Month: July 2011

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Part I: Rachel Brownstein on Why Jane Austen? ~ An Interview and Book Giveaway!

Why Jane Austen? indeed! We might all ask that of ourselves, the question of why she is still avidly read these 200 years later; why the movies; why the many continuations, the fan fiction and the mash-ups; why all the Austen-related blogs and social networking sites; and why the continuing scholarly interest in finding and discussing yet another approach, another meaning.  A few years ago we had Jane’s Fame by Claire Harman (Cannongate, 2009) and Jane Austen’s Textual Lives by Kathryn Sutherland (Oxford, 2005), both brilliant analyses of the past two centuries of Jane Austen studies and cultural popularity.  Now in the bicentennial year of Austen’s first published work, Rachel Brownstein has given us an engaging treasure-filled meditation on Jane Austen as writer, woman, social commentator, and 21st-century icon.  Don’t miss reading this book…

I had the good fortune to hear Dr. Brownstein speak to the JASNA-Massachusetts region this past May.  Brownstein has been one of my very own heroines ever since the publication of her Becoming a Heroine: Reading about Women in Novels (Viking, 1982), where she weaves her own personal narrative into an analysis of the various feminist literary critical approaches to late 18th and 19th century literature.  Heroine is notable also for its loving critique of Austen’s six novels – it is a must read.  [She further discusses Richardson’s Clarissa, Bronte’s Villette, George Meredith’s The Egoist, Daniel Deronda by George Eliot, Portrait of a Lady by Henry James, and Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway.] 

But what I love most about this book was her own story, her hiding in the bathroom at fifteen, behind a locked door, discovering literature, and “feeling transformed into someone older, more beautiful and graceful, moving among people who understood delicate and complex webs of feeling, patterned perceptions altogether foreign to my crude ‘real’ life … [all the while hugging] the secret knowledge that [her parents] were harboring a viper in their bathroom.” [p. 5] – didn’t we future English majors all find ourselves in that bathroom?

So what does an early feminist critic make of Jane Austen’s continuing popularity? And how as an English professor does Brownstein  make Jane Austen relevant to a college student in the 21st century, most all baffled by and suspicious of Austen’s world where “virgins are bent on finding rich husbands and no one works”, where everything is really about love and money, but we are shown nothing of the sex or the working [quoting Brownstein, May, 2011].

At this May talk, Dr. Brownstein read from her first chapter, surely making each of us wishing to be transported into one of her classrooms, to have her question our complacent assumptions, to dare to strip the works of all the critical analysis and take each sentence, each word back to the writer who wrote them – she dares us to be better readers, closer readers, understanding more with each re-read.  What does Jane Austen say to us and why does she continue to speak to us 200 hundred years later? 

I read this book on the heels of William Deresiewicz’s A Jane Austen Education: How Six Novels Taught me About Love, Friendship, and the Things That Really Matter (Penguin, 2011) – also a meditation of sorts, a very engaging personal one on how reading each of the novels changed the author’s life, each chapter a probing essay on how he saw way too much of himself in the least–liked of Austen’s characters.  Deresiewicz’s is an easy read, a well-written journey of discovery and we willingly and happily go along for the ride, having countless ah!-ha! moments as we nod in agreement at his insights.  But while Brownstein’s Why Jane Austen? is similar in its personal aspects, it is a far more scholarly text, with extensive notes, referencing previous criticism, biographies and popular culture run amok [what she calls “Jane-o-mania”, deliberately following the term “Byromania’ [p. 6]] with such a slight-of-hand, so jam-packed, that just like an Austen novel, a re-read is absolutely required!

Deresiewicz, incidentally, offers a lovely tribute on the cover of Why Jane Austen? – it is worth sharing:

Why Jane Austen? Is a warm-hearted, personal, and humane meditation on Austen and Austenolatry.  It is also in the tradition of Becoming a Heroine, smart, witty, eloquent and joyfully wide-ranging, a mixture of anecdote, cultural criticism, biography, literary history, and close reading.  By bringing serious literary thought to a wider audience – the book is accessible to anyone acquainted with Austen’s novels – it performs one of the most important services of humanistic scholarship.

I cannot say it better myself! In this book where the emphasis in on truth, the truth that fiction affords us, Brownstein shows us by beginning her work with an epigraph of Katherine Mansfield’s famous comment on Austen:

The truth is that every true admirer of the novels cherishes the happy thought that he alone – reading between the lines – has become the secret friend of their author.

– she shows us that we who read and re-read Austen indeed become sure and fast friends, illusive though she be.  Brownstein just brings us closer, and it is a lovely journey.

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Book Giveaway!!

Dr. Brownstein has been most gracious in doing an interview here at Jane Austen in Vermont [as well as coming to speak to our JASNA-Vermont region in June 2012! – we cannot wait!]  Please join me tomorrow when I post the interview, and hear directly from Prof. Brownstein as to “why Jane Austen?” –  any comments and questions will be forwarded to Dr. Brownstein for her response – you indeed might like to address “Why Jane Austen? in your own life!

 You will be entered into the Book giveaway contest for a copy of Why Jane Austen? by leaving a comment on either this post or on tomorrow’s interview – the deadline is midnight next Wednesday night August 10, 2011 – Winner will be announced on Thursday August 11, 2011  [worldwide eligibility].

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Further reading:

**Note the following upcoming event: Reading at Gibson’s Bookstore, Concord, NH. Thursday, August 25 at 7 p.m. – come in costume! see the flyer here: Why Jane Austen

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BIBLIOGRAPHY 

Works: 

Becoming a Heroine: Reading about Women in Novels. New York: Viking, 1982 [reprinted Columbia UP, 1994 with a new postscript]

“ChosenWomen.” Out of the Garden: Women Writing on the Bible.  Ed. Christina Buchmann and Celina Spiegel. New York: Ballantine, 1994.

“Endless Imitation: Austen’s and Byron’s Juvenilia.”  The Child Writer from Austen to Woolf.  Ed. Christine Alexander and Juliet McMaster. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2005. 122-37. [reviewed in JASNA News:  http://www.jasna.org/bookrev/br222p17.html ]

“England’s Emma.”  Persuasions 21 (1999): 224-41.

“The Importance of Aunts.” Fay Weldon’s Wicked Fictions. Ed. Regina Barreca. Lebanon, NH: UP of New England, 1994.  [pp.]

“Interrupted Reading: Personal Criticism in the Present Time.”  Confessions of the Critics. Ed. H. Aram Veeser. New York: Routledge, 1996. 29-39.

“Northanger Abbey, Sense and Sensibility, and Pride and Prejudice.” The Cambridge Companion to Jane Austen. Ed. Edward Copeland and Juliet McMaster. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1997. 32-57.

“Out of the Drawing Room, Onto the Lawn.”  Jane Austen in Hollywood. Ed. Linda Troost and Sayre Greenfield. Lexington, KY: UP Kentucky, 1998. 13-21.

 “Personal Experience Paper.” Personal Effects: The Social Character of Scholarly Writing. Ed. Deborah H. Holdstein and David Bleich. Logan, UT: Utah State UP, 2001. 220-31. 

“Rachel, au Coeur des lettres.” Rachel, Une Vie Pour le Théâtre, 1821-1858. Paris: Musée d’art et d’histoire du Judäisme, 2004.  41-55.

“Romanticism, a Romance: Jane Austen and Lord Byron, 1813-1815.”  Persuasions 16 (1994): 175-84.     

Tragic Muse: Rachel of the Comedie-Francaise. New York: Knopf, 1993. 

Book Reviews:

Rev. of Jane Austen, by Deirdre Le Faye. http://www.jasna.org/bookrev/br153p25.html

“Tenderized.” Rev. of The Uncommon Reader, by Alan Bennett.  Commonweal 135, 10 May 2008.

Rev. of Our Kind: A Novel in Stories, by Kate Walbert. WSQ: Gender and Cutlure in the 1950s. 33. 3-4 (2005): 365-68.

“What Becomes A Legend.”  Rev. of Blonde, by Joyce Carol Oates, and Seeing Mary Plain, by Frances Kiernan. The American Prospect, August 28, 2000.

Rev. of Secrets of the Flesh: A Life of Colette, by Judith Thurman.  Boston Sunday Globe, October 31, 1999.

Rev. of God’s Funeral, by A.N. Wilson.  Boston Sunday Globe, June 20, 1999.

Rev. of I Married a Communist, by Philip Roth. Commonweal, January 15, 1999.

Rev. of Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human, by Harold Bloom. Boston Sunday Globe, November 1, 1998.


Recent web articles and links:

A radio interview with Mark Lynch of “Inquiry” on WICN (90.5 FM), on NPR:
http://www.wicn.org/podcasts/audio/rachel-m-brownstein-why-jane-austen

Rachel Brownstein’s response to the Kathryn Sutherland kerfuffle last November on the Language Log blog: http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=2805

The Daily Beast – her response to V. S. Naipaul on Jane Austen http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2011/06/23/jane-austen-unsentimental-writer-for-our-times.html

The Huffington Post:  Jane Austen books you may not have discovered yet – Professor Brownstein offers up 11 lesser known works:  http://www.huffingtonpost.com/rachel-m-brownstein/jane-austen-books_b_885281.html#s298967&title=Northanger_Abbey

The Page 99 Test blog: http://page99test.blogspot.com/2011/06/rachel-brownsteins-why-jane-austen.html

An essay by Professor Brownstein at Austenprose:  http://austenprose.com/2011/06/28/why-jane-austen-blog-tour-with-author-rachel-m-brownstein-and-a-giveaway/

An essay at the Montreal Review:  http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/Why-Jane-Austen.php


Reviews of Why Jane Austen?:

At the Chronicle of Higher Education, by Gina Barreca: http://chronicle.com/blogs/brainstorm/37550/37550

At The New York Times:  “Lessons from Jane Austen” by Miranda Seymour: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/06/12/books/review/book-review-a-jane-austen-education-and-why-jane-austen.html?_r=2&ref=review

at Simple Pleasures Books blog: http://simplepleasuresbooks.wordpress.com/2011/07/01/book-review-why-jane-austen-by-rachel-m-brownstein/

at Bluestalking Blog:  http://bluestalking.typepad.com/the_bluestalking_reader/2011/06/why-jane-austen-by-rachel-brownstein.html

this just added: “A Pleasure, but not a guilty one” at Commonweal.com –  http://commonwealmagazine.org/verdicts/?p=413

 Copyright @2011 by Deb Barnum, of Jane Austen in Vermont
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The Truth is Out ~ Georgette Heyer & Barbara Cartland

Those who have read anything of Georgette Heyer, her writings, and her life know about the hushed-up squabble with another romance writer during the 1950s – Heyer chose not to sue for plagiarism, but Heyer had her say and the writer was “politely” asked to just stop it.  Now finally the story is out, Barbara Cartland the offender, all the juicy details to be revealed in Jennifer Kloester’s* new work, Georgette Heyer: Biography of a Bestseller, to be released this fall by Heinemann.

Here is the story from Bookseller.com:

Heinemann to explore Heyer’s plagiarism fury

29.07.11 | Benedicte Page

A literary plagiarism allegation from the 1950s is set to be given its first detailed airing in a new biography of much-loved novelist Georgette Heyer.

Georgette Heyer: Biography of a Bestseller by Jennifer Kloester (Wm Heinemann, hb, £20, October) reveals the outrage felt by the queen of witty regency romances at the obvious similarities between Barbara Cartland’s historical novel Knave of Hearts and her own youthful story These Old Shades (published in 1926), when they were brought to her attention in 1950.

“I think I could have borne it better had Miss Cartland not been so common-minded, so salacious and so illiterate,” Heyer told her agent, Leonard Parker Moore, in no uncertain terms. “I think ill enough of the Shades, but, good God! That 19-year-old work has more style, more of what it takes, than this offal which she has written at the age of 46!”

Heyer was also indignant at Cartland’s “borrowing” of various character names. “Sir Montagu Reversby”, a character in Cartland’s novel Hazard of Hearts, was blatantly pinched, Heyer felt, from Sir Montagu Revesby, a character in her novel Friday’s Child.

But it was Cartland’s historical and linguistic errors that really offended the writer‚ herself a stickler for accuracy. “She displays an abysmal ignorance of her period. Cheek by jowl with some piece of what I should call special knowledge (all of which I can point out in my books), one finds an anachronism so blatant as to show clearly that Miss Cartland knows rather less about the period than the average schoolgirl,” said Heyer, who told her agent she would “rather by far that a common thief broke in and stole all the silver”.

A solicitor’s letter to Cartland followed, and according to Kloester: “There is no record of a response . . . but Georgette later noted that ‚’the horrible copies of my books ceased abruptly’.”

Kloester’s biography has been written with the backing of Heyer’s son and the late Jane Aitken Hodge, whose own biography was entitled The Private World of Georgette Heyer. The book’s editor, Georgina Hawtrey-Woore, said the book contains much new material, including photos and 400 of Heyer’s letters.

 [Thanks to the Teach Me Tonight blog for the information]

*Dr. Jennifer Kloester’s previous book, Georgette Heyer’s Regency World, is an engaging fact-packed compilation of all things Heyer.  She visited the Word Wenches blog last November – you can read her interview here where she talks about this upcoming biography.

For further reading on Georgette Heyer, see my bibliography post here, as well as the link to all the book reviews from Austenprose‘s fabulous Heyer celebration last year.

Copyright @2011 by Deb Barnum, of Jane Austen in Vermont
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Strange Bedfellows ~ Jane Austen and Sports Illustrated?

Well, maybe not such strange bedfellows after all ~ Jane Austen did, as we all surely know, invent baseball [and here], so why not give her a well-deserved mention in Sports Illustrated?

I write this because my son went out of his way to drive over to my house just to show me what he assumed would be a glorious surprise – a Jane Austen siting that I surely couldn’t know about!  But alas! I had to tell him the truth that I already did know about not only the sale of The Watsons manuscript, but also the Sports Illustrated mention! – he is now more impressed than ever with my literary detective abilities, my ceaseless knowledge of everything and anything on Jane Austen [thank goodness for google alerts!] – but I felt that his efforts deserved a blog post, so here it is:

Go Figure

$1.4 million

Price fetched at auction by Sheffield FC, the world’s oldest soccer club, for its printed and handwritten versions of the game’s original rules, which were drafted in 1858.

$1.6 million

Price fetched at the same auction for the original draft of Jane Austen’s unfinished novel The Watsons.

Click here to see it on the page in SI: Austen Sports Illustrated

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Now I realize the SI editors were just following the same auction and wanted to show the comparison between the value of some old soccor rules and classic literature, but can this mean that Jane Austen in the Swimsuit issue will not be far behind?

‘Mermaids at Brighton’ – William Heath, c1829

[Image: Wikipedia]

 Copyright @2011 by Deb Barnum, of Jane Austen in Vermont
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Jane Austen Cards for Every Occasion!

Jane Austen at home in Bath

I received the information on these cards just before I was off on a holiday, so just now getting to post about them…. 

Tony Heaton’s “Greetings from England” line of cards and limited edition prints are quite lovely, our interest being of course those connected to Jane Austen [though certainly not limited to Austen only [isn’t that a name of a blog out there somewhere?] as I for one cannot resist the Shakespeare, the Hardy,  or a number of the grand stately houses he depicts.   Mr. Heaton, MDesRCA, kindly sent me several samples of the Jane Austen set – I will be ordering a number of each to sell at our meetings to benefit our JASNA-Vermont group.

Here is a sampling of what you will find when you visit the Greetings from England website:  

[the images below are very small – go to the website to see a full-size image – the cards are quite large (8×6) and suitable for framing if you did not want the expense of a limited print (which are 12×18)]

Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre:

 

Thomas Hardy’s cottage:

 

Wordsworth’s cottage:

The Cerne Abbas Giant:

There are many Heritage sites in the UK – from Westminster Abbey, The Tower of London, Greenwich’s Royal Naval College, to the coastline of West Dorset and East Devon…

Tower of London

And for Jane Austen? – for that is why we are here after all…

Chawton Cottage

Royal Crescent, Bath

and Jane Austen’s Bath:

There are a number more, so please visit the site to see these and more full-sized images at:  http://www.greetingsfromengland.co.uk/

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And this lovely little surprise, as I find if all does not come back to Jane Austen, it is sure to come full circle to Vermont:

The American Museum in Britain – Vermont Quilt

Detail of one side of a Log Cabin-Barn Raising quilt made by
Sarah Bryant of Mount Holly, Vermont, New England USA – 1886

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*All images from the Greetings from England website, copyright Tony Heaton, and used with permission.  Please request permission directly from Mr. Heaton for re-use of any kind.  Mr. Heaton also creates home portraits – contact him at his website for further information.

Copyright @2011 by Deb Barnum, of Jane Austen in Vermont.
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In Memory of Jane Austen ~ July 18, 1817

[I append here the post I wrote last year on this day]

July 18, 1817.  Just a short commemoration on this sad day…

No one said it better than her sister Cassandra who wrote

I have lost a treasure, such a Sister, such a friend as never can have been surpassed,- She was the sun of my life, the gilder of every pleasure, the soother of every sorrow, I had not a thought concealed from her, & it is as if I had lost a part of myself…”

(Letters, ed. by Deidre Le Faye [3rd ed, 1997], From Cassandra to Fanny Knight, 20 July 1817, p. 343; full text of this letter is at the Republic of Pemberley)

There has been much written on Austen’s lingering illness and death; see the article by Sir Zachary Cope published in the British Medical Journal of July 18, 1964, in which he first proposes that Austen suffered from Addison’s disease.  And see also Claire Tomalin’s biography Jane Austen: A life, “Appendix I, “A Note on Jane Austen’s Last Illness” where she suggests that Austen’s symptoms align more with a lymphoma such as Hodgkin’s disease.

The Gravesite: 

Austen is buried in Winchester Cathedral

….where no mention is made of her writing life on her grave: 

It was not until after 1870 that a brass memorial tablet was placed by her nephew James Edward Austen-Leigh on the north wall of the nave, near her grave:

It tells the visitor that:

Jane Austen

[in part] Known to many by her writings,
endeared to her family
by the varied charms of her characters
and ennobled by her Christian faith and piety
was born at Steventon in the County of Hants.
December 16 1775
and buried in the Cathedral
July 18 1817.
“She openeth her mouth with wisdom
and in her tongue is the law of kindness.”

The Obituaries:

David Gilson writes in his article “Obituaries” that there are eleven known published newspaper and periodical obituary notices of Jane Austen: here are a few of them:

  1. Hampshire Chronicle and Courier (vol. 44, no. 2254, July 21, 1817, p.4):  “Winchester, Saturday, July 19th: Died yesterday, in College-street, Miss Jane Austen, youngest daughter of the late Rev. George Austen formerly Rector of Steventon, in this county.”
  2. Hampshire Telegraph and Sussex Chronicle (vol. 18, no. 928, p. 4)…”On Friday last died, Miss Austen, late of Chawton, in this County.”
  3. Courier (July 22, 1817, no. 7744, p. 4), makes the first published admission of Jane Austen’s authorship of the four novels then published: “On the 18th inst. at Winchester, Miss Jane Austen, youngest daughter of the late Rev. George Austen, Rector of Steventon, in Hampshire, and the Authoress of Emma, Mansfield Park, Pride and Prejudice, and Sense and Sensibility.  Her manners were most gentle; her affections ardent; her candor was not to be surpassed, and she lived and died as became a humble Christian.” [A manuscript copy of this notice in Cassandra Austen’s hand exists, as described by B.C. Southam]
  4. The Hampshire Telegraph and Sussex Chronicle published a second notice in its next issue (July 28, 1817, p. 4) to include Austen’s writings.

There are seven other notices extant, stating the same as the above in varying degrees.  The last notice to appear, in the New Monthly Magazine (vol. 8, no. 44, September 1, 1817, p. 173) wrongly gives her father’s name as “Jas” (for James), but describes her as “the ingenious authoress” of the four novels…

[from Gilson’s article “Obituaries”, THE JANE AUSTEN COMPANION [Macmillan 1986], p. 320-1]  

Links to other articles and sources:

Copyright @2011 by Deb Barnum, of Jane Austen in Vermont
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Austen on the Block! ~ The Watsons Sells!

Update: the manuscript sold for £990,000 to the Bodleian Libraries of Oxford University [with a little help from The National Heritage Memorial Fund] – thanks to Tony Grant for this information in his comment below – here is the latest news from the BBC website: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-14152092 [though they could have spelled Bodleian correctly!]

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I am still on the road with little access – so thanks to Julie at Austenonly for the news that Jane Austen’s The Watson’s sold for over £850,000 this morning in London! – read Julie’s post here: http://austenonly.com/2011/07/14/the-watsons-sells-at-sothebys-in-london/ – stay tuned for the announcement of who bought it – apparently an institution – I would hazard a guess it is the Pierpont Morgan in New York City –  where the first pages of the manuscript are now housed – and though nothing against the Morgan, I guess I would prefer to see it at Chawton House Library, close to where it laid on a shelf somewhere in Chawton Cottage for a good number of years.

More later.  You can read my original post here:  https://janeausteninvermont.wordpress.com/2011/05/21/on-the-block-jane-austens-the-watsons/

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‘Jane Austen in Vermont’ on Holiday ~ Whale-watching in Canada!

I have not fallen off the planet – have just been out of internet-access-zone – was not expecting to be cut-off from the world of Jane Austen and posts or the world in general for that matter! – but have this tiny window tonight – with a few pictures to share, alas! nothing to do with Jane Austen! – will be back soon!

 

Copyright @2011 by Deb Barnum, of Jane Austen in Vermont
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English Country Dancing in Vermont!

Reminders!

English Country Dance Classes in Richmond
Learn about and enjoy Jane Austen’s favorite social pastime!
Richmond Free Library
201 Bridge Street, Richmond, VT
4 Wednesday Nights i n 2011:
July 6, 13, 20, 27
7pm to 9:30pm
please note that the library locks its door at 8pm
7pm to 8pm ~ basics/styling tips/review
8pm to 8:10pm ~ break
8:10pm to 9:30pm ~ dancing for all
Voluntary donation to defray cost of air conditioning
($3 per class suggested)
For adults & teens. Come with or without a partner; we’ll change
partners throughout the evening. Dress comfortably and bring
c l e a n , flat-heeled shoes with smooth soles (avoid sneakers & mules /
slides) .
~ No sign-up or registration required ~
Just show up and join us for some fun evenings!
INFORMATION ~  www. burlingtoncountrydancers.org

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You can also enhance your ECD skills here:

This first one is through the UVM OLLI program  [ Osher Lifelong Learning Institute ]:

English Country Dancing in Jane Austen’s World 
 
Instructor: Judy Chaves
Date: Monday, July 11, 6-8pm
Location: Ira Allen Chapel at UVM
Price: Members – $20 / Non-Members – $30

Do you enjoy 19th-century British literature? If you’ve ever read any of Jane Austen’s novels or seen any of the recent film adaptations, English country dance plays a prominent role in the culture of the time. The forerunner of American contra dance, English country dance is done in two facing lines (sometimes in squares, less often in circles) and requires no more than a knowledge of left from right and the ability and willingness to move to simply wonderful music. Through a combination of lecture (not much) and dance (as much as we can), you’ll learn the basics of the dance, gain an insider’s appreciation of the vital role it played in the lives of Austen’s characters, understand the etiquette and logistics underpinning Austen’s dance scenes–and have a great deal of fun in the process. You may come by yourself or as a couple! 

Copyright @2011 by Deb Barnum, of Jane Austen in Vermont
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Happy July 4th!

Wishing you all a Happy July 4th Weekend!

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The Penny Post Weekly Review ~ All Things Austen

The Penny Post Weekly Review

  July 2, 2011

The Circulating Library:

JASNA.org in celebration of and preparation for the Fort Worth AGM on Sense and Sensibility has posted a partial bibliography of readings in Persuasions and Persuasions On-Line – http://jasna.org/agms/news-articles/about-ss-reading.html

The British Library announces an iPad app accessing 19th century books http://www.bibliolabs.com/.   Users can experience the British Library 19th Century Historical Collection App for free from the App Store on iPad or at www.itunes.com/appstore/.

Also the British Library and Google Books are hooking up:  http://pressandpolicy.bl.uk/Press-Releases/The-British-Library-and-Google-to-make-250-000-books-available-to-all-4fc.aspx

Drury Lane theatre 1794 - Houghton Library

The Houghton Library at Harvard – their digitization project – this week they have added the following early 19th century drawings of English theatres: http://oasis.lib.harvard.edu/oasis/deliver/deepLink?_collection=oasis&uniqueId=hou00540

Victorian Secrets revives the works of neglected nineteenth-century writers and makes them available to the modern reader. Although over 60,000 novels were published during the 19th century, only a very small number have remained in print. See here for their catalogue:   http://www.victoriansecrets.co.uk/

Notable Women Authors of the Day by Helen C. Black

Charles Darwin’s Library:  http://www.biodiversitylibrary.org/collection/darwinlibrary

The James Boswell Library at LibraryThing:  http://www.librarything.com/profile/JamesBoswell

Nothing to do with Jane or literature, but take a look at this virtual exhibition of sheet music at the Library at Monash University: http://www.lib.monash.edu.au/exhibitions/stardust-melodies/

Beatrix Potter at the Free Library of Philadelphia:  http://libwww.freelibrary.org/blog/index.cfm?s=

Illus from A Happy Pair, 1890


Articles of interest:

This one has been everywhere but need to repeat out of an attempt to cover a week in the world of Jane Austen, so who can resist this!:  Kate Middleton and Jane Austen are cousins:  http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/06/28/kate-middleton-jane-austen-cousins_n_885899.html

“The Fathers of Jane Austen” – by Myretta Robens:  http://www.heroesandheartbreakers.com/blogs/2011/06/jane-austen-fathers

“The Country House and the English Novel” – by Blake Morrison at The Guardian:  http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2011/jun/11/country-house-novels-blake-morrison?INTCMP=SRCH

An essay on Keats’s grave at Victorian Poetry Network: http://web.uvic.ca/~vicpoet/2011/05/the-allure-of-keatss-grave/

Keats's grave in Rome - Wikipedia

William Cowper witty?? – see this essay by Robert Pinsky at Slate on Austen’s favorite poet:  http://www.slate.com/id/2297526/


Books of interest:

By Austen: all six Austen novels will be published as “flipbacks” in November:  http://www.flipbackbooks.com/index.html – For more information on this new book phenomenon (slightly larger than your iphone) hoping to outdo ebooks, see this essay at philobiblos: http://philobiblos.blogspot.com/2011/06/flipbacks.html

And Austen in the Baby Lit series along with Shakespeare: http://tinyurl.com/439ygyf


The Music Trade in Georgian England, edited by Michael Kassler. Published August 2011; Hardback ISBN 978-0-7546-6065-1: http://www.ashgate.com/isbn/9780754660651

Savage Grandeur and Noblest Thoughts: Discovering the Lake District 1750 – 1820: Exhibition Catalogue Published to Accompany Exhibition at Wordsworth Trust 1st July 2010 – 12th June 2011; By Cecilia Powell and Stephen Hebron: http://www.amazon.com/Savage-Grandeur-Noblest-Thoughts-Discovering/dp/1905256426

Review of Vauxhall Gardens: A History, by David Coke and Alan Borg:  http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2011/jul/01/vauxhall-gardens-history-coke-borg

Review of Roy Strong’s Visions of England: http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2011/jul/01/visions-of-england-roy-strong-review

A Book List:  if you are looking for a book list, go no further that “Best Holiday Reads” at The Guardian where writers share their favorite works – no Austen I’m sorry to say, but read Antonia Fraser’s account of reading Anthony Powell’s Dance to the Music of Time – just a great story! http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2011/jun/17/best-holiday-reads?INTCMP=SRCH

Auctions:

Bonham’s Sale 19483 – The Helmut Joseph Collection of Important Snuff Boxes, London, New Bond Street, 5 Jul 2011 at 10:30: http://www.bonhams.com/eur/auction/19483/

A Meissen gold-mounted oval snuff box, circa 1750-60 - Bonham's

Bonham’s auction shoe archive [absolutely fabulous images!]: http://bonhams.com/usa/auction/19239/lot/1195/ – and an essay with images at Booktryst: http://www.booktryst.com/2011/06/vintage-shoe-art-walks-runway-at.html – I want these!

Bonham's Shoe Archive - Booktryst

Shopping:  Peacock P&P bag:  [can any Austen fan really live without this?!http://janeaustengiftshop.co.uk/acatalog/pride_and_prejudice_peacock_shopper_tote_bag.html

Peacock P&P boag - Jane Austen Centre

For fun:

World of Playing Cards website:  http://www.wopc.co.uk/

Handmade relica 17th c English playing cards - World of Playing Cards

The all-over-the-web “he said / she said” – literary quiz:  http://www.nypl.org/blog/2011/06/24/he-said-she-said-literary-quiz

Have fun exploring!  Have you found anything of interest you would like to share? – please do!

Copyright @2011 by Deb Barnum, at Jane Austen in Vermont