Month: July 2013

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Austen on the Block! ~ Lounging around as Mr Darcy, or Maybe Maximus?

UPDATE:  Mr Darcy’s [a.k.a Laurence Olivier] jacket sold for $6,500. – estimate was $1500. – $2000.  Russell Crowe’s Gladiator tunic sold for $7500!

 There is a Hollywood auction taking place today in California – the Profiles in History auction house has a number of Hollywood artifacts being offered at their Hollywood Auction 56, the costumes for the Sound of Music movie for starters. But here is one item of interest to Jane Austen followers, a pure piece of Austen and movie memorabilia to grace anyone’s closet:

Darcyjacket

Lot 422: Laurence Olivier screen-worn “Mr. Darcy” jacket from Pride and Prejudice.

Estimated Price: $1,500 – $2,000   starting bid: $1,500

Description:

Laurence Olivier screen-worn “Mr. Darcy” jacket from Pride and Prejudice. (MGM, 1940).

A beautiful smoking jacket, screen-worn by Laurence Olivier as “Mr. Darcy” in the epic film adapted from the classic Jane Austen novel, Pride and Prejudice. Consisting of crimson, corded silk jacket with wide quilted satin lapels, black braid brocade loop and cloth-covered button front closure, integral sash with black fringed ends, crème-colored pleats peeking from sleeve cuffs and dark maroon satin lining throughout. MGM internal bias label on inside collar with “Larry Olivier” handwritten in black ink. This striking costume exhibits barely detectable age and wear. Fabric remains fresh with colors vibrant. Overall in vintage fine condition.

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and view the various other pieces of Hollywood history that are available, 988 lots in total, from Marilyn Monroe to the Von Trapps – the catalogue itself a work of art and collectible for any movie nut. Here is the link to the flipbook – Mr. Darcy’s jacket is on page 141, right next to Gary Cooper’s costume from Sergeant York and opposite Judy Garland Wizard of Oz posters…

It all goes live this morning 11:00 am. PST!

olivier-darcy

p.s.: do you think Mr Darcy SMOKED??

p.s. 2: just so you don’t think that my other fantasies are not touched on in this auction, if you go to page 298-300, you will find the following:

Maximus tunicRussell Crowe-Gladiator

Lot 803: Russell Crowe’s Maximus tunic from Gladiator.

Estimated Price: $2,000 – $3,000

Description:

Russell Crowe’s Maximus tunic from Gladiator. (DreamWorks, 2000) This tunic was worn by Russell Crowe as “Maximus” in Gladiator. The sleeveless, knee-length tunic is constructed from studio-distressed, unbleached cotton homespun fabric and lined with a light weight muslin reinforcement lining. A bias tag with “Max” written in black ink is sewn under the muslin lining at the back of the neck.  “Max” wears this tunic when he is abducted from his destroyed home by Roman slave traders and taken to Zucchabar, a Roman city in North Africa. There, he is bought by the trader “Proximo” and forced to become a gladiator. Accompanied by a letter of authenticity from the costumer.

[Note: Bidding for this item begins on July 29, 2013, 11:00 am PST]

I might just have to buy this catalogue!

c2013 Jane Austen in Vermont
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Jane Austen and the Bank of England

Well, this is everywhere so only posting this so everyone knows I am actually paying attention. The UK seems to be in the news an awful lot this week, and while I find this quite funny:

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[from https://www.facebook.com/politicalhumor ]

I don’t agree! I am unashamedly an Anglophile of the highest order [my parents were born there], and I had Tea every day as soon as I got home from school and have never changed the habit, and so all this stuff is just sort of ingrained…

So very excited this week, both about the Royal Baby AND the £10 note to feature Jane Austen.

So first a hearty congratulations to all in the Royal Family about George Alexander Louis – after George Knightley I am assuming, and a fine model for any young man (not to mention his great-grandfather)…

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[Image:  CBS News]

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And then Jane takes front-row seat after several weeks of mind-boggling discussion and various petitions on who shall grace the next issue of the £10 note, a woman it was to be, and Jane Austen it is – we can assume the Bank of England was a tad nonplussed by all of Jane Austen fandom raving for her to be chosen…

Here are the details – though they will not be in circulation until 2017 – I do wonder if they are concerned that any such Austen covered notes appearing shall just as quickly disappear into people’s scrapbooks and they shall have to start all over again – I cannot even imagine SPENDING this money, can you??

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[ Image: news.com.au ]

The portrait of Jane Austen, which will appear on the banknote, is adapted from a sketch drawn by her sister Cassandra Austen. Other features include:

• A quote from Pride and Prejudice – “I declare after all there is no enjoyment like reading!”

• An illustration of Elizabeth Bennet, one of the characters in Pride and Prejudice

• An image of Godmersham Park in Kent – the home of Jane Austen’s brother, Edward Austen Knight, and the inspiration for a number of novels

• A central background design of the author’s writing table which she used at home at Chawton Cottage in Hampshire

Fellow writers William Shakespeare and Charles Dickens have appeared on banknotes in recent times. Dickens was on the £10 note [Jane Austen shall be replacing Charles Darwin who is currently on the £10 note] and Shakespeare on the £20 note.

Bank of England notes can be spent throughout the UK. In addition, three banks in Scotland and four in Northern Ireland are authorised to issue banknotes.

On Twitter, Mr Osborne wrote: “[Incoming Bank of England governor] Mark Carney’s choice of Jane Austen as face of £10 note is great. After understandable row over lack of women, shows sense and sensibility.”

[Good to know someone knows their Austen…]

[Quoting from BBC News, where you can find a list of all the previous banknotes with famous faces…]

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[Image:  CBS News]

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UPDATE:  adding a few links here to other writings on the kerfuffle of Jane on the £10 note:

c2013 Jane Austen in Vermont
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On My Bookshelf ~ Jane Austen Scholar Janet Todd Turns to Fiction and Takes on Lady Susan!

Well, not sure if an ebook can be termed “on my bookshelf” but no matter – this new book out today by Austen scholar Janet Todd has already made its way to my kindle, so a virtual bookshelf it is … and I shall drop all my other reading and begin this immediately!

cover-ladysusan

Professor Todd has taken on Jane Austen‘s Lady Susan in her fictional account Lady Susan Plays the Game – this is from the Bloomsbury website:

A must-read for any devotee of Jane Austen, Janet Todd’s bodice-ripping reimagining of Austen’s epistolary novel Lady Susan will capture your literary imagination and get your heart racing.

Austen’s only anti-heroine, Lady Susan, is a beautiful, charming widow who has found herself, after the death of her husband, in a position of financial instability and saddled with an unmarried, clumsy and over-sensitive daughter. Faced with the unpalatable prospect of having to spend her widowed life in the countryside, Lady Susan embarks on a serious of manipulative games to ensure she can stay in town with her first passion — the card tables. Scandal inevitably ensues as she negotiates the politics of her late husband’s family, the identity of a mysterious benefactor and a passionate affair with a married man.

Accurate and true to Jane Austen’s style, as befits Todd’s position as a leading Austen scholar, this second coming of Lady Susan is as shocking, manipulative and hilarious as when Jane Austen first imagined her.

Published: 15-07-2013
Format: EPUB eBook
ISBN: 9781448213450
Imprint: Bloomsbury Reader 
RRP: £6.99  [ in the US, the kindle price is $7.19 :  Amazon.com

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You can read a post by Janet Todd here at the Bloomsbury Reader blog –  where she “tells us her thoughts on writing, language, and the pressure of re-imagining Jane Austen:”

Anne Elliot, virtuous heroine of Persuasion, was ‘almost too good’ for Jane Austen. ‘Pictures of perfection… make me sick and wicked,’ she remarked towards the end of her life. All Austen’s novel heroines are indeed ‘good’: two of them initially hazard improper or injudicious remarks—Elizabeth Bennet and Emma—but later they learn to repress such high spirits.

Now look at Jane Austen’s own letters. Recollect that most of them address her beloved Cassandra who, after Jane’s death, guarded her sister’s image by burning anything she deemed unsuitable—not so much for the public, since Jane was not yet famous enough to have her private correspondence of general interest, but for the younger members of the extended family now living in high Victorian rather than racy Regency times.  Yet even the unburnt letters show a woman very different from the fictional heroines, a woman with a naughty propensity sometimes to laugh at the virtuous, the vulnerable or the just plain unfortunate—a wife with an uncomely husband experiencing a still birth or young girls lacking beauty and unable to compensate for it.  This Jane Austen emerges very fully in a little work she wrote just as she was entering adulthood and long before she’d published any of her masterly novels: ‘Lady Susan’….

Continue reading…

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About the Author:

janet_toddJanet Todd is an internationally renowned scholar of early women writers. She has edited the complete works of England’s first professional woman writer, Aphra Behn, and the Enlightenment feminist Mary Wollstonecraft, as well as novels by Charlotte Smith, Mary Shelley and Eliza Fenwick and memoirs of the confidence trickster Mary Carleton. She is also the general editor of the 9-volume Cambridge Edition of the Works of Jane Austen and editor of Jane Austen in Context and the Cambridge Companion to Pride and Prejudice. Among her critical works are Women’s Friendship in Literature, The Sign of Angellica: Women, Writing and Fiction 1660-1800 and the Cambridge Introduction to Jane Austen. She has written four biographies: of Aphra Behn and three linked women, Mary Wollstonecraft, her daughter, and her aristocratic Irish pupils.

In the 1970s Janet Todd taught in the USA, during which time she began the first journal devoted to women’s writing. Back in the UK in the 1990s she co-founded the journal Women’s Writing. Janet has had a peripatetic and busy life, working at universities in Ghana, the US, and Puerto Rico, as well as England and Scotland. She is now an emeritus professor at the University of Aberdeen and lives in Cambridge.

 

Further reading:

book cover-LadySusanpenguin

c2013 Jane Austen in Vermont

 

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Tea Anyone? ~ Georgian Period Tea Caddies at Auction at Sworders

I have Tea on the brain because our JASNA-Vermont group is planning a Regency-style Afternoon Tea at The Governor’s House in Hyde Park on July 24th, 2013  [$25. / person, reservations required]

And so, Tea being on my radar [where it always is really…], I find there are a number of tea caddies up for auction at Sworders, Fine Art Auctioneers.

These are particularly lovely: [Lot 69]

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A pair of George III oval papier mâché tea caddies

Birmingham, c.1780, by Henry Clay, the first with a hinged lid decorated with bands of berried leaves and anthemia centred by a hallmarked silver loop handle stamped with the initials ‘HC’, the body with transfer decorated scenes of Demeter in the House of Kelos together with other classical figures, instruments and a painted chevron band, the second similarly decorated, but with palmette borders, 11cm high  Provenance:  By repute the Earls of Jersey, Osterley Park Middlesex, sold 1949.  Literature:  For a similar single caddy, ‘The Robert Harman Collection’, Sotheby’s, 12 November 1999, lot 6.  The silver loop handle carries the hallmark of Henry Clay, ‘Japanner in Ordinary to His Majesty and His Royal Highness The Prince of Wales’.  Clay specialised in Etruscan-style decoration of this kind.  A visitor to his workshop in Covent Garden in 1775 reported that he made boxes, tea caddies, panels for coaches and sedan chairs, coffee trays and ‘…all kinds of other vessels, black with orange figures in the style of Etruscan vases’ (‘George Christoph Lichtenberg’s Visits to England as described in his Letters and Diaries’, translated and annotated by M L Mare and W H Quarrell, Oxford, 1938).

Estimate: £5000 – £8000

Or this: [Lot 60]

teacaddy2-sworders

A George III tea caddy

of rectangular form with canted corners, the lid in harewood (?) with an inlaid oval patera within strung borders, the front panel in mahogany similarly decorated, the canted corners inlaid with plain shaded columns on a stained ground, 11.5cm high.

Estimate:  £500 – £800

You can view these here, and see the other 25 or so other tea caddies for sale here.

[Image and text from Sworders – Fine Art Auctioneers – Summer House Country Sale, 16 July 2013]

And on the subject of Tea, here are some offers from Twinings: [with thanks to Tony Grant for sending the link!]

twiningstea

c2013 Jane Austen in Vermont
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Can you forbear laughing

Recent Antiquarian Acquisitions

Click for larger image

“A lady stands at her dressing-table (right), her hair in an enormous pyramid decorated with feathers torn from a peacock, an ostrich and a cock. A young girl wearing a hat holds the peacock by a wing; another wearing a cap tugs hard at one of its tail feathers (which are very unlike peacock’s feathers). An ostrich (left), which has lost most of its tail feathers, is about to pluck out those which ornament the lady’s hair. A cock stands in the foreground (right), having lost almost all its tail feathers, many of which lie on the floor. A black servant wearing a turban stands on his mistress’s right, handing feathers from a number which he holds in his left hand. The lady, who faces three-quarter to the right, is elaborately dressed in the fashion of the day. Her pyramid of hair is decorated with lappets of lace and festoons…

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Jane Austen’s Mr Darcy Takes a Dip in the Serpentine

From The Independent:

 

darcyserpentine

Colin Firth’s memorable wet shirt scene in Pride and Prejudice has been recreated thanks to a giant statue of Mr Darcy which has been built in The Serpentine.

Click here or on ‘view gallery’ for more photos of Colin Firth’s giant Mr Darcy

The fibreglass sculpture, which closely resembles Firth, stretches 12ft out of the water at London’s Hyde Park. The image of Firth emerging dripping wet from the lake at Lyme Park, Cheshire featured in the 1995 BBC adaption of the Jane Austen novel. The scene, which caused a stir at the time, recently topped a viewers’ poll of the most memorable TV moments ever.

The model of Darcy took a team of three sculptors in excess of two months to design, construct and paint. Lead sculptor Toby Crowther said: “The challenge for us was capturing the spirit of Darcy as handsome and noble but also aloof and proud. The Mr Darcy sculpture is a real mix of the many portrayals of Jane Austen’s most famous hero.” The sculpture will tour a number of locations before being installed in Lyme Park, where it will remain until February.

Adrian Wills, general manager of Drama, said: “Jane Austen spent a lot of time walking in Hyde Park and along the banks of the Serpentine, so we would like to think she would have approved of our new dashing Darcy.”

The statue has been built to celebrate today’s launch of new UKTV channel Drama, a free-to-air station on Sky and Freeview.

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[image from BBC News]

And the Real Thing:

darcyfirthwetshirt

though I always liked this one better:

darcysmile