Posted on 01/28/2013 12:19:32 PM PST by Borges
Jane Austen lovers around the world have begun breaking out their bonnets for a yearlong celebration of the 200th anniversary of the publication of “Pride and Prejudice,” which loosed its famous first line on the world on Jan. 28, 1813.
It’s too late to secure an invitation to the BBC’s meticulous reconstruction of the Netherfield Ball, site of a pivotal encounter between Elizabeth Bennet and Mr. Darcy. (It was filmed last week at Chawton House, the Hampshire manor that once belonged to Austen’s brother Edward, and will be broadcast in May.) But there are plenty of public festivities on the calendar.
On Monday, the Jane Austen Center in Bath, England, will hold a 12-hour read-a-thon, to be broadcast live online. The Free Library of Philadelphia is hosting an all-day celebration including lectures, film screenings and “pop-up” theatrical performances of scenes from the novel. Goucher College in Baltimore, home to what it calls the largest Austen collection in North America, will open “Pride and Prejudice: A 200 Year Affair,” an exhibition of rare editions and other items documenting the novel’s reception over the past two centuries.
Those who can’t make it out of the house can enter a bicentennial essay contest sponsored by the Jane Austen Society of North America. If that’s too taxing, Penguin Classics has been encouraging readers to post favorite lines from the book on Twitter. (Sample: “For what do we live, but to make sport for our neighbors, and laugh at them in our turn?”)
(Excerpt) Read more at artsbeat.blogs.nytimes.com ...
....and zombies...
Your favorite.
GOOD SENSE AND SENSIBILITY........
Well, there’s going to be more GIRLS GONE WILD!!!! Videos.
Oh! Here’s one of my favorite lines from a Jane Austen book.....
“Dear Penthouse; I never dreamed this would happen to me....”
She was a wild woman.
200 years of “the reason I hit my head with this book is it feels so good when I stop”.
My heart is bleeding at the disrepect displayed on this thread...
Nothing is sacred!!!!
I need a cuppa....
I’m gonna enter the bicentennial essay contest.
WHAT JANE AUSTEN MEANS TO ME
By
blueunicorn6
What does Jane Austen mean to me? Well, without her, I guess they would have named the Capitol city of Texas Shakespeare. We’d have all been watching Dickens City Limits to see Lyle Lovett on PBS. In closing, Jane Austen must have been The Six Million Dollar Woman because she was Steve Austin’s sister. Remember the Six Million Dollar Woman? She was worth every penny of it. Obama would tax her until she became The $49.99 Woman. Anyway, The End.
Thanks!
Austen isn't as tedious as, say, Milton or Joyce, but man...she doesn't move the plot along quickly.
I could even finish the Cliffs Notes of P&P, just too painful.
Compared to whom, though? If you compare her to other writers of her day, her books do move more quickly.
A lot of what's in Austen isn't stuff that teenagers can really appreciate -- irony, subtle psychological observations.
It's easy to get really sick of Janeites or Austenians or whatever her fans call themselves, but her books weren't the worst or most inaccessible stuff in British literature. That's why they've provided material for so many adaptations.
FWIW don't bother with the awful British television series Lost in Austen, a real cringe-inducing modernization involving time travel, one of the worst of many bad shows Britain has produced.
“I could even finish the Cliffs Notes of P&P, just too painful.”
LOL!
Wait a minute, that may have been a different novel. I'll check and get back to you.
Who IS a great writer of that time? Austen is one of the more economical writers. Not a lot of fat.
You don’t like James or Wharton either right?
Pretty much if the English departments of the world consider it must reading I consider it annoying at best.
One English Class standard I think you’d like is Wilkie Collins’ 1860 novel ‘The Woman in White’. The first ever ‘page-turner’ or thriller. Not that other novels before it weren’t suspenseful or thrilling but Collins made that his primary goal...keep the reader in suspense in regards to a mystery taking place in the here and now and investigated by the main characters. It’s been imitated constantly.
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