Edward?  Yes.  Does it all work out in the end including forgiveness for everyone?  Yes, yes, yes.

In short, the Austen Project novels, so far, seem to be best suited for those readers who are unfamiliar with Austen's original novels.  Which I find to be galling because there is nothing wrong with the original novels and they can be read by academics and plebeians alike.  Meaning, if you are as familiar with the original novels as I am you are going to be just as bored and underwhelmed.  If one wants to re-tell a familiar story and update it for a contemporary audience there are so many successful adaptations: Clueless, Bridget Jones's Diary, The Three Weissmanns of Westport, The Lizzie Bennet Diaries.  Each of those took the original story and concept and adapted the concept to fit the time period rather than bend the time period to fit the idiosyncrasies of the plot.  I'll probably give the McCall Smith Emma adaptation a shot but if that's as underwhelming as Sense & Sensibility and Northanger Abbey then I might bail at fifty percent. 

Dear FTC: I received a finished review copy from the publisher.

Longbourn

Summary from Goodreads:
• Pride and Prejudice was only half the story •

If Elizabeth Bennet had the washing of her own petticoats, Sarah often thought, she’d most likely be a sight more careful with them.

In this irresistibly imagined belowstairs answer to Pride and Prejudice, the servants take center stage. Sarah, the orphaned housemaid, spends her days scrubbing the laundry, polishing the floors, and emptying the chamber pots for the Bennet household. But there is just as much romance, heartbreak, and intrigue downstairs at Longbourn as there is upstairs. When a mysterious new footman arrives, the orderly realm of the servants’ hall threatens to be completely, perhaps irrevocably, upended.

Jo Baker dares to take us beyond the drawing rooms of Jane Austen’s classic—into the often overlooked domain of the stern housekeeper and the starry-eyed kitchen maid, into the gritty daily particulars faced by the lower classes in Regency England during the Napoleonic Wars—and, in doing so, creates a vivid, fascinating, fully realized world that is wholly her own.

The servants are never mentioned in period literature except when absolutely necessary.  They were a bit like the wallpaper - always there but meant to be seen not heard.  Which is why Jo Baker's Longbourn caught my eye - not only a great way to write Pride and Prejudice fiction in a way that hasn't been done before but it also contained a great deal of research about what life was like for the servants of landed gentry.  Our protagonist at the outset is Sarah, one of the maids-of-all-work for the Bennets.  She fetches water for washing and laundry, scrubs the dishes and the furniture, helps with the cooking, and plays ladies' maid as needed to the five Bennet daughters.  She is up well before dawn and does not go to bed until after the family has retired.  Her hands are permanently cracked, dry, and blistered with chilblains.  It is not an easy life but one that comes with solid meals and a roof, and security especially if Mrs. Hill and the staff impress Mr. Collins so that he might keep them on after Mr. Bennet passes.

The plot dovetails with Austen's original in many ways, even to the point of providing Sarah with the choice of two beaus: James, the new footman, and Ptolemy Bingley, a biracial servant with the Bingleys who has entrepreneurial aspirations.  Backstories provided for Mr. and Mrs. Bennet and Mr. and Mrs. Hill create a more tangled set of relationships than Austen would have ever revealed on her bit of ivory.  I think someone not familiar with Pride and Prejudice would enjoy this novel, especially if exploring upstairs-downstairs fiction that has become more popular since Downton Abbey began airing.  I'm probably not the best judge because I own eight copies of P&P and have read it so many times I've lost count. 

Austenesque-plot aside, the whole thing was going swimmingly until two things kicked it out of kilter.  The first was a confrontation between James and Wickham and that fallout (I did enjoy how Baker carries Wickham's behavior to a logical place given his predilections); the second, and more troubling, issue came after the Bingley-Bennet/Darcy-Bennet double wedding.  Lizzie takes Sarah with her as her lady's maid and after some kvetching from Sarah about how she's possibly going soft from less work and worry about [spoiler] she resigns her position to go searching for [spoiler].  I'm not sure the point of all the wandering about for years and extended "epilogue"-ness of those last pages (it extends decades into the future beyond P&P and even, i think, beyond the actual concluding action of Longbourn.  Although it all seemed very much about agency and freedom and free will, I don't know why it had to take so long and it took away from the end of the book.

Ending aside, Longbourn is an excellent addition to the Austen fanfic-rewrite-reimagining genre.  Definitely a great book for fans of Pride and Prejudice as well as those who like good historical research into the everyday nitty-gritty.

Among the Janeites: A Journey Through the World of Jane Austen Fandom

Summary from Goodreads:
For anyone who has ever loved a Jane Austen novel, a warm and witty look at the passionate, thriving world of Austen fandom

They walk among us in their bonnets and Empire-waist gowns, clutching their souvenir tote bags and battered paperbacks: the Janeites, Jane Austen’s legion of devoted fans. Who are these obsessed admirers, whose passion has transformed Austen from classic novelist to pop-culture phenomenon? Deborah Yaffe, journalist and Janeite, sets out to answer this question, exploring the remarkable endurance of Austen’s stories, the unusual zeal that their author inspires, and the striking cross-section of lives she has touched.

Along the way, Yaffe meets a Florida lawyer with a byzantine theory about hidden subtexts in the novels, a writer of Austen fan fiction who found her own Mr. Darcy while reimagining Pride and Prejudice, and a lit professor whose roller-derby nom de skate is Stone Cold Jane Austen. Yaffe goes where Janeites gather, joining a pilgrimage to historic sites in Britain, chatting online with fellow fans, and attending the annual ball of the Jane Austen Society of North America—in period costume. Part chronicle of a vibrant literary community, part memoir of a lifelong love, Among the Janeites is a funny, touching meditation on the nature of fandom.

Yet another instance of my fellow booksellers knowing my weak spots.  Among the Janeites was handed to me while I was in the cafe line ordering a mocha.  No conversation, no "hey, you like Jane Austen," just the tacit understanding that a lit studies book about Jane Austen is an auto-buy for me.

Yeah, I'm a Jane-ite.  There are a lot of us in the Jane Austen fandom, and we run the gamut from covert to overt.  Like Yaffe, I probably fall somewhere in the middle of the Jane-ites: not over-scholarly so I like to have fun with some of the Austen-universe fan-fic if it has a good concept/is well-written/the reviews are good, but not so enthusiastic that I regularly play dress up and read all the fan-fic as well as writing my own (though, when I make it back to the UK someday, Chawton et al. is on the list of places to visit along with Gads Hill and Haworth; I've already visited the Jane Austen Centre in Bath).

Yaffe strikes a good balance in all her research and interviews.  She walks us through the intricacies of buying a (correctly styled) Regency gown, complete with underthings and corset.  The corset proves to be a problem, particularly because it lends a certain shape without which her gown can't be fitted (having worn a corset once myself, I sympathize with all her complaints - and I was singing, so mine was only lightly laced, but it still sucked to wear).  She even (bravely) interviews someone who I think most of the other Janeites avoid.  Plus many points for being polite but I still think she thinks that he's a loon (dudes, I think he's a loon - Jane Fairfax got knocked up by Emma's brother-in-law before the start of the novel? uh, no).

What Matters in Jane Austen? Twenty Crucial Puzzles Solved

Summary from Goodreads:
Which important Austen characters never speak? Is there any sex in Austen? What do the characters call one another, and why? What are the right and wrong ways to propose marriage? In What Matters in Jane Austen?, John Mullan shows that we can best appreciate Austen's brilliance by looking at the intriguing quirks and intricacies of her fiction. Asking and answering some very specific questions about what goes on in her novels, he reveals the inner workings of their greatness.

In twenty short chapters, each of which explores a question prompted by Austens novels, Mullan illuminates the themes that matter most in her beloved fiction. Readers will discover when Austen's characters had their meals and what shops they went to; how vicars got good livings; and how wealth was inherited. What Matters in Jane Austen? illuminates the rituals and conventions of her fictional world in order to reveal her technical virtuosity and daring as a novelist. It uses telling passages from Austen's letters and details from her own life to explain episodes in her novels: readers will find out, for example, what novels she read, how much money she had to live on, and what she saw at the theater.

Written with flair and based on a lifetime's study, What Matters in Jane Austen? will allow readers to appreciate Jane Austen's work in greater depth than ever before.

With the 100th birthday of Austen's Pride and Prejudice, and that of her later works coming in rapid succession, there's been an uptick in the publication of Austen biographies and literature studies.  What Matters in Jane Austen? is a bit different.  It's a cross between a cultural history and a mini-course on Austen's writing.  John Mullan uses questions like "Who dies in Austen?", "Which characters don't speak?", and so on to comment on customs in Austen's day and pull out themes across Austen's books. A relatively quick read for a lit crit book but a really good introduction to Austen studies.

Dear FTC: I purchased this book.  Because, duh, Jane Austen.

Searching For Pemberley

I started reading Searching for Pemberley last January since I got it as part of the Austen birthday ebook sale at Sourcebooks.  It took almost a whole year to finish - not good.

It is long and overstuffed. Too many asides, too much extra history. It isn't fun to read. Maggie comes off as an absurd little busybody who is treated with indulgence. I had only read to Chapter 16 by December because it took so much work to get through each chapter. So I skimmed the rest to see what happened.  I didn't much care for the worries about religion or if Suitor #1 really loves her vs. Suitor #2.

Eh. I'll go read Austenland or A Weekend with Mr. Darcy again.

Why Jane Austen? (mini-review)

Pride and Prejudice will turn 200 years old in 2013.  It's still one of the most-read and most-beloved and most-adapted English-language books - why?  Why is Jane Austen still relevant?

This is the question Rachel Brownstein (professor of English at Brooklyn College and CUNY Graduate Center) tries to answer in her book Why Jane Austen? (and, refreshingly enough, there are no subtitles).

Why Jane Austen? has the best opening line of any lit-crit book I've ever read:

Sometime in the 1908s, soon after the publication of my first book, I went to a literary party in Brooklyn at the home of a fashionably gritty playwright: jug wine, cheese and crackers, and brownies laced with cannabis, homemade by his wife.

And then she slips in an anecdote about some dude who is being a jerk about feminists. Like.

Brownstein examines Austen's world critically, noting how her novels have been re-interpreted and examined using theory of all types: economic, social commentary, feminism, politics, etc.  The book is a very readable volume of literary criticism, but it stays firmly grounded in academics with good supporting documentation and writing.

Aside from a few weird typos/boo-boos in the first half of the book (the star of Bride and Prejudice is Aishwarya Rai, not Ray, and in the ITV adaptation of Lost in Austen the heroine enters P&P through a door in the bathroom, not a dream - although we could argue whether the either thing is "reality" or "fantasy") it was a very good addition to my shelf of Austen criticism.

Austenland

Thanks to the Sourcebook sale back in December, I broke the ice on Austen-esque sequels/updates/retellings.  Now, thanks to the NOOK Daily Find, I've come up with another Austen retelling that I've thinking of reading:  Shannon Hale's Austenland.

Jane Hayes has an obsession with Jane Austen, more specifically with Mr. Darcy of the Colin-Firth-in-a-wet-shirt-variety.  Great-Aunt Carolyn suspects this is why Jane is still single - no mortal man measures up.  When the aunt dies, she leaves Jane a trip to Pembrook Park - an "immersion" vacation specializing in Jane Austen's novels (hence the title, Austenland).  Jane decides to take the trip, to get Mr. Darcy out of her system, and be ready to face the world Austen-free.

Pembrook Park is a bit of a trial - no cell phones, no computers, no electricity, and no hanky-panky (or, at least, none it seems if one is below a certain paying rate).  Jane rediscovers old passions (she used to paint) and makes the acquaintance of a rule-breaking gardener (Martin) and a stiff-necked, proper English gentleman (Mr. Nobley - who reeks of eau de Darcy) providing her with the perfect love triangle.  But who is acting the part and who is real?

This is easily the best Austen adaptation I've read.  Hale uses Austen's themes of propriety, marriage, honesty, and love to explore Jane's dilemma.  Jane's ex-es are taken out and examined, one per chapter, and their offenses detailed.  None are spared, from her kindergarten crush to the recent walk-out of her fiancee.  Buried within the Pride and Prejudice plot and Jane's love of Mr. Darcy is the wish to find a man who might take one for a mere fifty pounds per annum, to paraphrase Lizzy Bennet.  Known in the modern sense as the wish to find a partner who doesn't take you for granted or treat you like crap. Which all of Jane's boyfriends have done - they don't respect her or, in the case of her fiancee, don't treat her very well.

Midnight in Austenland is definitely going in my TBR!

A Weekend With Mr. Darcy

Having read through two Austen-inspired books - and been rather underwhelmed - I tried out a third purchase from the Sourcebooks sale.

Victoria Connelly's A Weekend With Mr. Darcy follows Jane Austen addicts at a conference.

Huzzah, these are my people!! An Austenesque novel that neither a) fails miserably in execution or b) stuffs enough sex scenes into the narrative to make even a Regency Rake want to take a powder (because that's what an Austen variation/re-telling needs - lots and lots of uncomfortable sex).

At first, I wasn't quite sure where Robyn fit into the narrative (and the beginning was a little pokey) but once all the characters got to Purley Hall for the Jane Austen Conference things started to pick up. It's easy to teAt last. An Austenesque novel that neither a) fails miserably in execution or b) stuffs enough sex scenes into the narrative to make even a Regency Rake want to take a powder (because that's what an Austen variation/re-telling needs - lots and lots of uncomfortable sex).

Oxford professor of English Katherine Roberts is off to attend the Jane Austen Addicts...and to meet her favorite author, Lorna Warwick.  The famously reclusive Warwick writes the Regency bodice-rippers Katherine is addicted to but Katherine is in for a surprise - the author she corresponds with is really Warwick Lawton...a man.

Robyn Love is saddled with a big problem, two actually: a Jane Austen addiction and a dead-beat boyfriend.  She feels unappreciated and jumps at the chance to attend the conference, a weekend to find other kindred spirits.  Can she find herself, too?

At first, I wasn't quite sure where Robyn fit into the narrative (and the beginning was a little pokey) but once all the characters got to Purley Hall for the conference things started to pick up. It's easy to tell Connelly is a Janeite - she knows all the books, variations, adaptations (and they're almost all named-checked in the book as are the real books/movies) - and she gives the reader the best and worst of the breed. The narrative nods to the plot of Pride and Prejudice in places but takes the bones that it needs for plot and leaves the rest. Kudos also to keeping the falling action of the book from becoming overlong, stopping at just the right place.

If you're like me, and have been wondering where to start to find an entree into Austen-inspired fiction, definitely take a look at A Weekend With Mr. Darcy. 

The Man Who Loved Price and Prejudice

Austen birthday sale book number 2!

Now, The Man Who Loved Pride and Prejudice is billed as a love story with a Jane Austen twist.  I can handle that.  The story of Cassie (marine biologist) and Calder (his father is a senator...one of those senators with Old Money and a big ego) falls squarely in the category of contemporary romance:  she's mega-smart, has a unique job, and is effortlessly gorgeous, he's standoffish, rich, and HOT ergo they will have some sort of conflict and then wind up together.

Pretty nice, right?  And it was a nice story with a good writing style...until a zillion loads of dirty laundry got in the way (his and hers).   At some point the storyline gets really complicated with pen names, social/class issues, spousal abuse issues, research funding problems, and so on - I really couldn't keep track.  The falling action was so drawn out that the last 50 or so pages seemed unneccesary.  It definitely could have used some cuts.  (I also thought that Calder's book - it supplants Darcy's letter to Lizzy - could have been much better written if all he was doing was modernizing Austen to apologize to Cassie).

Unless I missed it, I don't think it's explained why Calder is "The Man Who Loved Pride and Prejudice"....

Fitzwilliam Darcy, Rock Star: in which I start dabbling in Austen-derived fiction

So, Sourcebooks had a "Jane Austen's birthday" sale (which I posted about) and I decided to try on JA inspired fiction/fan-fiction/modernizations for size.  Which I lump together as "Austenesque" books for lack of a better term.

I had heard bits and bobs about Fitzwilliam Darcy, Rock Star in the blogosphere so I decided to try this version of rich-nineteenth-century-gentleman-translated-as-rock-star first (and, for the record, I'm just going to assume that everyone has read Pride and Prejudice so none of the actual plot points are spoilers).

So, Darcy, Bingley, and their cousin Richard Fitzwilliam (the cousin who appears at Rosings in P&P) make up Slurry and they are in desperate need of an opening act for their tour.  Lizzy, Jane, and Charlotte front a "girl-band" (hate that term) called Long Borne Suffering (haha) and, conveniently, Slurry is near-enough to see them play a gig.  Conveniently for the plot, LBS is booked for the tour and the major character quirks (Darcy is standoffish, Jane and Bingley have instant attraction, Lizzy enjoys needling Darcy) easily translate from the book.  Tour and marriage plots ensue.

What I enjoyed most were some really good plot changes.  Charlotte and Richard are fleshed out, Mr. Collins is actually called-out for taking advantage of a situation, Lydia's subplot is downgraded since she only appears in a handful of scenes, and Caroline Bingley is a much nicer person.  I think the stressors of a new band jumping into the deep end with a major tour were shown adequately and Rigaud didn't shy away from the anonymous sex-and-drugs pull of the music world.   

And then there were some plot decisions that really made no sense. Wickham's prediliction for "ladies with learner's permits" (a la Georgiana's story, which is retained for the book) turns into a drug problem out of nowhere (and gets an FBI plot thrown in for good measure).  The Bennets' marriage issues are only alluded to (the Bennet parents and younger siblings hardly figure in the story) and could have done away with entirely and saved about 20 pages in total.  Richard gets a sex addiction plot (hey, Lizzy/Darcy and Jane/Bingley have built-in conflict courtesy of P&P, he and Charlotte have to fight about something).  Original names are retained (Fitzwilliam? Really? Lady Catherine is still, inexplicably, referred to as Lady Catherine yet she's not referred to as English in any way).  And the triple marriage plot is really unbelievable in a modern sense.

And then there are the sex scenes.  What's that you say?  Yes, there is a LOT of well-described sex in this book.  Far, far more than what I was expecting and enough to make me wonder why this book is merchandized in Fiction as opposed to Romance.  Adventurous boots-knocking occurs with regularity - Jane and Bingley, Charlotte and random person, Richard and random person(s), Richard and Charlotte, Darcy and Lizzy (and then they fight, then have more sex) - and also so discussion of previous sexual experiences (novel gains points for allowing heroines to have sexual experiences prior to the acquaintance of the heros).  The writing-style of the scenes changed, too, to a style more generic to the bodice-ripper genre.  I wouldn't have minded as much except there was a multitude of man-will-teach-woman-how-sexytimes-are-properly-done schtick...totally out of place in a contemporary novel (loses points previously gained).  The power of the Magic HooHoo and the Mighty Wang of Lovin' made obvious appearances (I've started following the Smart Bitches on twitter).

If you like a more adventurous contemporary romance novel, this is definitely for you.