…is Felicia! – Please email me and I will put you in touch with Elizabeth Rodgers on how to get the free app [if you do not have an iPhone, please let me know and I will draw another name]
Thanks all for responding – I recommend you buy the app for 99c and start listening right away! Visit Audiobook Pop! to order. [Also note that the app will be free on the opening day of the JASNA AGM in Brooklyn – available on October 5, 2012]
[Risa, I will have Ms. Rodgers answer your question.]
Copyright c2012 Jane Austen in VermontGentle Readers: I welcome today Elizabeth Rodgers, one of the creators of the “Audiobooks –Austen” app for the iPhone, a veritable Jane Austen anthology just a tap away, as she explains how the app works and what is included, all for a mere 99c!
I have my Jane Austen in every format available to man – multiple hard copies of each novel [remember those space-taking, dust-collecting things?], audiobooks [originally on cassette tapes!, then CDs, then iPod, now iPhone], now on my kindle [I confess shamefaced], and of course the movies, most adaptations to re-view annually… there is no end!
It has been interesting to see the various apps for the iPhone – the books, the games, the audiobooks – all slightly different, just to confuse the user and turn the selection process into a nightmare of choices… audiobooks especially – the narrator being the selling point. I mean who can compare to Patrick Tull reading Patrick O’Brian, or Frank Muller his Great Expectations? – or Jenny Sterlin reading Laurie R. King’s Mary Russell mysteries, and Richard Armitage Georgette Heyer [and though his readings of Sylvester and Venetia, are alas! abridged, they are still worth the price of admission…]. As for Austen, there are any number of options to choose from – some are free, some quite costly – so how to decide?? Well, here is an option that takes some of the confusion and decision-making out of the equation, as you shall see – I highly recommend it! And Ms. Rodgers has graciously offered Jane Austen in Vermont readers a chance for a free giveaway of the new app! – so any questions or comments will make you eligible for the random drawing – see below for details!
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Audiobooks – Austen is a Jane Austen audiobook anthology. For the Jane Austen enthusiast, this is an easy purchase. Not only do you get Emma, Pride and Prejudice and Northanger Abbey, but you also get lesser known stories like Lady Susan, The History of England as well as a biography of Jane Austen by her nephew. Once you buy the app for $0.99 in iTunes, the audiobooks are free. No more CDs, no more paying for each new audiobook download. The narrators in the app are great and you can stream or download audiobooks on the go. And Android users: we’re so close to the Android version — it will be available Fall 2012. The audiobooks included in the app are: –
About Audiobook Pop! Audiobook Pop! was founded in 2010 to provide a solution to the following three points of pain:
Audiobook Pop! curates its content and carefully selects only the best narrators so that there is minimal decision-making, ease of use and affordability. Too much choice is not a good thing. I first had the vision for an audiobook app when I took a road trip with my family, including my two young children. There’s nothing wrong with watching DVDs on the road, but I’m determined to raise them as readers. A non-technical person, I partnered with Boisean designer and developer, Mazal Simantov. Together we architected the simplicity and intuitiveness of the app and Simantov created the elegantly simple design. The keys to success were threefold: ease of use, great content, efficient user choice. In February 2011, the first app, Audiobooks For Your Kids, was launched.
Once the original app had been established, we received feedback from users that similar apps with different themes would be well received. To meet that demand, in Spring 2012, we released Audiobooks – Sci-Fi, Summer 2012, Audiobooks – Austen, and up next is an app with global fairy tales and folk tales and then, a Bronte Sisters anthology — Anne, Emily and Charlotte. Users can learn more about Audiobook Pop! and Audiobooks – Austen by following the company on Twitter @audiobookpop and on Facebook for news on current releases and to suggest themes for new apps. We donate a portion of our sales to Librivox.org.
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Thank you Elizabeth for sharing this with us and offering the free giveaway! – I can add that the app is very easy to use and it is quite delightful to have all these works at one’s fingertips!
Please leave a question or comment for Elizabeth by next Sunday September 16, 2012, 11:59 PM – the winner will be announced on Monday September 17th …
Everyone is eligible, or at least all of you with an iPhone, iPad or iTouch, and the Android, the app for which will be available shortly.
Gentle and Fun-Minded Readers: today I welcome Vanessa Paugh, creator of Pride and Prejudice RPG*, a mind-challenging Jane Austen-related game for your iphone. I have downloaded it, but alas! have not had the time to really become “accomplished” [one must practice as Elizabeth so wisely reprimands herself and Mr. Darcy] – but I invite you to read what Vanessa has to say about why she created this game – you can find it at the iTunes store for 99c – try it out and let me know how you fare! – and Thank You Vanessa for sharing your game with us today!
[*for the uninitiated: RPG = role-playing game]
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Pride and Prejudice RPG is a musical, fashion role playing game based on the first part of Jane Austen’s novel. The player becomes Elizabeth Bennett and strives to complete the accomplishments that will lead her to Mr. Darcy. There are four sections in the game: Pianoforte, Hertfordshire, Shoppe and Closet.
With Pride and Prejudice RPG, the player can enjoy literature, fashion and music, and painlessly improve her math skills at the same time.
Pianoforte section
The primary reason that I created Pride and Prejudice RPG was to ultimately increase the numbers of women in Science Technology Engineering and Math (STEM). As Ghandi said, “be the change you want to see.” Studies have shown that many gamers become interested in STEM from curiosity about the inner workings of the games they play. Subsequently, they want to make games themselves and eventually choose programming or other STEM fields as careers. In addition, when many women see how technology can solve problems which interest them, they realize that STEM fields don’t have inherent gender association.
Currently, many concerned woman are debating the best methods to increase the numbers of women in STEM. Some say that gender neutral toys, clothes, media and attitudes are the only way to go. Others are trying the girly geek route with perfume chemistry sets, pink Legos, computer engineer Barbie and glamourous magazine style math books. The problem comes when these groups forget the goal and end up fighting each other. STEM fields don’t have to be limited by gender and cultural gender norms don’t have to limit careers in STEM fields. According to Kim Tolley’s research, in the 1830’s, Americans debated whether women could study classics, because many “experts” thought they should continue to study science. In 2005, Americans debated whether woman could study science because some “experts” thought they should continue to study classics. It’s time to take the gender limitations out of academics, period. I hope Pride and Prejudice RPG is one step in that direction. It includes literature, musical math, historical fashion and creative experimentation. These are the four main subjects that we require all students to learn: Language Arts, Mathematics, History and Science. When roadblocks are removed and encouragement is not withheld, woman can learn all of them.
Although I had played many computer games, I never considered becoming a game designer until I heard about Brenda Laurel and Purple Moon’s “Rocket’s New School.” Janet H. Murray’s “Hamlet on the Holodeck” inspired me to read all of Austen’s work and start turning “Pride and Prejudice” into a game. I was enlightened by Sherri Graner Ray’s “Gender Inclusive Gaming” and investigated redesigning traditional violent gameplay into other game playing mechanisms. Talking with Julienne Gehrer, the developer of the Pride and Prejudice board game, inspired me to focus on selecting the genre of the game first. Emma Campbell Webster’s “Lost in Austen” confirmed my research that a role-playing game would be the most appropriate genre. I was also inspired by the mommy iPhone game company Appsnminded and intrigued by some iPhone task based RPGs, which led me to discover the right game mechanisms to trade narrative accomplishments for violent acts. A post on Balancing Jane’s blog gave me the idea to combine music and math. And after reading Peggy Orenstein’s “Cinderella Ate My Daughter” and debating on Reel Girl’s blog, I refined Pride and Prejudice RPG’s presentation, so that it was more about accomplishment and less reflective of cultural gender biases.
Hertfordshire section
I started designing my Pride and Prejudice game in 2004 with girls in mind, continuing in the footsteps of the girl games movement from ten years before. However, at the Women’s Game Conference in 2004, I heard a woman ask when games that reflected her fantasies would be addressed by the game industry. A man on the panel dismissed her question, so I started focusing on software for women. My research predicted that Jane Austen readers who hadn’t played games might try my game if the text was fairly literal. It also indicated that gamers who hadn’t read Austen might read her work as a result of playing a literal Pride and Prejudice game. Realizing that there had been a lot of debate among women over video game violence, I excluded weapons, stereotypes, and moving targets from my game. I also left out timed challenges, timed energy replacement, and long written passages from Pride and Prejudice RPG to make it more fun for novice gamers.
Shoppe section
Closet section
The current version of Pride and Prejudice RPG covers the first part of Jane Austen’s novel up to the end of the Meryton Assembly. In future updates, I want to add accomplishments for Elizabeth’s adventures in Kent and Derbyshire, and important events such as refusing Mr. Collins and Mr. Darcy. I also plan to include more challenging songs, and of course, Elizabeth will need more shoes, gowns and bonnets. If women who play my game and love it let me know, I will be very glad to hear from them. However, I really challenge anyone who wishes Pride and Prejudice RPG were different to seriously consider making her own game. There are only three other electronic Jane games out there so far: Matches and Matrimony, Rogues and Romance, and Hidden Anthologies. There are millions of Jane Austen fans and thousands of openings in STEM fields waiting.
About the Author:
Dr. Vanessa Paugh is a college professor and indie game developer in Dallas, Texas.
She holds a Bachelor’s in Electrical Engineering,
an MFA in Arts and Technology and a Ph.D in Aesthetic Studies.
Images and text courtesy of Vanessa Paugh, with thanks!
You can find the game at the iTunes store here: http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/pride-and-prejudice-rpg/id510978515?mt=8
and please comment if you have any questions or thoughts for Vanessa about her game!
It’s here! The release of the new Facebook game for Janeite’s…Rogues and Romance. WOW!!!!
Enjoy!!!
The latest from the Jane Austen Centre:
Pride and Prejudice Heart Confetti
This heart confetti is made from your favourite romantic book – Pride & Prejudice.
This is perfect for your wedding and makes a unique table decoration. *
Presented in a pretty ivory envelope ready for giving (or keeping!)
Bring Darcy and Lizzie, and all your other favourite characters, to your wedding today!
Only £3 per pack
You can order here from the Jane Austen Centre in Bath
[* or you can sit around on a rainy day and try to piece the book back together? – wedding or not, I think this is a must-have for any true Austen fan…]
Text and image from the Jane Austen Centre (except for the last bit…)
27 January 2012
News /Gossip:
This article and book is generating so much online chat that I had to link to it:
“The First Sexual Revolution: Lust and Liberty in the 18th Century.” Adulterers and prostitutes could be executed and women were agreed to be more libidinous than men – then in the 18th century attitudes to sex underwent an extraordinary change… by Faramerz Dabhoiwala in The Guardian:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2012/jan/20/first-sexual-revolution?newsfeed=true
-and you might also like to read this essay by Tony Perrottet on “Guidebooks to Babylon” – note the references to “Harris’s List of Covent Garden Ladies”:
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/22/books/review/guidebooks-to-babylon.html?pagewanted=all
-and perhaps this whole book on the subject: The Covent Garden Ladies: Pimp General Jack and The Extraordinary Story of Harris’s List by Hallie Rubenhold – Tempus Publishing, 2005:
Oh dear, what would Jane say!
Downton Abbey ~ like Dickens, DA now has its own category!
*Downton Abbey, the house as the real star of the show:
http://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/story.asp?sectioncode=26&storycode=418569
*This article on “The Literary Pedigree of Downton Abbey” will give you several books to add to your TBR pile:
http://www.themillions.com/2012/01/the-literary-pedigree-of-downton-abbey.html
*as will this post from JASNA-New Jersey that lists several booklists out there:
http://cnjjasna.blogspot.com/2012/01/downton-abbey-reading-list.html
*and a visit to the Masterpiece website will give you stories to read, polls to take and videos to view:
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/masterpiece/downtonabbey/
countdown to next show [for those counting!]: 2 days and 7 hours…
Now back to Jane Austen!
“Discovering Austen: A One-Woman Show”:
http://www.libraryasincubatorproject.org/?p=2553
Visit The Library as Incubator Project for an interview with Kristin Hammargren on her upcoming one woman show, Discovering Austen (running Thursday, January 26 – Saturday, January 28, 7:30 p.m. at the Hemsley Theatre,821 University Avenue in Madison,WI).
The Circulating Library:
*An article about unfinished books like Dickens’ Edwin Drood and Austen’s Sanditon:
http://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/story.asp?sectioncode=26&storycode=418771&c=2
[this lovely image from the article : by Miles Cole]
*Behind Jane Austen’s Door by Jennifer Forest – an ebook, sort of a cross between Bill Bryson’s At Home and Amanda Vickery’s works on Georgian homelife, but lots shorter: – have just started it, will report when done…
http://www.smashwords.com/books/view/123849
*Romanticism Redefined: Pickering & Chatto and The Wordsworth Circle
from the Alexander Street Press – check if your local academic or public library will be subscribing to this online resource:
http://alexanderstreet.com/products/romanticism-redefined-pickering-chatto-and-wordsworth-circle
-And read this review in Library Journal:
http://reviews.libraryjournal.com/2012/01/reference/romanticism-redefined/
*The Victorian Newsletter: http://www.wku.edu/victorian/index.php
*The British Newspaper Archive: http://www.britishnewspaperarchive.co.uk/
• Books I am Looking Forward to
*as a great advocate of the importance of re-reading, especially Jane Austen, I am happy to add this to my TBRimmediately pile:
Patrica Meyers Spacks, On Re-Reading:
http://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?recid=31296 , which includes a video interview with the author:
After retiring from a lifetime of teaching literature, Patricia Meyer Spacks embarked on a year-long project of rereading dozens of novels: childhood favorites, fiction first encountered in young adulthood and never before revisited, books frequently reread, canonical works of literature she was supposed to have liked but didn’t, guilty pleasures (books she oughtn’t to have liked but did), and stories reread for fun vs. those read for the classroom. On Rereading records the sometimes surprising, always fascinating, results of her personal experiment.
Spacks addresses a number of intriguing questions raised by the purposeful act of rereading: Why do we reread novels when, in many instances, we can remember the plot? Why, for example, do some lovers of Jane Austen’s fiction reread her novels every year (or oftener)? Why do young children love to hear the same story read aloud every night at bedtime? And why, as adults, do we return to childhood favorites such as The Hobbit, Alice in Wonderland, and the Harry Potter novels? What pleasures does rereading bring? What psychological needs does it answer? What guilt does it induce when life is short and there are so many other things to do (and so many other books to read)? Rereading, Spacks discovers, helps us to make sense of ourselves. It brings us sharply in contact with how we, like the books we reread, have both changed and remained the same.
-and a review here: http://www.jsonline.com/entertainment/arts/on-further-review-finding-value-in-rereading-books-an3qem9-137781373.html
and here at Austenprose: http://austenprose.com/2012/01/21/on-rereading-by-patricia-meyer-spacks-a-review/
*Just in time for Valentine’s Day: Jane Austen on Love and Romance, edited by Constance Moore:
*Simon Dickie: Cruelty and Laughter: Forgotten Comic Literature and the Unsentimental Eighteenth Century. U Chicago P, 2011. [love the cover!]
http://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/C/bo11913215.html
with a review here: http://bnreview.barnesandnoble.com/t5/In-Brief/Cruelty-amp-Laughter/ba-p/6577
*The final book in Michael Thomas Ford’s trilogy of Jane as Vampire will be released on February 28, 2012:
Here is a review from Library Journal:
Ford, Michael Thomas. Jane Vows Vengeance. Ballantine. Feb. 2012.
c.288p. ISBN 9780345513670. pap. $15.
Author-turned-vampire Jane Austen wants to marry Walter, but fending off her soon-to-be mother-in-law and fear of revealing her Big Secret are sucking the fun out. Walter’s invitation to join colleagues on an architectural tour of Europe leads him to suggest a wedding-slash-honeymoon. The wedding party—including their friends Lucy and Ben and Walter’s mom, Miriam, and her dog—arrive in London anticipating the happy event, but it’s not to be. A guest from Jane’s far past arrives to object, and the remainder of the trip continues this inauspicious start, including the search for Crispin’s Needle, said to return a vampire’s soul. If the needle can be found, would it deliver a soul or kill the vampire trying?
Verdict: Ford’s final book in the trilogy (Jane Bites Back; Jane Goes Batty) is nicely connected with characters and ideas to the previous books, but it can also be read as a stand-alone. More architectural detail than literary asides, a fabulous back story for Miriam, and a sometimes overwhelming number of additional elements will surprise readers. Still, the key elements of a charmingly reluctant vampire, supportive friends, and flashes of brilliance offset by poor undead life-skills remain in full force. [Library marketing.]—Stacey Hayman, Rocky River P.L., OH
*Coming in June 2012: London: A History in Verse, edited by Mark Ford (Belknap, 2012)
Called “the flour of Cities all,” London has long been understood through the poetry it has inspired. Now poet Mark Ford has assembled the most capacious and wide-ranging anthology of poems about London to date, from Chaucer to Wordsworth to the present day, providing a chronological tour of urban life and of English literature.
Nearly all of the major poets of British literature have left some poetic record of London: Chaucer, Spenser, Shakespeare, Donne, Milton, Dryden, Pope, Johnson, Wordsworth, Keats, Byron, and T.S. Eliot. Ford goes well beyond these figures, however, to gather significant verse of all kinds, from Jacobean city comedies to nursery rhymes, from topical satire to anonymous ballads. The result is a cultural history of the city in verse, one that represents all classes of London’s population over some seven centuries, mingling the high and low, the elegant and the salacious, the courtly and the street smart. Many of the poems respond to large events in the city’s history—the beheading of Charles I, the Great Fire, the Blitz—but the majority reflect the quieter routines and anxieties of everyday life through the centuries.
Ford’s selections are arranged chronologically, thus preserving a sense of the strata of the capital’s history. An introductory essay by the poet explores in detail the cultural, political, and aesthetic significance of the verse inspired by this great city. The result is a volume as rich and vibrant and diverse as London itself.
*Shannon Hale has a new book coming out on January 31, 2012 – Midnight in Austenland – another story with a different heroine set in the fictional Austenland as in her first Austen book… I liked that book, thought it was great fun, so will give this a try as well… $9.99 on my kindle
* Posh Pocket Jane Austen – 100 Puzzles and Quizzes by the Puzzle Society – came out in April 2011.
http://www.andrewsmcmeel.com/products/?isbn=1449401236
*What Austen’s Sense and Sensibility can teach us about Love and Courtship“, at The Daily Beast: http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2012/01/20/virgil-jane-austen-and-other-authors-can-teach-us-about-love.html
*World Book Night is taking shape for April 23, 2012. You can see the 25 titles that will be distributed to people in participating countries: Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice is among them! – for the other titles [and a fabulous book list], go here: http://www.worldbooknight.org/about-world-book-night/wbn-2012/the-books
You can learn more about this event in the US here: http://www.us.worldbooknight.org/
*On my bedside table?: reading Bleak House, finally…
Websites and Blogs worth a look:
*“Sense and Sensibility in the Dining Room of Chawton Cottage”: by Julie Wakefield
http://janeaustenshousemuseumblog.com/2012/01/22/the-sense-and-sensibility-display-in-the-dining-room/
Austen in Academia:
NEH Seminar for college and university teachers: “Jane Austen and Her Contemporaries” June 18-July 20, 2012
http://nehseminar.missouri.edu/
“We will read four Austen novels (Pride & Prejudice, Sense & Sensibility, Emma, and Northanger Abbey) and several novels by her contemporaries, including Anna Maria Porter, Jane West, and Mary Brunton. We will have several speakers join us in person or via Skype, including Jay Jenkins of Valancourt Books, who will talk to us about selecting, editing, and getting published a scholarly edition of an eighteenth- or nineteenth-century novel. We will also be taking a group day-trip to the Spencer Library at the Universityof Kansas.”
Museum Musings – Exhibition Trekking:
*The Cambridge University Library has just opened an exhibition Shelf Lives: Four Centuries of Collectors and their Books January 18 – June 16, 2012
http://www.lib.cam.ac.uk/exhibitions/shelf_lives/
the bookshelf of Sir Geoffrey Keynes, noted bibliographer of Jane Austen (1929) – if you look closely at this bookshelf, you may notice a familiar spine or two of Austen’s works!
article here: http://www.finebooksmagazine.com/fine_books_blog/2012/01/four-centuries-of-collectors-at-cambridge.phtml
*At the The Folger Shakespeare Library, from Feb 3- May 20, 2012:
Shakespeare’s Sisters: Voices of English and European Women Writers, 1500-1700
http://www.folger.edu/woSummary.cfm?woid=721
Auction News:
Always on the lookout for London materials:
Sotheby’s London November 15, 2011: Lot 14
A New & Correct Plan of London [London, 1760], folding silk fan engraved by Richard Bennett.. Travel, Atlases, Maps & Natural History [L11405] Estimate: 4,000 – 6,000 GBP – Sold for: 11,875 GBP
Regency Life
• Fashion
A little later than our time, but here is an interesting blog post on “Women, Fashion and Frivolity” at the Darwin and Gender blog:
http://www.darwinproject.ac.uk/gender/2012/01/06/women-fashion-and-frivolity/
-Note this quote by George Darwin:
Women’s dress retains a great similarity from age to age, together with a great instability in details, and therefore does not afford so much subject for remark as does men’s dress.
[excuse me? – a great similarity? an instability in detail? ]
Here is the full text of George Darwin’s 1872 writing on Development in Dress
http://darwin-online.org.uk/content/frameset?viewtype=text&itemID=A570&pageseq=1
General History:
*this is fabulous! Postcards of Queen Elizabeth through the ages at Financial Times online: http://www.ft.com/cms/s/2/34f15e78-3c0c-11e1-bb39-00144feabdc0.html#axzz1kFQt7sIb
[when there scroll down to view the slideshow]
[image: with thanks to Nerdy Girls!]
Charles Dickens: – he’s everywhere!
*Dickens in pictures at the Telegraph :
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/charles-dickens/8954312/Charles-Dickens-in-pictures.html
*A tour of Dickens birthplace:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/topics/christmas/8947295/A-tour-around-the-house-where-Charles-Dickens-was-born.html
*“Celebrating Mr. Dickens” a symposium at the Universityof Delaware, February18, 2012: http://www.udconnection.com/saturdaysymposium
*“Dickens in Lowell”: an exhibit [opens March 30, 2012] ,and symposium celebrating Dickens’s historic visit to Lowell, Massachusettsin 1842 – http://www.uml.edu/conferences/dickens-in-lowell/
*The Yale Center for British Art begins its 2012 film tribute to Dickens with the first film in the series “Dickens’London”, a 1924 12-minute silent film:
– followed by The Pickwick Papers, from 1952: http://calendar.yale.edu/cal/ycba/week/20120123/All/CAL-2c9cb3cc-333ca412-0134-477bda0c-00000991bedework@yale.edu/
*The DeGoyler Library at Southern Methodist University is hosting a Dickens exhibit:
Charles Dickens: The First Two Hundred Years. An Exhibition from the Stephen Weeks Collection. January 19-May 12, 2012 – a catalogue is available for purchase: http://smu.edu/cul/degolyer/exhibits.htm
Shopping:
from Flourishcafe at Esty.com
For Fun:
*Another image of Jane! A cigarette card from the NYPL Digital Gallery, from a collection of 50 cards of “Celebrities of British History” – here is the Jane Austen card and the verso with a short biography of Austen. You can see her illustrious company on the 49 other cards at the link below:
http://digitalgallery.nypl.org/nypldigital/dgkeysearchresult.cfm?parent_id=452639&word=
[with thanks to JASNA-New Jersey for the link]
Specific Material Type: Photomechanical prints
Source: [Cigarette cards.] / Celebrities of British history : a series of 50
Location: Stephen A. Schwarzman Building/ George Arents Collection
*Found this on the Cotswold History blog: http://www.cotswoldhistory.com
http://www.cotswoldhistory.com/2012/01/life-is-like-a-jane-austen-novel/
Sometimes, entries from 18th century newspapers read more like the introduction to a Jane Austen novel than a Jane Austen Novel. Take this entry from the Gloucester Journal of 17 April 1797:
“Glocester, April 17 – Tuesday last was married at North Nibley, in this county, Mr John Parradice, of Wick, to Miss Sarah Knight, ofNorth Nibley, an agreeable young lady, with a large fortune.”
A groom named Paradise (almost), and a pleasant, rich lady; this story has the potential to make a rather good novel.
*A reminder that the website for the Jane Austen Centre in Bath has a section on Music Videos: http://www.janeausten.co.uk/the-jane-austen-centre/jane-austen-videos/the-music-videos/
Watch them all and choose your favorite [very hard to do!]
A new card game based on the novels of Jane Austen has just been released. Called “Suitors and Suitability,” it is the first in a series and is based on Pride and Prejudice – the series will also include Sense and Sensibility, Emma, and Persuasion – they ask you on their website to vote for which game you would like to see published next – alas! I am disappointed to not see Northanger Abbey in the offing! – surely a fine book for a card game where one could get lost in the dank hallways of a Gothic Abbey! – perhaps we should begin to rally for Henry Tilney as a most major suitable suitor!
The game for 2-6 players, age 13 and up, costs $24.95 – a tad steep for a card game, but you should play the demonstration game and see if it seems worth a dive into your pocket-book – the pictures are generally appealing, though Mr. Darcy seems sadly lacking [where is Colin Firth when we need him?]
[sorry, this has nothing to do with the cards – but who can resist this picture! – with thanks to Vic at Jane Austen Today for sharing this luscious shot!]
Well, back to the game – I have just spent a few minutes with the demo and need to give it more time to pass any sort of judgment – right now I am a bit befuddled! – one needs perhaps to buy it just to see what it is all about! – I do think it might be a perfect choice for the next game night of our budding co-ed book group – but take a look and see what you think – and let me know!
And an invitation from the publisher:
If you are near the Bay Area of California you might be interested in our upcoming game night. On Saturday, February 4th at 5:30 PM we will be serving tea with a traditional menu provided by a local caterer. Along with the tea service will be a chance to mingle in our elegant showroom and play the game. Period attire is admired but not required. For more information, and reservations please see our website. http://www.lumenaris.com/event_games.html
The Lumenaris Group, Inc
18675 Adams Ct. Suite H
Morgan Hill, CA 95037
Phone: 408-591-4034
Website: http://www.lumenaris.com/suitors.html
And check out the other games offered – there are various puzzles, from easy to very difficult – for starters, you might be interested in this fashion puzzle!
[all images from Lumenaris.com, with the exception of Mr. Firth]
The random drawing for the 2012 Jane Austen Calendar from the JASNA-Wisconsin group has just been done! – Drum Roll Please…and the Winners are…
Felicia, who commented on December 16th and wrote the following:
I would thank Miss Austen for bringing some wonderful people in my life. Because of her books I have met some great friends.
Felicia
And
Cara Dragnev, who commented on December 16th as well:
Happy Birthday to Jane! And what a tribute to her to have this wonderful blog party! If I wrote Jane a letter, I would first of all THANK her. Thank her for all the joy she has brought to me and all who read her. I would love for her to see one of her books as a film and get a reaction. Can you imagine? Thank you for joining in this wonderful party!
~Cara
***********************
Congratulations Felicia and Cara! I will email each of you privately, but if you see this, please send me your mailing address and contact information as soon as possible and I will get the calendar off to you right away. If I don’t hear from you by December 27th, I will draw another name. My email is jasnavermont [at] gmail [dot] com
If you are not one of the lucky winners, and are in desperate need of a Jane Austen calendar [and you should be…], you can order your own copy and more for all your friends at the JASNA-Wisconsin website here.
Thank you all for participating! – I have not answered any of your comments due to the Holiday Season Craziness, but thank each and every one of you for your own delightful letters to Jane Austen and the various gifts you would give her if you could! I encourage everyone with a spare minute in their day [and when might that be one asks?] to read the many comments and see how Austen has touched so many lives across generations and geography…
And a final thank you to JASNA-Vermont’s Michelle Singer for her lovely tribute letter to Jane that started all this !
Wishing you all a Festive and Happy Holiday!
Danforth, Handcrafted Pewter, Middlebury Vermont
Deb, at Jane Austen in Vermont
Just a reminder ~ tonight at midnight is the deadline for the Birthday Soiree Giveaway : the 2012 Jane Austen Calendar from Wisconsin JASNA – two copies will be sent to two winners of the random drawing – all you need to do is comment on this post here – worldwide eligibility, winners will be announced tomorrow. Good Luck one and all!
Day 3: Wednesday, 21 December 2011
For Your Wardrobe
Well, I bought this for myself a bit ago, thinking no one would ever find this to even know I wanted it – so here is the link to a very cool t-shirt company, Out of Print Clothing.com – they make clothing and various accessories featuring the world’s greatest literature, and Pride & Prejudice, as one would expect, has a good number of items:
You can find all the P&P items here:
http://outofprintclothing.com/shop/gift-ideas/book-families/pride-and-prejudice/
And check out the other authors, such as Poe:
or Bronte:
There are a myriad of Jane Austen items in all imaginable formats everywhere it seems – just visit the shops at Esty for a veritable feast ~ here is one example from prettygirlpostcards:
You can also find the Pride and Prejudice t-shirt in one of my favorite book catalogues – Bas Bleu [as we are all such bluestockings!] – there are other Jane Austen and Pride and Prejudice must-have items to add to your collection, including these earrings:
Happy shopping! ~ what is your favorite Jane Austen accessory??
Jane Austen in Vermont 