Jane Austen

Sep 08 2013

‘Lizzie Bennet Diaries’ Creators Will Tackle Emma

Good news: Bernie Su and Hank Green, creators of the delightful, award-winning online series “The Lizzie Bennet Diaries,” are turning their attention to Jane Austen’s “Emma.”

A modern, technologically savvy retelling of “Pride and Prejudice,” “The Lizzie Bennet Diaries” went viral as Su and Green not only posted 9 1/2 hours of video on YouTube, but created profiles for the characters to interact with each other and with their audience on Twitter, Facebook and other social media.

Its modernization and high tech appeal aside, “The Lizzie Bennet Diaries” stayed faithful to the spirit, characters and core story of Jane Austen’s most popular work.

Su and Green will take a similar approach to “Emma Approved,” which will debut in October. This Emma will be a 20-something life coach, entrepreneur and social media maven, who with her business partner Alex (Mr. Knightley, I presume?) manages her lifestyle brand, Emma Approved.

Interviewed in the LA Weekly, Su said he chose Emma for his next project because she is an ” ‘ends justify the means’ character with a heart of gold” who has good intentions, even if she’s clueless. “Given that she’s so driven and has a lot of resources, she’s incredibly powerful,” he said.

Especially with YouTube and Facebook at her disposal.

Dec 16 2012

Happy Birthday, Jane Austen

Today is the 237th anniversary of Jane Austen’s birth, and we’re rapidly approaching the 200th anniversary of her most famous novel, “Pride and Prejudice.”

Like all Austen fans, I could go on and on about Jane, but I’ll keep it short: How many authors are still popular 200 years after they’re first published? Not many, that’s for sure.

Way to go, Jane!

Oct 23 2010

Even Austen Needed an Editor

It is a truth universally acknowledged, that behind every good writer stands a good editor. Jane Austen was no exception, according to a BBC News story that’s been widely picked up by various news outlets.

While studying 1,100 original handwritten pages of Austen’s unpublished writings, Professor Kathryn Sutherland of Oxford University found plenty of blots, crossed out words and sentences, and “a powerful counter-grammatical way of writing.” Austen, she says, also was far more experimental and even better at writing dialogue than her published works suggest.

Sutherland says William Gifford, an editor who worked for Austen’s publisher, most likely was the one who polished and honed Austen’s prose.

Sutherland’s research forms part of an initiative by King’s College London, the Bodleian Library in Oxford and the British Library in London to create an online archive of Austen’s handwritten fiction manuscripts. The project will launch this Monday (October 25). As I’ve noted earlier, Austen’s history of England already is online.

Those of us who write for a living aren’t surprised by the fact that what one writes and what gets in print aren’t always the same thing. Nor are we surprised that Austen’s prose is constantly being edited and rewritten to render it suitable for a modern medium, film.

On its radio news, as an example of how Austen’s editor polished her scribblings into memorable prose, CBS featured a voice clip of Colin Firth in the 1995 BBC version of “Pride and Prejudice” passionately begging Lizzy “to end my suffering and consent to be my wife.”

While that declaration brings goosebumps to those of us who are convinced Mr. Firth was Mr. Darcy in a previous life, it does not appear anywhere in Austen’s famous novel. It’s an invention of screenwriter Andrew Davies.

Apr 30 2010

Samuel Clemens vs. Jane Austen: Never the Twain Shall Meet?

The Chicago Examiner recently ran a fun list of the “50 Best Author vs. Author Putdowns of All Time.” The collection of gloriously vicious insults includes one of Mark Twain’s many stabs at Jane Austen: “Every time I read ‘Pride and Prejudice,’ I want to dig her up and hit her over the skull with her own shin-bone.”

Mark Twain in 1909 — The irascible Mark Twain never tired of skewering Jane Austen.

Twain (Samuel Clemens to his friends and family) also wrote that “any library is a good library that does not contain a volume by Jane Austen. Even if it contains no other book,” and lamented that “it seems a great pity that they allowed her to die a natural death.”

Ironically, that sounds just like the kind of barbed stuff Austen would write. Twain and Austen are two of my favorite authors, precisely because they are so adept at throwing literary darts. Austen had a much narrower focus and a much more contained life than did Twain, but in a lot of ways they aimed at similar targets.

I find Twain’s reference to “Every time I read ‘Pride and Prejudice’ ” a trifle suspicious. Just how many times did he read it, anyway? I’m not the only one to think that perhaps Twain doth protest too much about Austen. An essay some years back in “The Virginia Quarterly Review” suggested that Twain’s hatred of Austen may have been at least partly a pose, and that he may have realized (albeit reluctantly) that he and Austen shared a similar disdain for fools.

As for Twain, he didn’t escape skewering by other authors, either. William Faulkner called him a “hack writer who would not have been considered fourth rate in Europe.” Ouch!

Dec 02 2009

What Killed Jane Austen?

Like everything else about Jane Austen, her death continues to fascinate us. Literary scholars and Janeites still wonder about the illness that plagued the author for more than a year before she died at the age of 41 in July, 1817. It was during this time that she finished Persuasion, the saddest and most pensive of her novels.

In 1964, Dr. Zachary Cope proposed that Addison’s disease, a rare disorder in which the adrenal glands don’t produce enough hormones, killed the famous author. Her symptoms included extreme fatigue and weakness, faintness, back pain, nausea, and pain in the joints. To Cope, though, a vital clue was skin discoloration. “Recovering my looks a little, which have been bad enough, black and white and every wrong colour,” Austen wrote in March 1817. Addison’s disease can make the skin look bronze or mottled. (Reporters often wondered why U.S. President John F. Kennedy, who had Addison’s Disease, had a perpetual “tan.”)

In 1997, Austen biographer Claire Tomalin begged to differ, and thought Austen’s symptoms suggested lymphoma.

Katherine White, the coordinator for the Addison’s Disease Self-Help Group’s clinical advisory group in the United Kingdom, thinks something much more common killed Jane: bovine tuberculosis, probably from drinking unpasteurized milk. In a paper she wrote for the Medical Humanities journal, White (who is a social scientist, not a medical professional), argues that while Austen could have had Addison’s Disease, tuberculosis seems a more likely cause of her final illness and death.