I somehow forgot I bought this game last year. Since I was in the mood for a game set in Jane Austen’s fictional universe, I was all for it. Even when I discovered it’s not an adventure game, but a RPG (role-playing game) or strategy game. I hadn’t played this type of game before but hey, it’s Jane Austen. So I was willing to try.

Right off the bat, the game opens with a tutorial to explain that you’re the heroine in the world of Pride and Prejudice – which includes some elements from other two Austen novels: Persuasion and Sense and Sensibility – and your actions will determine your matrimonial path, and blah blah blah. I was impatient enough to leap over the rest of tutorials into the game.

A big mistake.

Because I somehow ended up marrying someone I didn’t expect to marry. To say that my jaw was on the floor would be the understatement of this century. I’d expected to marry Mr. Darcy himself. Oh no, Matches and Matrimony won’t make it that easy for the likes of me. Well chastened, I went back to the game’s tutorials and dutifully read all before trying again.

Matches and Matrimony: A Pride and Prejudice Tale is essentially a dating sim that revolves around your decisions in how you would pick an activity for each day of your five-day week — depending on your path, there are potentially fourteen weeks in total per game — and how some characters who might like you more or less, based on your responses. And this would affect the percentage of your sum and subsequently influence your matrimonial path.

Each activity has points, plus or minus, for each of nine characteristic traits: Willpower, Wit, Talent, Kindness, Propriety, Sensibility and Energy.

If you select ‘Go Visiting’ for one day of your week, it’ll increase Kindness (+6) and Propriety (+4), and decrease Energy (-10). And ‘Read a Book’ for another day, which would increase Wit and Sensibility while decreasing Willpower. ‘Rest’ for one day would mean Energy 40+ alone.

Note: sometimes it’d reverse unexpectedly. When you might expect more points for certain traits, it’d go in the opposite direction and decrease those much-needed points. (I later figured out why that happened, so you’ll probably figure out yourself, too.)

At the first try, I had no strategy – none whatsoever – so I randomly clicked on an activity for each day and hoped for the best. Oh, I did have a bit of a strategy: I’d made sure that I was nice to everyone. Never rude or confrontational. Good manners, always.

And that, readers, is how I ended up with that dreadfully dull cousin, Mr. Collins, as my husband.

Oh, the horror.

So, how you choose activities for your heroine each week does affect your path. Sometimes, crazily so. Likewise with your interactions with various characters throughout the story as their reactions will influence your path, positively or negatively.

To begin with, you get to name the heroine – clearly based on Elizabeth Bennet – however you like. I found this rather disconcerting, to be honest. I mean, ‘Fia Bennet’ doesn’t sound quite right, does it?

I did later have fun by naming my heroine after my baby brother, ‘Alasdair Bennet’, though. Pretty immature, but so fun.

While most characters are from Austen’s fictional universe, the details of some characters are different. Such as Mr. Wickham, from Pride and Prejudice, is renamed as Mr. Wickeby for this game, but everything he says and does in this game resembles those of Mr. Willioughby from Sense and Sensibility. Mr. Bingley’s first name went from Charles to Edward. For a while, I didn’t notice this change until I vaguely remembered that Edward is from Sense and Sensibility and that his surname is Ferrars. It explains why Mr. Bingley seems a combination of Charles Bingley and Edward Ferrars. I don’t think there are any more significant changes. Not as far as I can recall, anyroad.

Well, not all characters from Pride and Prejudice appear in this game. Younger Bennet sisters – Mary and Kitty – don’t show up. So, along with the Bennet parents, it’s just Elizabeth (you), Jane and Lydia (who’s renamed Lydianne for this game).

Did all those changes mess with my head? Yup. I think the game designers did it to make the game unpredictable for various paths to the nine possible endings.

In other words, what you know about Austen’s novels may work against you.

My sketchy recollections of the novels had clearly worked against me because I kept marrying the wrong suitors, from Colonel Brandon (Sense and Sensibility) to Captain Wentworth (Persuasion), or ending up alone as “an old maid”. I mean, I was left pretty nonplussed when I somehow managed to marry Mr. Bingley as well. And that cad, Mr. Wickesy (a.k.a. Wickham from Pride and Prejudice and Williboughy from Sense and Sensibility). I also ended up being well liked by the dreadful Bingley sisters and thoroughly disliked by my supposedly best friend, Charlotte.

The competitive cow in me was annoyed enough to replay the game to correct all that as well as to achieve the ultimate goal: marry Mr. Darcy.

Although the game itself was easy to master, finding the Darcy route wasn’t that easy. In fact, it was so challenging that I ended up playing the game repeatedly for a couple of hours, trying every possible route.

If you play this game just right, you’ll be involved with all main key plot points of Pride and Prejudice including the awesome confrontation with a certain snobbish Lady and the famous first proposal scene with Darcy and Elizabeth (you).

I oddly felt thrilled whenever the red line in Darcy’s ‘attachment’ bar increased. He likes me, he likes me! And I let out a little cheer when I finally married him. I admit I did feel a little pathetic afterwards but hey, I nabbed that surprisingly elusive bloke.

 I don’t think I’d have enjoyed replaying the game so much if it wasn’t for the game’s Skip function, though. This function allows you to speed through all dialogues and scenes you’d already seen until a new dialogue line or scene appears.

So you can replay the game until you reach your chosen ending.  I read somewhere online that three endings involve Darcy, but I had managed to reach just six out of the nine endings so there are two more Darcy endings I haven’t tried yet. Gah. At least it shows that this game’s replayability value is pretty high.

The game also has an option to save a spot any time throughout the game, up to 10 slots. And believe me, readers, you will definitely need this option.

Because when you realise you don’t like where your path is heading, you can’t return to change your selection of activities for that week. Once you’ve made your choices, your path is determined. So each time your heroine says “Now is probably the best time to save your game” before you could make your selection of activities, do it! You can save a game over a previous save when you run out of the save slots.

The game’s options page is pretty basic as it has functions for you to control the Music and Sound Volume, ‘After choices’ (stop skipping or keep skipping), Display (full screen or windowed mode), and Text Speed.

Also, bundled with the game are Austen’s full novels: Pride and Prejudice, Persuasion and Sense and Sensibility, that you can read within the game.

And of course, it has information guides (mostly to explain each character trait) and character profiles.

While it’d grown on me during the game, I found the general art rather frustrating. This sort doesn’t usually bother me, but since we  see the background art repeatedly throughout a game? And when we see Darcy’s supposedly magnificent home? It can make one wish the game makers had invested in a better artist.

Some dialogue exchanges – especially the ones involving Mr. Collins - were a tad long-winded. I did wonder if this was intentional, though. Occasionally, some parts felt repetitive but I can’t tell if it was due to my impatience or the pacing of the game itself.

It’s quite a short game, too. Perhaps between twenty to forty minutes per game, I’d say? Well, it depends on each path. The ’best’ path lasts roughly fifty minutes while each of ‘bad’ paths varies between twenty to thirty minutes. The shortest – and the worst – path is the Mr. Collins route, which typically lasts twenty minutes. Of course, it also depends on your pacing preference. I’m a speedy gamer, so it was a quick play each time. Well, except for that damn Darcy route.

And I really don’t understand why the game creators set Jane Austen’s novels in “Victorian times” (see left for the ‘TALENT’ screenshot). I don’t know much about period costumes, but I’m pretty sure some background characters are wearing 1880s-era clothes and hats, too.

Anyhow, the competitive cow in me quite enjoyed playing the game repeatedly so it deserves a B from me.

Suitable for all ages and ideal for players who are looking for a fun dating sim. Also for those who like simple RPGs with a bit of a challenge. Some parts of the game might have Austen purists twitching, but Matches and Matrimony: A Pride and Prejudice Tale is honestly a gentle fun and sweet-natured game.

Available in Windows and Mac at all major online retail stores including Big Fish Games ($2.99), Amazon US/UK/etc. ($6.99) and iWin ($6.95).

Related posts:

1. DVD REVIEW: A&E’s “The Romance Collection: Special Edition” — “Pride and Prejudice”
2. Thursday Afternoon Haiku Moment: Pride and Prejudice and Zombies by Seth Grahame-Smith
3. REVIEW: Cat’s Tale: A Fairy Tale Retold by Bettie Sharpe

Though I’ve made the decision not to read any more Jane Austen fanfic – um, I mean homages to JA extending the lives of the characters she created, I couldn’t pass up this book which not really about any of the books JA wrote but rather about a reenactment society dedicated to those books and the world of JA. Nah, not really, in fact it’s about one of the members of that group who goes toe to toe with a hero dedicated to all things manly and Scottish. Kudos to you for managing to combine two of the most beloved tropes in RomanceLand.

Kate Simmons might be a modern day bookstore manager but within her beats the heart of a woman in love with the romance and gentility of the books of Jane Austen. She’s also a dedicated member of the Jane Austen Regency Reenactment Society (JARRS) and has been put in charge of this year’s annual Fauxhall Gardens gala which they plan to hold on August 16th to celebrate the birthday of Georgette Heyer. Everything is spiffy except for finding a location near Spokane to host the event. So far, all the spots are either littered with discarded addict needles or far beyond the modest means of the JARRS. That is until Kate learns about a piece of public land that could be perfect. The only problem is it’s already been staked out by another group.

Julian Wallace might sound like he’s got a Scottish name but actually he’s part Asian/part Caucasian. He does brood nicely and looks damn fine in a kilt which he proudly dons while participating in the lifestyle introduced to him by his stepfather – the Scottish Highland Games. Julian competes in the hammer throw and this year is the year he plans on two things happening. The first is to take back the record once held by his stepfather which was wrested away by a rich knave named Duke Kilroy. The second is to secure a sponsorship from a whiskey distillery which would allow Julian to pay his expenses in this sport and also help support his mother and sisters. And no prissy group of women – regardless of how cute he thinks Kate is – who want to hold a glorified tea party on the same spot on the same weekend are going to get in his way.

So, there are two groups who both need the same land at the same time and two organizers who both have reasons very important to them to secure said land. Let the games begin.

The introduction of the main characters of Kate and Julian show, in a nutshell, exactly who they are and what is important to them at this time. Kate loves the JARRS, though she realizes that not everyone does. She dragged her best friend Jada to a ball and regrets it. Though Kate does laugh at the way Jada spices up the evening even if it causes some of the older ladies to swoon – and not in a good way. Julian is almost fanatically devoted throwing the hammer and being manly as he imagines the great Scottish warriors of olde were. But both are immediately attracted to the other and adult enough to try to work out a compromise over some drinks at a local martini bar only to discover that by “compromise” Julian and Kate each fondly imagine the other will give in.

Only this time, for almost the first time in her life, Kate discovers in herself an overwhelming desire to win. She’s been the good little girl, the easy girlfriend, the one who’s always given up or given in to the demands of others but damn it, not this time. So Julian wants to play rough does he? She’ll show him and everyone else that she’s got what it takes. For his part, Julian hopes that a bit of intimidation will send Kate and the JARRS running. After all, the Scots are better than the English any day. To his surprise, and a little bit to his delight, Kate doesn’t dissolve into tears at the roadblocks he puts in her path. No, Kate gets mad. And then she gets even.

I found that I enjoyed Kate’s various plots to get her revenge and wish that the results of one of them had figured more prominently in the scenes of the actual Games. Highland warriors in kilts plus Drag Queens would have been hysterically funny. Julian’s efforts to beat Kate made me just the slightest bit twitchy. You keep saying that his mother taught him to treat women better than that and Julian himself is uneasy but it seems that his efforts to beat Kate are a touch more mean spirited. Good for Kate that she never buckles. I also like how her friends are willing to pitch in and help her just as Julian’s are there for him. And if the two groups have fun in a hot tub while each trying to stake out the park, well no harm – no foul. The solution that Kate discovers and devises is ingenious and the scenes of how it plays out are some of my favorite in the book. The inclusion of dampening the women’s dresses is brilliant.

What do I think of the flow and resolution of the romance? I like it. You show Kate and Julian beginning to soften towards each other as a progression of them learning more about the other rather than a sudden thunderbolt of lurve. Though they start their relationship as seeming opposites, both discover how suited they are for the other and when they finally do compromise, it feels more even handed and something done for love rather than one or the other giving in.

One thing that I did get tired of is the repetition of Julian’s “Me Great Scottish Warrior. Have pair the size of grapefruits.” chest beating and testosterone oozing. Kate jokes that she almost believes Julian would whip it out and start peeing on the park grounds to stake his claim and I don’t think she’s too far off. I think Julian’s watched “Braveheart” a few too many times.

Still I finished the book with the feeling that Kate has a kilt in her future – and will be happy about that – and that Julian is going to end up cheerfully wearing his pantaloons and cravat to future JARRS events. And that’s why I read romance novels.

~Jayne

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Related posts:

1. REVIEW: The Man Who Could Never Love by Kate Hewitt
2. REVIEW: Road to Love by Linda Ford (5/08)
3. REVIEW: Love Song by SL Carpenter

Sarah: My experience with fanfiction comes from two different directions: as a Jane Austen scholar and as a reader of m/m romance.

I have to say from the start that I don’t willingly read fan fiction. I know that it can be a wonderful thing for writers and readers and fan communities, as Jan and Has so brilliantly attested. I certainly don’t think other people shouldn’t read it. It’s just not for me. RPS creeps me out and I’m uninterested in reading alternate or continuing storylines from fictional worlds and characters that I enjoy, whether TV, book, or film.

For me, it comes down to voice. I read primarily for voice and, in my opinion, it is incredibly difficult to replicate another author’s voice. I mean, yes, I read romance for the happy ending and the depth of characterization. But I read specific authors for their voice. I fall in love with characters because of the voice in which they are written. So I’m uninterested in Further Fan Fiction Adventures of favorite characters, because they will by definition be written in a different voice.

Sunita: As I said in my earlier post, I came to fan fiction through m/m romance. I didn’t know much about either when I started reading m/m, but as I read more and more, it became clear to me that there were certain characterization, setting, and relationship tropes that recurred far more often in the novels than they ever showed up in real life. Retrospectively that seems unsurprising: after all, romance is populated by billionaires and dukes, as well as feisty, beautiful heroines who want to save their families, and I don’t bat an eye. But I think that subconsciously I was expecting m/m to be more realistic. When I discovered its roots in slash, those tropes made much more sense.

While I notice and appreciate voice, especially that of favorite authors, it’s not the primary reason I read genre fiction. I pay more attention to characters and setting. So I’m not opposed to works that port characters to a different world, or new characters in the same setting. I read a lot of series and linked books, for that very reason.

Sarah: The first direction from which I encountered fan fiction was Jane Austen. I am an Austen scholar during my day job. Jane Austen’s books, of course, are out of copyright, so Austen fan fiction does not run into the issues that Fifty Shades of Grey does with appropriating someone else’s copyrighted characters. There is a LOT of Jane Austen-inspired fiction out there. (Twilight, of course, is famously one of them, ironically enough.) Since 1993, there have been about 100 books inspired by or continuing Pride and Prejudice alone, let alone Austen’s five and a half other books (Lady Susan being the half) and two unfinished novels. And of course, Austen herself has become a character in a lot of these modern books.

I’ll admit, I read and enjoyed Helen Fielding’s Bridget Jones’ Diary, a modern-day retelling of Pride and Prejudice and I enjoyed Ann Herendeen’s slashy Pride/Prejudice for the intellectual exercise of the thing. And I adore the films (Pride and Prejudice: A Latter Day Comedy and Bride and Prejudice are my favorites). But in general, I find it VERY difficult to read any of the books that purport to continue Elizabeth and Darcy’s story or that tell the stories of other characters (Mary Bennet, Georgiana Darcy, etc.) because no matter how hard an author tries, she cannot replicate Austen’s voice and because she’s necessarily influenced by twenty-first century priorities, rather than those of the early nineteenth century. And, honestly, I enjoy leaving characters with their HEAs; I’m not interested in their Further Adventures. I like narrative closure and I prefer to leave it closed. YMMV.

Sunita: I have no interest whatsoever in Austen fanfics or retellings as novels. For one thing, they’re written in a modern voice, by modern writers. Austen isn’t historical fiction or historical romance; she was writing about her contemporary world. By definition, any work that continues those characters’ stories is going to be doing so through a modern lens. That’s a distortion I’m not interested in.

Sarah: This is precisely why I love Bridget Jones, both book and film, and P+P: A Latter Day Comedy and Clueless. (And the fabulous Easy A, a retelling of The Scarlet Letter)! They are modern, taking the plot and themes and having them comment on modern characters and settings.

Sunita: Out of that group, I really only like Clueless, but I agree with you that the modern retellings are more enjoyable. I tend to treat movies as a different kind of aesthetic and cultural experience. They’re showing me something (literally, since it’s a visual medium) that is not there in Austen but could be. Of course, they’re modern too (even the period, “authentic” ones), but somehow it doesn’t bother me as much. I guess I expect movies by definition to be different.

Sarah: And this is why I can enjoy the Keira Knightley/Matthew McFadyen P+P (with bonus Wuthering Heights ending), or the completely fictional “biography” of Austen, Becoming Jane: because I treat them solely as a movie with its own narrative and visual conventions.

Getting back to fan fiction: Almost all Austen fan- or repurposed- or real-person fiction makes a point of mentioning the Austen connection if it’s not obvious, precisely because of the cultural cachet it garners. This is precisely the opposite of most m/m romance that’s repurposed slash or fan fiction, which tries to hide its origins. And it’s that intellectual dishonesty and its repercussions for me as a reader that is the reason I try my hardest to avoid P2P books.

I have reviewed (and reviewed very well) a lot of m/m romance that I discovered later is fan fiction with the serial numbers filed off: Zero at the Bone (Brokeback Mountain), Shades of Gray (also Brokeback Mountain), and All’s Fair in Love and Advertising (some scifi show I know nothing about), at the very least (there was also intense speculation about I Just Play One on TV -– probably RPS). I’m sure people with more knowledge could find more among the books I review (part of my problem with fanfic is that I don’t watch TV and I don’t read fanfic, so I rarely know what to look for, or even THAT I should be looking).

As an aside: Alternate Universe (AU) fanfic seems to be the easiest to repurpose (like 50 Shades): the author has already created a different world, so all she needs to do is change the characters just slightly enough (names and looks), and it can look like original fic and people defend you by saying things like, “Twilight was about vampires, 50 Shades isn’t paranormal,” so obviously, they’re not the same at all.

Sunita: I see two ways in which fan fiction has influenced m/m. The first is this reworking — sometimes extensive, sometimes … not — of stories that had been previously published and disseminated on line for free. And m/m publishers have, to different degrees, been complicit in this process. Most of the well-known m/m publishers have published books that are lightly or heavily transformed fan fiction. If you look at a list of favorite m/m romances at GoodReads, Jessewave’s site, or our own yearly Best Of lists, you’ll see books that started as fan fiction. The main difference I see between the presses is that some of the older ones wanted fan fiction that was substantially reworked. Some of the newer ones seem to accept more work that comes close to the file-off-the-serial-numbers approach.

Unlike the current brouhaha around 50 Shades of Grey, many fans who were aware that published m/m novels had been reworked from fan fiction did not reveal the origins. I can understand why readers were quite annoyed to discover that the books they thought were original were not. Some are like you and don’t want to read repurposed fan fiction at all, no matter how different the new product is. Other readers don’t care. I have mixed feelings. But I think that disclosing provenance is important. Attribution to a previous source matters to me. At the same time, I’ve read and enjoyed books that turned out to have begun as fan fiction, and I’m glad I read them.

Sarah: I would not willingly have read these books, and certainly would not have reviewed them, if I’d known ahead of time that they were fan fiction. I personally feel that it’s intellectual theft and it’s lazy. Don’t get me wrong: when it’s written as fanfic, to be distributed for free, I think it’s a wonderful thing. But if an author pulls to publish, I think she’s disrespecting her readers, specifically the readers who don’t know that it’s formerly fan fiction.

Jami Gold said it the best for me in her post on “What Makes a Character Unique“:

Characters—good characters—go much deeper than their job, their human/non-human status, their name, number of siblings, where they live, etc. Real characters are born out of their history, family background, worldview, religious beliefs, moral code, self-image, self-delusions, strengths, flaws, goals, etc. They aren’t puppets fulfilling our goals for a plot.

Most fanfic stories—no matter how out-of-character the characters might act—still intend for their characters to evoke those of the original author. While superficial details might be different (especially if it’s an “alternate universe” fanfic story), most of those things I listed above would be similar to the original. In other words, not a unique character.

Someone wrote out an extensive list as a comment in another of Gold’s posts of the connections between Twilight and 50SoG. Ana is clumsy because Bella is clumsy, for example, not because E.L. James decided Ana is clumsy for reasons of her own. Or, in the case of Zero at the Bone, I commented in my original review (before I knew the book was BbM fanfic):

“D’s “dialect” is…slightly annoying. [...] It’s part of him. It’s perfectly sustained throughout the book. But it’s never explained by where he came from (either geography or class). And it slowed down my reading sometimes enough to be mildly irritating.

I didn’t know at the time, but D’s dialect comes from the fact that he’s actually Ennis Delmar from Brokeback Mountain and that’s how Ennis speaks. When ZatB was fan fiction, that doesn’t need to be explained. But in original fiction, the way a character speaks has to come from somewhere and the P2P author was, in this case, too close to her source to know to explain that when she was publishing it as original fiction.

The issue for me comes down to this: I believe that P2P disrespects its non-fanfic readers. This is the distinction for me between Austen fanfic and P2P fanfic that purports to be original. The fact that it’s Austen fanfic is the point and one is expected to read it, whether it’s canon-set or AU, with the knowledge that it’s Austen-based. It’s meant to be read as Austen-inspired and that fact is meant to heighten the reader’s pleasure in reading it. This is precisely the point of fanfic, no matter the provenance (out of copyright or not).

P2P fanfic that purports to be original is disavowing that layer of pleasure, claiming, in fact, that it doesn’t exist, but then still fails to explain vital character traits or plot points for the unsuspecting reader, because they didn’t need to be explained when the story was fanfic.

It’s that intellectual dishonesty towards the non-fanfic reader that makes me SO mad when I discover that a book I’ve enjoyed is P2P fanfic. I feel like the author’s pulling one over on me and it retroactively destroys all the pleasure I felt in the book when I read it.

Sunita: For me, the second way that fan fiction affects m/m as a genre is less ethically problematic but perhaps just as important in the growth and maturation of the genre. I’m talking about the adoption and immense popularity of certain types of stories, such as hurt/comfort, Gay4U, Out4U. Fan fiction writing experience is very helpful in developing certain aspects of a writer’s craft. Writers are often very good at character interaction. Good m/m romances have interesting characters, and the romantic relationships are carefully and compellingly written. But not all authors are as good at other components of a story that are necessary when moving into the world of original fiction.

Violetta Vane has an excellent post on the issues authors confront in moving between fan fiction and original fiction. She notes a number of weaknesses fan fiction writers have to overcome:

Setting detail. Most settings are already given to us by canon. They’re taken for granted. Describing setting takes time away from the stuff everyone wants to read: the characters interacting and having a rich inner life.

Character description. We know how the characters look already in canon. There’s no need to describe them all over again.

Original characters. There’s a frequent prejudice against original characters, especially female ones.

Plot. The major plot points are already given to us in canon.

Conflict and suspense. It’s very hard to introduce this in fanfic, because conflict and suspense rely on CHANGE, and fanfic writers 1) often don’t want to truly change the characters they love 2) even if they do, their audience may not accept the change.

Some authors are very good at these aspects, but many otherwise good writers struggle with some of them (and have remarked on it). And if publishers are not doing a lot of developmental and content editing, then those weaknesses aren’t going to be addressed in the book production process.

So for me, the relationship of fan fiction to the m/m genre is a mixed bag. It has given us many talented authors and wonderful books. But as long as the genre isn’t open and up-front about that relationship, the disadvantages that closeness brings are not likely to be addressed.

Related posts:

1. How I Came to Appreciate Fan Fiction
2. Fan Fiction Author Roundtable: Cyndy Aleo, Tamara Allen, Jane Davitt, & Jami Gold
3. GUEST REVIEW: The Lost Memoirs of Jane Austen by Syrie James

We at Dear Author get sent a lot of requests to review books and many of us have lamented at the frequency of Jane Austen themed ones. Yet, despite that, another reviewer and I were interested in the description of your book “Definitely Not Mr. Darcy.” A reality dating show with a 1812 theme and $100,000 at stake for the lucky contestant who “nabs” the handsome Regency guy? Could be fun.

Chloe Parker is a 39, divorced single mother with a failing business who desperately needs to win the grand prize of the contest which she’s been selected to be a part of. A long time Jane Austen fan, she can quote the books, knows the details of life in Austen England and thinks having the chance to actually live as a Jane Austen heroine for the duration of the show is a dream come true. But the reality of life without hot showers, deodorant, modern bras and hampered by chaperones turns out to be more than she bargained for.

And then there’s her main rival among the contestants who won’t stop at breaking the rules but stoops to sabotaging Chloe at every turn. If that weren’t enough, Chloe finds that the accomplishments of a Regency Miss are harder and less interesting than they appear on film. Sebastian Wrightman is a hunk in his skintight breeches though and with her business needing a serious cash infusion, Chloe pursues him like a hound does a hare. If only she could stop thinking of his intelligent, younger, and penniless, brother Henry.

The PW blurb for the book promises sidesplitting faux pas as Chloe attempts to play a young woman on the hunt for a man in 1812 England. Well, amusing at times? Yes. Bust a gut laughing? No, not me. It’s also kind of sad in a way to watch as Chloe’s infatuation with the era is slowly stripped away though after watching some of the historical “reality” shows on PBS and the BBC, I kind of knew it was coming. Modern comforts are hard to let go of, as Chloe discovers. But along the way, she does discover something much more interesting – herself. She also unearths some business savvy and a well of inspiration that will allow her to save her business herself which I quite liked.

Now as for the romance…even if I hadn’t been a bad girl and skipped to the end to confirm my guess on who Chloe would actually fall for, as the story progressed it would have been pretty obvious. I was surprised that she didn’t bother to Google Sebastian Wrightman before leaving Chicago but then the book would have been over before it began. I like the man she falls for and who falls for her but since the reader must be kept in the dark about a lot of things, we never see his POV, or in fact anyone else’s, throughout the book. But, once Chloe knows what is going on, I have to agree wholeheartedly with her reaction. Clotted cream to the face wouldn’t be enough for me, though the way she tells him off in public is satisfying. Still, to be manipulated that way no matter what the reason would leave a bad enough taste in my mouth that any forgiveness would be a damn long time in coming. I was reminded of Patient Griselda from The Clerk’s Tale – a story I’ve always despised.

As a humorous tale about what life in Regency England was really like, “Definitely Not Mr. Darcy” has its moments and entertained me. As a romance, the hero leaves a lot to be desired no matter how much money he was or how much he enjoys Jane Austen books. I finished the book thinking Chloe deserves more which is not a good thing for this genre. C

~Jayne

Goodreads | Amazon | BN | nook | Sony | Kobo

Related posts:

1. REVIEW: Darcy’s Story by Janet Aylmer
2. REVIEW: Mr. Darcy Broke My Heart by Beth Pattillo
3. REVIEW: Me and Mr. Darcy by Alexandra Potter

This is the latest entry into the “Emma” canon, released in 2009 by the BBC. I guess it would be more accurate to call it a miniseries rather than a movie as it’s told in four roughly one hour parts. And while I didn’t think it would take over the place of my favorite adaptation, I was pleasantly surprised to discover how much I enjoyed it.

Young, rich and more than slightly snobbish, Miss Emma Woodhouse (Ramola Garai) is the social center of the village of Highbury and convinced that she is a brilliant matchmaker. Though determined never to marry, she happily pairs everyone else off, much to the frustration of Mr. Knightley (Jonny Lee Miller) who watches her machinations and offers sage advice, which Emma rarely takes. After the marriage of her long time governess and companion (Jodhi May), Emma takes young Harriet Smith (Louise Dylan) under her wing and begins to scheme. She persuades Harriet to decline the offer of marriage from a local farmer and sets Harriet’s sights higher – first on the stuffy vicar Mr. Elton (Blake Ritson) – who secretly admires Emma instead. Then, when that falls through, on Frank Churchill (Rupert Evans), recently returned to the neighborhood after a childhood away with his aunt.

Another recent addition to the scene is Jane Fairfax (Laura Pyper), niece of the silly Miss Bates (Tamsin Greig) who has extolled Jane’s virtues to Emma until Emma is heartily sick of them. Emma carelessly flirts with Frank who flirts right back. Meanwhile, the little community is ruffled by the further addition of Mr. Elton’s new, and snobby, wife (Christina Cole) who seeks to take over as the social leader. Mr. Knightley tries to warn Emma that Frank and Jane seem to have a secret attachment but Emma laughs at his warnings – that is until the two reveal their hidden engagement. It’s only now that Emma discovers that Harriet aspires not to Frank Churchill but to Mr. Knightley himself. And it’s this revelation which gets Emma to finally examine her own feelings for the man. Is there a chance for her to recover what she’s afraid she’s lost or will her actions cost her the man she now knows she loves?

There is much to love about this “Emma.” The costumes and music are wonderful and both are the subjects of special features on the discs. Instead of pale pastels, the hues are rich and vibrant for the leading characters and subdued and faded for Miss Bates as would befit clothes washed and faded out over the years. The locations are also a treat with attention paid to the estate of the wealthy Woodhouses as well as the cramped, low ceilinged rooms inhabited by the Bates ladies.

Garai, as Emma, has to carry much of the story and manages well, except for her tendency to odd facial grimaces. She’s suitably self centered and unthinking but can still convey Emma’s basic goodness and ultimate realization of what’s at stake for her heart. I didn’t think I’d care for Miller as Mr. Knightley but he won me over – for the most part. I do think that these two play their early relationship more as equals in age rather than as the 16 year difference between them should dictate.

The longer 4 hour length allows for much more exploration of the secondary characters and I understood far more about the backgrounds of Frank and Jane and why that piano should cause so much fuss. There’s more time allowed for Frank to demonstrate why Mr. Knightley should take Frank into suspicion and why he is ultimately the inferior man to Knightley. Tamsin Greig plays a wonderful Miss Bates – annoying yet obviously proud of her niece Jane then finally hurt by Emma’s thoughtless comment at the picnic. Sir Michael Gambon who plays Mr. Woodhouse is also given a great deal of screen time and I love the father/daughter relationship he has going with Garai. Look for an interview with him on the second disc.

Louise Dylan does a good job as the young and artless Harriet Smith who is more untutored rather than silly. However I find I don’t care for Christina Coles as Mrs. Elton as she seems to try too hard in the snobbery department. Evans is a good social climbing Mr. Elton and is obviously made smaller by his poor choice in a wife. Sadly I find Jodhi May thoroughly forgettable as Mrs. Weston while Robert Bathhurst is wasted as her husband since he has so little to do. A welcome change here is the larger roles for Dan Fredenburgh as John Knightley.

The longer length of the miniseries doesn’t drag as I was afraid it would. Instead it allows ample opportunity to see just how tightly knit the community would have been and how bound up the characters are in business not their own. We can see how it would be almost impossible not to meddle in the lives of those around you for sheer lack of anything else to do. At the same time, the easy ‘come and go’ relationship between Knightley, the Westons and the Woodhouses depicts long time neighbors and friends.

This is supposed to be a modernization of the novel and it’s here that I have the most problems. The courtesies that should be inbred in Emma and others are sometimes sloppily done, the deportment at the Box Hill picnic leaves much to be desired and Emma’s hysterical refusal of Mr. Knightley’s proposal is far too waterworks-y. I finished the viewing with the impression of people merely playing at the manners which would have been an unthinking part of these people.

I am by no means a Jane Austen expert and as such will sit back and await the opinions of those who have spent far more time dissecting the novel and the various filmed adaptations. I find much to recommend in this version along with a little that left me dissatisfied. But overall I am pleased with the addition. B

~Jayne

Related posts:

1. Friday Film Review: Bend it Like Beckham
2. Friday Film Review: Love Actually
3. Film Review Friday: Firelight

That said, Amazon Montlake’s cover and then the title were in auspicious starts.  The cover, particularly the font, recalls an 80s contemporary and the title doesn’t have a historical feel, but a chick lit feel.  But setting that aside is the astonishing bad quality of the teaser chapters.

Update:  It has been pointed out that the teaser chapters are unedited. I don’t know if that changes how I feel about this, but I felt like I should point it out.

This is Amazon’s own product and frankly, mobipocket is really just a container of html files.  The cleaner the html file, the better the end product.  (Remember this point for the next part of this post). One would think that Amazon and all of its tech folks would put out a proper ebook, right? Particularly for a book that is intended to launch its line in a crowded market?

Let’s set aside some of the editing problems I think the chapters had and just focus on the formatting.

• Random indents

• Inconsistent formatting

• Underlining where there should have been italicization

And then this completely bizarre passage which I believe is an editorial suggestion:

Then there is the actual content.  The first couple pages contains this line.

Because aside from not knowing if the setting sun would be bright enough to cover his scramble for that depression, he had no idea if the linen would burn or how fast it would if it did

Shouldn’t that be aside from not knowing if the setting sun would be dark enough to cover his scramble?

As reader S. McNulty points out there are several continuity problems:

So what’s his name? Is it James Owen or James Owens? It changed by paragraph. Also, with the secondary male, Pomfrey. He was a colonel. Then he was a captain. Then a colonel again. And which is it? Colonel Lord Pomfrey or Lord Colonel Pomfrey? I know there’s a fun story here but the editing problems and the continuity problems kept taking me out of it. I hope the book is still in draft and that these issues can be addressed before the November 1, 2011 release date. I would really like to read the finished product.

None of this is Brockway’s fault, of course, but it does say something about Montlake and Amazon’s commitment to quality publishing. This piece is not ready for public release yet.

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Remember what I said about clean html?  It’s something that needs to be drummed into self publishers and those who deem themselves to be publishers.  BookEnds is publishing Christie Craig’s Dorchester books.  As Dhympna reports, the production quality is really poor.

She has more screenshots but I figured this post was getting image heavy.  Any one who is in the publishing business whether it is Random House (who is notorious for these kinds of errors) or Amazon or an agency publishing books for their clients.  Don’t forget the Lora Leigh/Berkley debacle.   Some of these problems occur during the OCR process (turning the screen image into text) and some of them occur due to html problems.  My suggestion for authors digitizing their backlist? Go and pirate your own book. You will likely find a well proofed copy of your own book that will have pristine html code.

The question is, of course, does any of this really matter? Are we making mountains out of molehills?  Dean Wesley Smith, self publishing advice giver who proclaims that one should never ever ever give percentages of your work away, doesn’t want to hear about typoes from readers. He is going to write 100 stories in one year and publish them (although what does publish mean here?)

#1… Please, I know I will make typos and such.  I don’t care and please don’t tell me. Thanks. If you have trouble reading something with a few typos, please don’t read these stories. There is no such thing as a perfect story and I ain’t trying to write one. Or 100 for that matter.

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Kobo is taking over the Borders ebookstore.  If you have bought even one book from Borders, go to this link and start the transfer of your books. It’s painless but important.  You will need your Borders username and password.

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Amazon has disallowed tagging for digital books. Some cry conspiracy by Amazon and the Big 6 because Amazon has an interest in pushing down the self publishers. OHREALLY?  Another author posits that this was taken away because Amazon was aware of how blatantly authors were using tagging to game the system.

I have no more data than anyone else so I won’t go so far as to claim no doubt but it’s my educated guess that tags stopped being a reflection of what readers thought and just a cheap way for authors to game the system. So Amazon killed them, at least in their original form.

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This link has images of Jane Austen’s original manuscripts.  She edited herself.  A lot.

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Finally, do you sometimes get the impression that cover artists are just, well, messing with us?  Is that a penis poking out of your pants or are you just the product of a photoshop job gone bad?

Related posts:

1. Friday Midday Links: Borders Q3 Profits Dismal
2. Thursday Midday Links: Can a “no issues” book truly be no issues?
3. Friday Midday Links: To Heaven and Back Again, the Ebook Saga

Ever since I fell in love with “Monsoon Wedding” I’ve been looking for more movies from the Indian subcontinent. Kandukondain Kandukondain (I Have Found It) is highly ranked at Netflix so I added it to my queue. And waited. And waited. Until it was marked with the dreaded “Unavailable.” But I left it in my queue and finally it was available but with the also dreaded “very long wait.” Then I saw it was on sale at a place where I like to buy my DVDs so I took a chance and ordered it. My long wait paid off in spades.

“Rich, young, gorgeous and pampered, sisters Sowyma (Tabu) and Meenakshi (Aishwarya Rai) want for nothing except the true love their hearts crave. While Sowmya grudgingly places family responsibilities head of romance, Meenakshi yearns for a white knight who will come to her “just like a storm.” Three different coincidences bring the girls three very different suitors and a tempest of romantic complications. Manohar (Ajith), an aspiring filmmaker, falls for Sowmya but will wed her only after directing his first film. Commando Major Bala (Mammooty) woos Meenakshi despite physical and emotional war wounds and competition from Srikanth (Abbas), a charismatic poetry-quoting businessman. But with their patriarch’s health ebbing, the romantic storm Meenakshi and Sowmya wished for may soon be eclipsed by the harsh realities of modern South Asian life.”

Kandukondain Kandukondain is actually not a Bollywood film since it’s in the Tamil language. I believe it’s called Kollywood but whatever the official designation it’s great. Vibrant is a word I could use to describe all the movies I’ve watched in these genres. The colors dance in front of my eyes, dazzling me. The better movies have songs which make my feet tap as I sway to the rhythms. Needless to say I was bebopping all the way through this one. For those who haven’t seen a B/Kollywood movie, expect a full fledged song and dance number at various times throughout the film. They seem to add about half an hour to any movie. However, if you don’t care for them, just fast forward though them.

No doubt the Austenistas are getting impatient for me to comment on how well the film resembles the book. Since it’s been years since I read the book, I honestly can’t answer that. How good an adaptation of Emma Thompson’s screenplay is it? Very good, is my answer – with some twists that make it uniquely Indian. There are a few changes to the storyline as the family isn’t tossed out of their palatial home until the grandfather dies at about the 1 hour mark. It’s then that they move to Chennai (Madras) rather than endure the bitchy wife who Sowmya and Meenakshi’s uncle married. Sowmya and later Meenakshi then go out and get jobs to help support the family as does their mother.

Manohar comes from a wealthy family but he doesn’t want to use his engineering degree or work for his father’s company. Instead it’s being an assistant director in the film industry which has alienated him from his family. But perhaps the oddest difference is the way the film opens, with some background scenes of Major Bala’s former military life. At first, I wondered WTF? Is this some kind of preview for another film? But it’s more insight into what made his character begin drinking and become so bitter and moody before meeting the young woman who captures his heart. Srikanth hasn’t ruined any young women. Rather it’s his shady private bank which defaults on its investors that brings him to ruin and causes him to have to marry another woman.

But the rest of the story follows the outline Thompson wrote. Sowmya and Manohar are already in love but separated by circumstances. There’s even “the other woman” who temporarily steps between them. Meenakshi loves her poetry and initially spurns the man who is more practical – bringing pillows upon which to rest her injured ankle – for the one who can quote poetry to her. Their younger sister has a passion for science and their mother is a loving airhead. Meenakshi finds out Srikanth’s betrayal of their love and almost dies as a result of her heartbreak yet this event makes her finally see the man who does truly love her.

And when Meenakshi confesses her love to Bala, I teared up. Have you ever finally gotten something you’ve wanted for so long? Something you never thought you’d get, that you had given up hope to ever get? And when you get it, you’re almost afraid to touch it? That is this scene and Mammooty plays it beautifully. I will confess that the HEA scene between Sowmya and Manohar doesn’t work as well with a martyrish Sowmya initially turning him away before changing her mind to “yes” almost in the blink of an eye. It’s the one time the movie falters for me though, so I can live with it.

Right now, short of buying it, I think the only way to see this film is on youtube. Just type in KandukondEin (note it’s been uploaded spelled with a final E not A) and the first part should come up. It is long (2.5 hours) and the subtitles flash by so be prepared to read quickly. But if you open yourself to trying something different – and yet the same – you just might fall for it as I have. B+

~Jayne

Related posts:

1. Friday Film Review: Princes et Princesses
2. Friday Film Review: Monsoon Wedding
3. Friday Film Review: Run Fatboy Run

My guess is that under the Agency model, publishers cannot allow certain features to exist on one retailer but not on another thus if they turned off the lending feature on the Kindle, then the nook lending feature disappears as well.

But removing rights that existed at the time of purchase is a pretty sucky move.

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Maili sent me this fabulous piece about how one Chinese woman related to the Jane Austen stories. The author of the essay finds reflections of herself in the story as well as reflections of Chinese culture:

Jane Austen did not pretend that the ordinary was anything but, but she created stories and even a world that a person like me separated from her by two centuries can relate to:

● I see myself in the woman who has perhaps lost her bloom.
● I see myself in the book lover who is sometimes carried away by the romance of the fiction.
● I see myself in the daughter who is left with a widowed father.

and

I just don’t see myself in her novels though; I see the Chinese life in them:

 · Every Chinese knows a well-meaning mother like Mrs. Bennett who cannot rest until all her daughters are married.
 · What Chinese family won’t suffer an upheaval should a member do a Lydia? A Chinese father won’t be as civil as Mr. Bennett though to welcome the newlyweds back so soon after such a scandal that has brought the family shame.

India is the third largest English book market and some people predict that it will become the major English book market in 10 years.

Already, India is the third-largest English book market, according to figures from the National Book Trust of India, and it is expanding every year. K Vaitheeswaran, the chief operating officer of IndiaPlaza.com, a leading online book vendor, said: “Some of it is a function of the fact that books are now available for Rs99 (Dh8), which is a suddenly affordable price point. A whole lot of people are buying books at that price”.

One would think that the increase in India readers would result in diversity of content from publishers as surely the Indian readers would want to see their values and cultural experiences reflected in these stories, even if some values and experiences are universal (see infra Chinese Jane Austen story).

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I thought this was a very funny article about men trying to learn more about their women based upon what their women read.   A recently engaged writer hopes to be the best husband possible and decides to read the book on his fiance’s nightstand in order to gain some insight.   The book was Happy Ever After by Nora Roberts.   The writer enlists his groomsmen to read with him so that they can cull out what makes the perfect man.

"Let's go to page 250," The Photographer said. He quoted Brown: "I can't deal with someone who can't talk to me, who can't be intimate with me except physically." The Photographer closed the book. "That may have been the closest to real life for me. I do find that my girlfriend wants to discuss everything and talk it out, and I'm more inclined to keep things in, and that's a constant friction."

…

"Yeah, I'm a big proponent of that. I think these really deep conversations bring people closer together. I think girls especially are big advocates of that," The Executive said.

It’s a cute and funny article although the ending might not please Nora Roberts’ fans (although I thought Happy Ever After was the weakest of the four bridal books.)

Related posts:

1. Thursday Midday Links: Amazon Bows to Pressure & Bluefire Brings Digital Lending to iThings
2. Wednesday Midday Links: BN may go private
3. Wednesday Midday Links: February Book Specials

• Eliza's Daughter, by Joan Aiken (Sense and Sensibility continuation)
• The Darcy's & the Bingley's, by Marsha Altman (Pride & Prejudice continuation)
• Mr. Darcy Takes a Wife, by Linda Berdoll (Pride & Prejudice continuation)
• What Would Jane Austen Do?, by Laurie Brown (contemporary/time-travel romance)
• The Pemberley Chronicles, by Rebecca Collins (Pride & Prejudice companion)
• The Other Mr. Darcy, by Monica Fairview (Pride & Prejudice continuation)
• Mr. Darcy's Diary, by Amanda Grange (Pride & Prejudice continuation)
• Mr. & Mrs. Fitzwilliam Darcy: Two Shall Become One, by Sharon Lathan (Pride & Prejudice continuation)
• Lydia Bennet's Story, by Jane Odiwe (Pride & Prejudice continuation)

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In keeping with the Jane Austen theme, The Republic of Pemberly is hosting a short story contest in conjunction with Ballantine Books. The short story contest begins January 1, 2011. The grand prize is publication of your entry in the Ballantine anthology “Jane Austen Made Me Do It.” Publication of this anthology is tentatively set in the Fall of 2011.

Contest Highlights

• Eligibility: Previously unpublished U.S. residents over the age of 18
• Entries must be approximately 5,000 words in length
• Manuscript submission January 1 – February 13, 2011
• Voting for the Top Ten finalists February 14 – 28, 2011
• Top Ten finalists announced on March 1, 2011
• One Grand Prize winner receives $500.00 and a contract for publication in the anthology Jane Austen Made Me Do It
• Grand Prize winner announced Fall 2011 in conjunction with the official release by Ballantine Books (Random House, Inc.) of Jane Austen Made Me Do It

Jane Austen Made Me Do It contains more than twenty best-selling and popular authors who have contributed short stories inspired by Jane Austen, her novels and her philosophies of life and love. From historical continuations of her plots and characters to contemporary spinoffs and comedies, the stories encapsulate what we love about our favorite author: romance, social satire and witty humor. Contributing to the line-up are best-selling authors Karen Joy Fowler (The Jane Austen Book Club), Adriana Trigiani (Brava, Valentine), Lauren Willig (The Pink Carnation series), Laurie Viera Rigler (The Jane Austen Addict series), Syrie James (The Lost Memoirs of Jane Austen), Stephanie Barron (Being A Jane Austen Mystery series), and the husband and wife writing team of Frank Delaney (Venetia Kelly's Traveling Show) and Diane Meier (The Season of Second Chances). Many Austenesque authors and others from related genres have also contributed stories to the project. One spot in the anthology remains open for the lucky Grand Prize winner.

The anthology's editor, Laurel Ann Nattress of Austenprose.com, is very excited at the prospect of discovering the next star in the burgeoning sub-genre of Jane Austen sequels and inspired books. "Jane Austen has been inspiring writers for close to two hundred years. It seems quite fitting that she should be the witty muse of our anthology and short story contest. Encouraging writing and discovering new talent is in spirit with her true legacy. I am "all anticipation' of what will develop, and am honored to be part of the selection team."

Visit the official Jane Austen Made Me Do It Short Story Contest web page for official contest rules and eligibility requirements. Best of luck to all entrants.

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Samhain is giving away freebies, although not related to Jane Austen but rather to New Year’s Eve. These four New Year’s themed stories are freebies on Kindle and Nook and will run a full month from mid-December to mid-January.

The first date is the day the book price flips to $0.00 and the second date is the final day and the original price will go into effect again.

• 12/15/2010 to 1/15/2011: Going All In by Jess Dee
• 12/15/2010 to 1/15/2011: Make Mine Midnight by Annmarie McKenna
• 12/15/2010 to 1/15/2011: The Bite of Silence by Mary Hughes
• 12/15/2010 to 1/15/2011: With this Ring by T.A. Chase

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Remember the pedophile book?   Amazon is continuing to censor books that its reading public decides is offensive.   This time around erotic romances featuring incest is being pulled from the self publishing ranks.   As Ars notes, part of the settlement over the George Orwell debacle was that Amazon would not remove purchased content from a consumer’s account without a court order.   Yet, some readers have indicated that these now banned books have been deleted from their accounts.   No confirming details have been given.   Amazon’s censorship is concerning yet there isn’t enough of an outcry because the books being banned by Amazon are on the margins.   I guess so long as Amazon just removes the fringe books, then it’s all okay?

Note: Amazon is censoring.   Censorship, however, is not the same as a violation of the first amendment.

Related posts:

1. World Book Day Poll Places Jane Austen at the Top
2. GUEST REVIEW: The Lost Memoirs of Jane Austen by Syrie James
3. REVIEW: Sense and Sensibility by Jane Austen

When I heard you were going to write a Regency paranormal, my initial thoughts were, “Why?” No, actually they were more along the lines of “You’ve got to be shitting me. Jane Austen as a vampire?!” But when the publicist sent me a copy, I couldn’t resist at least trying it because, after all, it’s a Janet Mullany book.

When Jane Austen and her sister Cassandra attend the Basingstoke Assembly Rooms, Jane never expects that one of the visiting Damned will dance with her, then flirt with her then, on a moment’s impulse, convert her. But changed to one of the Damned she is. Her only hope to undo what has been done is to take the waters at Bath so she, her parents and her sister journey there to the home of her aunt and uncle.

While at the Pump Room, Jane meets another vampire. To his horror, Luke Venning learns that Jane’s creator has abandoned her with no instructions. After allowing her to feed on his blood, he urges her to rethink her plans as attempting the change can be deadly but as a clergyman’s daughter Jane can’t imagine being doomed to hell should she be killed. As well, her ties to her human family are still strong.

All goes by the wayside, however, when the unthinkable occurs. After 700 plus years, England is invaded. The French begin to take the port towns then move inland, arriving at Bath and setting up a Republic. Jane realizes that as a vampire she will be able to answer the call to defend her country and thus begins her association with the Damned. As Jane learns more about her condition, is around those who accept her new status and begins to find love, her determination to try to revert is shaken. While the battle for Britain rages, what will Jane decide about the fate of her own soul?

In for a penny, in for a pound – while writing a paranormal in which a beloved English writer becomes a vampire, why not alter history a bit and allow the damned Frenchies to invade “This blessed plot, this earth, this realm, this England?” I will admit to being almost as shocked when the French troops arrived as were the citizens of Bath. England invaded? Unthinkable. But you do a marvelous job of portraying the unthinkable and seem to have relished the doing.

I’m no Austen expert so I will have to defer to those who are about how well you incorporate book quotes plus the known events and people of her life into the book. However, as this is also told as an alternate history story, exceptions have obviously been made.

The book begins with the style of sly humor I’ve come to expect from your writing. But later this ebbs away due to the serious nature of events portrayed. I can’t help but mourn this loss as this is something I look forward to while reading your books. Yet on the other hand, it would be hard to make some of the end scenes of the book funny and maintain the intense tone and tension.

I enjoyed the mix of proper young gentlewoman meets new existence as a vampire. It makes sense that in this world in which etiquette and social position are paramount, Jane would have to learn a whole new set of social rules. One must be proper at all times and if one is a vampire, one must be a properly behaved vampire. I also like how you make Jane be torn between the delights of her new existence and her dismay at losing her beloved family as well as her clergyman’s daughter’s despair at now being one of the Damned.

The outcome of the invasion ends the way I thought it would. Though the trip there meanders a touch and includes a whiff of the melodramatic. Jane see-saws back and forth about her options and in the end, though I can understand her final choice, it does underscore my main problem with the book. Why make Jane Austen become a vampire? Why not just have the main character be a young English gentlewoman?

And why have another important historical figure join her as one of the Damned? Given the reason he was changed, it doesn’t even make sense for this person to be in Bath and join the other Damned in their fight against the French. And as for Jane, though it’s amusing to imagine her with fangs, in the end I can’t help but feel it’s merely jumping on the Jane bandwagon and cashing in on the current popularity of all things Jane Austen-ish.

Ultimately, I find the book hard to grade. It’s well written, will amuse and entertain many and is certainly different from the usual follow up books written from the POV of the housekeeper at Pemberley. I read most of it in one day and wanted to know how the story would unfold. It kept my attention and I’m not sorry I read it. But I still have that initial question in my mind. “Why?”

~Jayne

Book Link | Kindle | Amazon | nook | BN | Borders
| Sony| KOBO

Related posts:

1. REVIEW: The Rules of Gentility by Janet Mullany
2. REVIEW: Improper Relations by Janet Mullany
3. REVIEW: A Most Lamentable Comedy by Janet Mullany

I’d call this book a loose sequel to last year’s “Jane Austen Ruined My Life.” It’s not necessary to have read that one to jump right into “Mr. Darcy Broke My Heart.” I also love that while you take advantage of the current “Austen craze,” this book isn’t one of the many books out there that seek to take Austen’s secondary characters and write HEA novels for them.

Claire Prescott is a sensible woman who believes in facts and figures, not fairy tales. But when she agrees to present a paper to a summer symposium at Oxford on her ailing sister’s behalf, Claire finds herself thrown into an adventure with a gaggle of Jane Austen-loving women all on the lookout for their Mr. Darcy. Claire isn’t looking for Mr. Anyone. She’s been dating Neil — a nice if a bit negligent — sports fanatic. But when a tall, dark and dashing stranger crosses her path, will the staid Claire suddenly discover her inner romantic heroine?
Her chance meeting with a mysterious woman who claims to have an early version of Austen’s Pride and Prejudice — in which Lizzie ends up with someone other than Fitzwilliam Darcy — leads to an astounding discovery about the venerated author’s own struggle to find the right hero for Lizzie Bennett. Neil’s unexpected arrival in Oxford complicates Claire’s journey to finding her own romantic lead. Mr. Darcy Broke My Heart is the story of a woman who finds that love isn’t logical and that a true hero can appear in the most unexpected of places.

As I read the book, I couldn’t help but get frustrated at times with Claire. Just as frustrated as those who love her probably feel about how she’s put off her own life to do for them. This book is more, I think, women’s fiction with a romance at the end than a romance. It’s told in 1st person POV and deals more with Claire and her journey to understanding herself and what she’s done with and allowed to happen in her life. It packs a lot of change and self examination into a weeks time.

As with the first book, I just accepted the Formidables. But the thought of a hidden Austen manuscript would be tantalizing. I like the bits and pieces of the version of “First Impressions” you’ve created and think it makes sense given what little I know of Austen’s life. We see what could have been the outcome of Jane examining her own life and the people in it, just as Claire does. And how that could have changed what is probably her most widely read book, “Pride and Prejudice.”

There is a romance here and as with the previous book in this series, “Jane Austen Ruined My Life,” the heroine has to deal with two men in her life. Who are they both and what does each want from her? Claire has to determine that, and learn her own heart, before the end of the story. Part of my difficulty with the book is that since it’s from Claire’s POV, all we know is what she has figured out or thinks she knows. It’s not until late in the story that we learn more about both men, which helps to illuminate who they truly are and what they feel for Claire. I was willing to keep reading because watching Claire come to self realization caught my attention. She’s a flawed person but then aren’t we all? She doesn’t come to immediate self knowledge and fights what she discovers about herself along the way. And who doesn’t do that too? After she finally figures it all out, though, I’m glad that she’s going to wait almost another year before tying the knot. I think settling into her new relationship needs a little time.

You did have me guessing about who she’d end up with. It swung back and forth, chapter to chapter and even within chapters. I was even to the point of thinking that she’d not end up with anyone but perhaps take more time to find out what she really wants from life before looking for a relationship. And honestly, I think I would have been fine with that too. I do like her choice because who doesn’t want a hero like that?

But even as you kept me guessing about Claire’s ultimate hero, I discovered that I don’t care for books which make me guess. Love triangles have rarely been my reading choice and I think I know why. I want to know who the hero and heroine are going to be and not be pulled back and forth over the course of the book as to which person another ends up with. Sure, I want to watch a couple work out their relationship but I want to know who I’m supposed to cheer for. Here, the information needed to see who would be the hero seemed to come from left field.

I do like the way you’ve woven Austen and her books into these stories as it’s more unique than just another rehash of the characters she left without HEAs. In the end, my grade is based, somewhat, on what is my own personal dislike of love triangles. I think that people who don’t mind these will ultimately enjoy the book more than I did. B-

~Jayne
This book can be purchased at Amazon (affiliate link) and Barnes and Noble (non affiliate link). No ebook version.

Related posts:

1. REVIEW: Jane Austen Ruined My Life by Beth Pattillo
2. REVIEW: Heavens to Betsy by Beth Pattillo
3. REVIEW: Earth to Betsy by Beth Pattillo

I will confess right off the bat that I’m one of those readers who never “got” you. I tried to read Pride and Prejudice years ago, but gave up after a few pages because of your writing style. What can I say – I had less patience in those days with long, indirect sentences which seemed to use 20 words to say what could be easily said in five (hah! I’m one to talk on that score…). I read Emma a few years ago and honestly did not care for it. It wasn’t so much the language this time; it was the fact that there seemed to be about a dozen main characters and only one of them (Mr. Knightley, of course) appeared to not be a complete and utter twit. Emma herself was dumber than a bag of hammers, and every other character seemed to fall somewhere on the continuum between “moron” and “get any stupider and we’ll need to water you twice a week” (to paraphrase the late, great Molly Ivins).

I don’t really like reading about stupid people, so Emma frustrated me. Nonetheless, I picked up a copy of Sense and Sensibility recently, and though I started reading with some trepidation I soon found myself enchanted with the writing and the characters (though many of them are hardly any sharper than those found in Emma).

Sense and Sensibility, for those readers who don’t know, is the story of Elinor and Marianne Dashwood, sisters who encounter many obstacles on the path to true love. As with Pride and Prejudice, the title Sense and Sensibility is significant. Elinor, the older of the sisters, is ruled by sense – she is not given to great shows of emotion or passion, whereas Marianne, who to be fair is only about 17 during the time the story takes place, thrives on drama and grand expressions of emotion. Elinor is by far the more sympathetic of the sisters for most of the book, though some readers may, I suppose, find her coolness and perfection a bit off-putting. I found her very sympathetic, since as the reader we’re privy to her inner thoughts and realize how hard it is for her to maintain her calm facade at times.

The story opens with the death of Mr. Henry Dashwood, Elinor and Marianne’s father. Soon, their half-brother and his rapacious wife descend on Norland Park, the family’s estate, and take over the place. Mr. Dashwood had hoped to provide well for his second wife and their three daughters (Elinor and Marianne have a younger sister, Margaret), being that his son John was already wealthy from an inheritance from his late mother, as well as from having made a good marriage. But the estate had been passed down to Mr. Dashwood in such a way that he was unable to leave it to anyone but his son John, and so as an alternative he asked John on his deathbed to look after the interests of his stepmother and sisters. This leads to a rather hilarious conversation between John and his wife, in which they gradually whittle down the meaning of the promise John has made:

“Perhaps, then, it would be better for all parties if the sum were diminished one half. Five hundred pounds would be a prodigious increase to their fortunes!”

“Oh! beyond anything great! What brother on earth would do half so much for his sisters, even if really his sisters! And as it is — only half blood! — But you have such a generous spirit!”

Soon they have decided that this “generous spirit” only requires them to help the ladies find a suitable place to move to, and nothing more. In Mrs. John Dashwood’s opinion, the move cannot come too soon, for she is concerned about the connection forming between Elinor and her brother, Edward Ferrars, who is a frequent visitor at Norland. Mr. Ferrars is the eldest son of a wealthy family and his sister and mother have big plans for him that don’t include a quiet, modest non-entity such as Elinor.

Marianne also disapproves of the growing affection between Elinor and Edward, for entirely different reasons: she sees Edward Ferrars as too boring and passionless and cannot understand the attraction that Elinor feels for him. Marianne is not just set on being emotional and dramatic herself; she dislikes and distrusts anyone who does not wear his heart on his sleeve.

Soon the widow Dashwood and her daughters receive an offer from a distant relative for a situation in Devonshire: a comfortable and affordable cottage near the relative’s estate. They leave Norland with some regret (it has been their home for quite a while, after all) and embark on their new life.

Once settled in Devonshire, the Dashwood sisters meet a veritable host of new people, many of them very amusing (your gift for satire really shines in these characterizations, I think): Sir John Middleton, their jolly but rather silly benefactor; his wife, who thinks of nothing but her children, and Mrs. Jennings, the wife’s mother, vulgar and gossipy but with an unexpected heart of gold. They also meet several eligible gentlemen: Colonel Brandon, a friend of Middleton’s who takes an interest in Marianne (an interest not returned because she finds him to be even more of a dry stick than Edward Ferrars) and John Willoughby, a dashing young man who does attract Marianne’s notice.

There’s a lot going on in the plot of Sense and Sensibility; I haven’t even mentioned several major and minor characters (my favorite of which are probably Mr. and Mrs. Palmer, Lady Middleton’s sister and brother-in-law – he is gruff to the point of rudeness, a quality that his silly wife seems to delight in, insisting that he is “droll”). Nor have I really managed to dig very deeply into the plot. Suffice to say that there are a number of twists and turns to Elinor’s and Marianne’s romances; the story eventually moves to London and both sisters suffer a fair amount of heartache before each finds her Mr. Right.

I liked pretty much everything about Sense and Sensibility: the plot, which is intricate without being too convoluted (there are some unlikely coincidences of the sort that make the reader think that there must have only been a few dozen people in Regency England, but I can handle coincidences pretty well in a well written book – what might be unbelievable in a bad book feels symmetrical to me in a good one), the characters, several of whom have unexpected depth – even some of the villains are not entirely without nuance, and the writing, which is the very definition of droll (unlike Mr. Palmer). I loved this bit about Edward Ferrars’ controlling mother, who briefly disowns him:

Her family had of late been exceedingly fluctuating. For many years of her life she had had two sons; but the crime and annihilation of Edward, a few weeks ago, had robbed her of one; the similar annihilation of Robert had left her for a fortnight without any; and now, by the resuscitation of Edward, she had one again.

In spite of his being allowed once more to live, however, he did not feel the continuance of his existence secure, till he had revealed his present engagement; for the publication of that circumstance, he feared might give a sudden turn to his constitution, and carry him off as rapidly as before.

If I have any quibbles or criticisms of the book, it would be a slight sense of apprehension over the resolution of one of the romances (I don’t want to say more for fear of spoiling anyone – one of the pleasures of the book for me is that I didn’t know who would end up with who) and an occasional difficulty with the old-fashioned writing, which did feature the same long, indirect sentences that I tended to get lost in and have to reread to understand. Still, I feel such a sense of triumph and pleasure at being able to say that I am an official “Jane Austen fan”. I wonder which of your novels I should pick up next? I feel like I should try Pride and Prejudice again, but I know the story so well from film adaptions that I don’t feel as much of a sense of urgency. I’ve been warned away from Northanger Abbey, which doesn’t seem to be a favorite of even die-hard Austen fans. I’m thinking of either Mansfield Park or Persuasion. In any case, I am eagerly looking forward to reading your works again – no more trepidation for me.

My grade is an A-.

Regards,

Jennie

This book is in the public domain.   Grab a free copy.

Related posts:

1. REVIEW: Confessions of a Jane Austen Addict by Laurie Viera Rigler
2. REVIEW: Jane Austen Ruined My Life by Beth Pattillo
3. GUEST REVIEW: The Lost Memoirs of Jane Austen by Syrie James

Lucinda Betts and Elise Logan sent me the link to NPR’s piece by Jack Murnighan who is a closet romance reader (not so closeted anymore, Jack).   Wonder if Jack prefers the romances with “Jack” as the titular character?

Not unlike the great late-teen realization that girls like sex too, the very thought that men and women were occasionally conjuring the same sugarplums made me feel much closer to my female compeers in general, and less like a creeping lust monster.

Here is a Capital! piece of social media mockery.   It’s Pride and Prejudice recast in Twitterverse.   There are so many brilliant moments that it’s hard to quote just one favorite.

Bingley:
@Darcy I can hardly wait to dance with @JaneB. She is the most capital girl I have ever met. #loveat1stsight

Darcy:
@Bingley Any savage can dance. #proofofmysuperiority

Bingley:
@Darcy JaneB’s sister, Lizzy is pretty. You could dance with her. It would be capital fun.

Darcy:
@Bingley She’s tolerable, but she is not handsome enough to tempt me. Also: could you stop saying “capital” so much? #abovemypeers

LizzyB:
@CharlotteL RT @D*rcy “She is tolerable. But she is not handsome enough to tempt me.” #twitteratiRtwats #takeyrtweetsprivatefool

In non book news, scientists have been able to recreate human sperm from stem cells. This will help those that have bought this cookbook. (hey, it is kind of book related)

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3. REVIEW: Hustle, Sweet Love by Maggie Davis

Auto-buy for me
Jane Austen and zombies? This
is my dream come true.

At first, I’m puzzled.
Why is Jane Austen sharing
copyright with Seth?

Public domain book
But I read and it is clear
more ripoff than new.

The text, dialogue
word for word what Austen wrote
…with minor changes.

This book reads more like
wild usage of “Find/Replace”
tool in MS Word.

At first, this is cute.
Men are judged by number of
kills, not money. Nice.

Darcy is a catch
Because he is a master
of zombie slaying.

The Bennett daughters
act the same, talk the same
but they are…ninjas.

My eyebrows? Raised but
I still read. Netherfield Ball?
Invaded by dead.

Darcy slights Lizzy
Instead of laughing it off,
she wants to…gut him????

This is where you start
to lose me. Despite Bennett
bloodthirst, I press on

But when Darcy asks
Lizzy to dance with him,
the story has changed.

Instead of the Austen
version where she declines, she
gives him ‘cut direct’

I realize at
this point that Grahame-Smith?
Doesn’t know his Jane.

I don’t mind a spoof
Of beloved author. BUT.
You missed the basics.

Give the cut direct?
MAJOR deal in Regency.
But no one here blinks.

I realize that it’s
A bit silly to get mad
over a detail.

But missing that small
detail showed me something big.
You skipped your homework.

This is not a fan’s
Loving homage. This is a
shameless grab for cash.

Maybe a cute gift
for people that appreciate schtick
But fans of Jane? Pass.

DNF

This book can be purchased in mass market from an independent bookstore or ebook format from the Sony Store and other etailers.

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Dear Ms Pattillo,

A copy of your latest book, “Jane Austen Ruined My Life,” was included in one of the recent arc packages Jane sent to me. Since I’ve enjoyed several of your previous stories, I made sure to put it close to the top of my reading “To Do” list.

When she was a young grad student, Emma Grant thought she’d found her Mr. Knightley. But as she said herself, he actually turned out to be her Mr. Nightmare. Now divorced from her academic star and tenured professor husband – after she caught him doing her teaching assistant on their kitchen table – she’s flying to England. The divorce not only cost her her marriage, she’s also lost her university teaching job due to Edward and the slut’s allegations that Emma plagiarized a paper. As Emma says, one whiff of scandal is enough to derail an academic career, especially when one’s opponent is as respected as her former husband is.

Emma’s got one last chance to resurrect her career. If she can find, publish and write a paper about what she thinks may be lost letters of Jane Austen, she knows she’ll be accepted back into the academic fold with open arms. It all hinges on the mysterious Mrs. Parrot with whom Emma’s been corresponding. Emma must undertake a series of tasks, as Mrs. Parrot calls them, to prove herself worthy of access to the letters, which Mrs. Parrot dangles before Emma like opium before an addict.

With her future, and access to all 3000 of Jane Austen’s not only unpublished but unknown letters, on the line Emma doesn’t really have much choice. And thus she begins a series of journeys around southwestern England to various Austen locales and in doing so, Emma learns not only about Jane Austen’s private life, but much about her own.

First off, anyone who decides to read this book needs to just accept the premise. That there are that many unpublished letters from a beloved author of whom the world hungers to know more. And that there is a secret society, btw I love Emma’s joking reference to them as the Jane Austen CIA, which has undertaken to protect and keep them hidden from the world at large. Though in real life I would find this almost impossible to believe, this is, after all, fiction and you can do whatever you will.

Having said that, I found Mrs. Parrot and Miss Golightly to be delightful. If anyone could be members of a secret literary society, I’d pick these two. I’d also love to have free reign to wander through Mrs. Parrot’s Victorian London home and the key to private garden reserved for the Square’s homeowners.

It’s easy to see that you took your time visiting all the sites mentioned in the book. The descriptions of them put me right in the scenes with Emma and through her eyes, I got a lovely tour of London, Bath, Lyme Regis, Steventon and Chawton. Your trip to Hatchards must have been fun and a tour of the rare manuscripts and books in the British Library would have sent shivers down my spine. Researching all this would be the kind of background book work that I could really get into.

From the minute Barry appeared in the story, I wondered about him. He just seemed too much like Wickham – charming and so interested in Emma as he turned up at just the right times. But for his purposes, couldn’t he have just followed Emma to her London source? Done a little B&E? This part did strain the belief I was willing to suspend about the plot.

Now Adam is, as Emma finally realizes, the type of man to keep around. And he certainly is willing to wait for Emma, and put up with her quest, and feed her, and not pry into her secrets. I want one of him. Though if he hadn’t expressed at least some frustration with her by the end of the book, I would deem him too good to be true even for a fictional book.

If you had ended the story with Emma finally finding her true love, falling into his arms and the scene fading to the credits as it does in all the screen adaptations of Jane Austen’s novels it would have had a momentary “feel good” quality for me. After all, who doesn’t love a happy ending? But for Emma, given her past, this just wouldn’t have worked.

For she, at one time, had thought that she’d found her life’s hero. She’d married him, begun a life together doing things they both loved, lived what she thought was her “happy ever after” and had ultimately found that just getting the hero to propose and show up at the alter isn’t enough.

Her tasks to prove herself to the Formidables show her that a happy ending isn’t guaranteed to anyone. There’s luck and a lot of hard work needed to find and keep a life partner. And one can’t totally blame another for things not working out. Since Emma was willing to put her dreams on hold and allow her life to be dictated to her, she bears as much responsibility for the failure of her marriage as anyone.

It was a hard lesson to learn and to admit to herself but once Emma does that, I can see why she makes the choices for her future that she does. As she got burned riding the coat tails of her tenured husband, she needs to make it on her own in the academic world. And after she rediscovers her life long love of writing, it’s obvious to me that she needs to explore where this might take her before risking her heart a second time.

The manner in which Emma learns all this might be straight out of a novel but the lessons are age old. Jane Austen might have seduced Emma with the heroes of her books but Austen never actually offered anything to readers beyond the pleasure of reading her novels. I think Emma is headed in the right direction towards who and what might be her HEA and I wish her well. Now if we could only get a final book for Betsy Blessing, I’d be delighted. B

~Jayne

This book can be purchased in trade paperback from Amazon. No ebook format.

Related posts:

1. REVIEW: Heavens to Betsy by Beth Pattillo
2. REVIEW: Earth to Betsy by Beth Pattillo
3. GUEST REVIEW: The Lost Memoirs of Jane Austen by Syrie James

Last month we received an unusual request at Dear Author. We were asked to review something other than a book — a DVD set called “The Romance Collection: Special Edition.” The 14 DVD set, which can be found here, retails for $99.95 and contains nearly 30 hours of programming (not including the special features) from A&E’s romantic films and miniseries.

The eight titles included in “The Romance Collection: Special Edition” are as follows: “Pride and Prejudice” starring Colin Firth and Jennifer Ehle, “Victoria and Albert,” starring Nigel Hawthorne, Jonathan Pryce and Sir Peter Ustinov, “Emma,” starring Kate Beckinsale, “Jane Eyre,” starring Deborah Findlay and Ciaran Hinds, “Lorna Doone,” starring Martin Clunes, Richard Coyle, Aidan Gillen and Amelia Warner, “The Scarlet Pimpernel,” starring Richard E. Grant and Elizabeth McGovern, “Tom Jones,” starring Max Beesley, Samantha Morton and Benjamin Whitrow, and “Ivanhoe,” starring Steven Waddington and Ciaran Hinds.

While we probably won’t be reviewing all eight of these films, we do hope to review a few of them and this review of “Pride and Prejudice” is the first of these reviews.

I should confess now that I volunteered to review “Pride and Prejudice” partly because (and here comes a shameful admission) the novel of the same title was the only one of the seven classic books that seven of these eight films are based on which I had actually read in its entirety. Philistine that I am, I couldn’t make it past the midpoint of Jane Eyre, and as for the other five books, I’ve never even attempted to read them.

It occurred to me only after I finished viewing “Pride and Prejudice” that perhaps I am not the best choice of reviewer, since it’s been well over a decade since I read Jane Austen’s novel, and since, while I enjoyed it, I can’t say I ever fell in love with it the way so many people have. So please keep that in mind when reading my review.

This BBC production, made in 1995 and first released in the U.S. in 1996, is directed by Simon Langton and stars Colin Firth as Mr. Fitzwilliam Darcy and Jennifer Ehle as Miss Elizabeth Bennet.

To anyone unfamiliar with the story, Elizabeth, or Lizzy as she is frequently called, is the second of the five daughters of Mr. and Mrs. Bennet. The Bennets’ financial situation is not secure. Mr. Bennet’s estate is entailed and therefore he cannot pass it on to his daughters after his death, and for that reason it is imperative that his daughters marry well. So when “a single man in possession of a good fortune,” Mr. Bingley, moves into the nearby country estate of Netherfield Park, Mrs. Bennet begins to hope that he will marry one of her daughters.

Charles Bingley arrives at an assembly accompanied by his haughty sisters and his seemingly even haughtier friend Mr. Darcy. Bingley is quickly smitten with the oldest Bennet sister Jane. Darcy, however, remains aloof, and seems put off by Mrs. Bennet’s attempts to interest him in Lizzy. And later in the evening, Lizzy overhears him saying “She is tolerable, but not handsome enough to tempt me.”

Lizzy takes the comment as evidence of Darcy’s excessive pride, and it prejudices her against him, as does a story told by Mr. George Wickham, an officer in a regiment that is quartered nearby, who tells Lizzy Darcy did him a great injustice.

Meanwhile, Mr. Bingley and Lizzy’s favorite sister Jane grow closer, and Darcy casts smoldering looks Lizzy’s way. Mr. Bennet’s heir, the obnoxious Mr. Collins, a clergyman who wants to marry one of the Bennet sisters, arrives in the neighborhood at this point, and he sets his mind on marrying Lizzy, who has no interest in him.

Bingley, his sisters and Darcy then unexpectedly depart the country for London, and Jane too, goes to London to stay with her aunt and uncle, in the hopes of encountering the man she loves there. But her hopes are crushed, and when Lizzy, visiting a friend, encounters Darcy again, she does not hesitate to lay the blame for that, and for Wickham’s difficulties, at Mr. Darcy’s feet.

But Darcy, against his will, has fallen in love with Elizabeth, and despite his reticence, cannot allow all her misapprehensions to stand. Will Lizzy ever change her mind? And will true love triumph over pride and prejudice? The answers to those questions are probably known to many romance readers, but that doesn’t keep us from enjoying the story.

My main criticism of this miniseries is that at five hours, its pace sometimes feels a tad too stately for me. That was true of the book as well, however, and I think it would be difficult to make a faithful adaptation much shorter. Nonetheless, there were times I wished that Langton and screenwriter Andrew Davies had found a way to make the story feel as though it was moving along at a good clip.

Another problem for me was that I didn’t love Jennifer Ehle’s portrayal of Lizzy. Ehle is clearly a good actress, and she captures Elizabeth’s wit and cynicism, as well as her loyalty to her sister Jane. But there is also something a touch too self-contained and self-satisfied for my taste about her version of Lizzy, and I can’t say I had a lot of empathy for the character as portrayed by Ehle.

A couple of secondary performances that did not work that well for me were Alison Steadman’s in the role of Mrs. Bennet, and David Bamber’s in that of Mr. Collins. I feel that Ms. Steadman plays Mrs. Bennet as a shrill and vulgar harpy who remains one dimensional throughout, and that Mr. Bamber’s Mr. Collins has so many exaggerated mannerisms that, although he is funny, it becomes difficult to believe that such a man could have actually existed.

Fortunately, the strong performances outnumber the weak ones. First and foremost among the miniseries’ diamonds is Colin Firth’s performance. His Mr. Darcy is filled with repressed passion, and when he admits to Elizabeth that he wants her despite his better judgment we can both believe that he desires her powerfully and that he wishes almost as powerfully that he did not. The storyline often requires Darcy to be silent, and yet even when he is silent, Firth compels the viewer’s attention with his heated glances.

Many of the other performances in this miniseries are also quite successful, but due to space constraints I will confine myself to listing only a few.

Anna Chancellor is especially good as Miss Caroline Bingley, who does not aid Jane Bennet’s romance with her brother and who wants Mr. Darcy for herself. The role requires Ms. Chancellor to reveal to the viewer the disappointment that she tries to conceal from Mr. Darcy, and Ms. Chancellor pulls off this feat quite well, creating a very believable antagonist in the process.

Julia Sawalha also gives a strong performance as the flaky Miss Lydia Bennet, making her character’s frivolity part of a kind of teenaged enthusiasm for good-looking men that renders Lydia’s actions more understandable.

Among the secondary male actors, Crispin Bonham Carter (who according to IMDB is Helena Bonham Carter’s cousin) is very sympathetic and likeable as the good natured Mr. Charles Bingley, and Benjamin Whitrow delivers Mr. Bennet’s wry observations with perfect comedic timing.

Though I wished for tighter editing and a more emotionally affecting score, I thought the production values were also strong for the most part. John Kenway’s cinematography nicely captures the charms of the English countryside. Actual English country houses are used to great effect both as sets and in the art direction, and the house that doubles for Darcy’s home of Pemberley is particularly impressive, just as it should be.

The costume design, by Dinah Collin, also impressed me, precisely because it didn’t seem to go out of its way to do so. I like that the Bennet sisters’ financial straits are accentuated by the way they are dressed in simpler costumes than the more sumptuous frocks worn by wealthier female characters such as Bingley’s sisters or Lady Catherine de Bourgh.

The related special features include a Jane Austen biography and bibliography, cast biographies and filmographies, anamorphic widescreen (2.35:1), and a behind-the-scenes featurette, “The Making of Pride and Prejudice.”

Overall, I enjoyed this “Pride and Prejudice.” though perhaps not as much as people with greater patience and avid fans of the book will. My grade for this one is a B-.

Sincerely,

Janine

Purchase link at the A&E store.

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When your publicist queried DA about a possible review for your book “Confessions of a Jane Austen Addict,” I admit to groaning and rolling my eyes. Not another book designed to appeal to the Austeninistas, I thought. Can’t these authors think of their own plots and characters? Must they keep endlessly recycling versions of Austen’s books? Then I caught sight of something that grabbed my attention. This was supposed to be about a modern 21st century woman who transposes back in time and gets to see England as it was then and who discovers just how dirty, germ-filled, and restricted a place it really was. Well, that’s different, I thought. I’ll give it a try.

When I hauled it out of its mailing envelope, I said a silent prayer that it wasn’t going to be a ‘Chick Lit’ style book with a heroine condemned to doing stupid things in order to be ‘cute’ and show the difference in life then vs now. You answered that prayer with a sharp heroine who quickly decides it’s in her best interests to curb her language and actions. The manner in which she initially ‘deals’ with her transposition is realistic. The way in which she manages to blend into a society so different and ‘pass’ is inventive and totally convincing. Her gradual adjustment to her new body makes sense as do her occasional slip-ups.

I did wonder at how easily her confidante accepted her confession of the truth. The fortune teller was an interesting character. Her explanation of the fluidity of time served as well as anything to account for the transposition as well as show why Courtney might have trouble getting back home.

I loved Courtney’s reactions to the grim, grimy reality of life in Austen England. Though she quickly learned not to speak her disgust at the skeevy waiters, overwhelming BO, nasty inns and the horrors of drinking and bathing in the waters of Bath, her inner asides were priceless. I almost LOL when she acts like any star struck denizen of LA during her brief visit to London.

Up through the end of her visit to Bath, I can understand how she doesn’t fully comprehend how her actions can impact the lives of others. Mary pretty much finally lays it out in terms that anyone who has a minimal IQ could understand. That coupled with Courtney’s own knowledge of Austen’s world through her repetitive readings of Austen’s books seemed to finally ‘bring it all home’ to Courtney. Which makes it all the more surprising what she almost does in London. As I read that scene, I kept thinking WTF? How can she do this, risk this, continue with this when she knows the consequences should she be caught? Yes, Courtney does seem to ‘get it’ after returning home and being confronted with her mother’s suspicions but she should have already ‘gotten it’ after Bath.

I also still have some questions about the final denouement of the scene with Edgeworth. At first I thought that Courtney finally accepts where she is and has no further thoughts of trying to return to her modern life in LA. But then the epilogue diary entry coupled with what Courtney told James makes me think there was some kind of a fusion thing going on. So, what really happened or are we supposed to fill in whatever we want there?

While I am tired of authors retelling Austen’s stories from endless different viewpoints and carrying on with the lives of the next generation of characters, I thought your clever working of the situations from her books into your book was great. After all, Austen was writing about the world she knew so it’s not surprising that those same circumstances would be encountered by anyone living in those times. I enjoyed watching Courtney grow as a person and delighted in her finally finding her own ‘Mr Darcy.’ B+

~Jayne

This book can be purchased in trade paperback from Amazon or Powells or ebook format.

Related posts:

1. GUEST REVIEW: The Lost Memoirs of Jane Austen by Syrie James
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I love the idea of reading the period book reviews and I know Jayne will love the recipes. The price point is $8.00, the same as the paper release.

According to the same PW article, while the Kindle spiked interest, most sales have come from the Sony Reader. I find that fascinating given the conflicting information that I keep hearing about Kindle sales. Genevieve Shore, the digital director at Penguin, believes that a multi function device is ultimately the direction of ebook reading. I don’t disagree with her as I use my iPhone for reading.

Via Publishers Weekly.

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I just read The Lost Memoirs of Jane Austen by Syrie James. It’s a ‘what if‘ story. ‘What if‘ Jane Austen had experienced romantic love. After all these years, how would we find out about her ill-fated romance? When and where could it have happened? Who would have been her love? Why didn’t Jane have her own happily-ever-after?

I have to tell you, Jane, this book answers every one of those questions in a completely believable way. Syrie James uses Jane’s real life travels, letters, and interactions to tell us a story that not only leaves you believing ‘it could have happened’, but wishing ‘oh, if she couldn’t have it all, I hope she had this’.

The story is written as Jane’s journal. Through it we are introduced to not only, my dear Mr. Ashton, but her large and loving family, as well as fictitious characters who are incorporated into Miss Austen’s work. We learn so much about Jane; from her love of country life to her struggles with her inner demons.

The Lost Memoirs of Jane Austen is a very easy read (I set it down once thinking I was on page thirty something, when I picked it up again a few hours later, I discovered I’d actually reached page ninety-seven). I was wholly engaged from beginning to end.

I know you end your reviews with a letter grade, I don’t believe I have the background as a writer to accurately do that, but I will tell you when I closed the cover (the very tactilely pleasing cover) of this book, I felt as though I’d made a friend.

If I didn’t say it before, thank you so much for this opportunity. It’s been such fun.

Sincerely,

Lorri

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