Jane Austen Meets Twenty-First Century Technology

 I have had an obsession with the novels of Jane Austen since I was a young girl.  I remember the first time I read Pride and Prejudice:  so began my maddening crush on Mr. Darcy that would last until...well...now.  The first time I watched the BBC's on-screen version of the novel, I fell instantly and madly in love with Colin Firth.  I mean, what woman couldn't?!   So, for the better part of my life, I have been a true Janeite.  I love having a membership to JASNA, the Jane Austen Society of North America, although my husband seems to have no understanding of this.  I pity him.  I cannot imagine my life without the influences of Jane Austen and her wonderful literary characters.  It was through reading the works of Austen that I first realized I wanted to major in English Literature in college.  And it is against those same works that I measure every other novel I have ever read. 

So, just imagine my excitement when I read about the BBC releasing a new interactive game for facebook based on Jane Austen and the characters of her novels!  Truly!  I was so astonished (in a good way), that I had to copy the press release here.  Read for yourself!

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

BBC Worldwide Limited

BBC WORLDWIDE TO CREATE A JANE AUSTEN GAME FOR FACEBOOK

Jane Austen’s Rogues and Romance coming to Facebook this Spring

LOS ANGELES, CA (February 23, 2012) – BBC Worldwide is preparing to bring the world of Jane Austen to Facebook in a new interactive game inspired by her work. Developed in partnership with Legacy Interactive, Jane Austen’s Rogues and Romance will re-create the world of her novels allowing players to take part in an imaginative adventure that follows the path of Elizabeth and Mr Darcy after they are married.

For almost 200 years Jane Austen’s work has stood the test of time with legions of fans worldwide enjoying her witty character portrayals and depictions of 19^th century English society. Her novels have inspired countless adaptations, prequels and sequels including The Jane Austen Book Club; Pride and Prejudice and Zombies and Clueless. Jane Austen’s Rogues and Romance will mark the first time her works have inspired an online social game.

Robert Nashak, EVP, BBC Worldwide Digital Entertainment & Games, explains, “Social interaction is at the core of Austen’s work and we felt that was a concept we could explore that had a natural synergy with Facebook. Rogues and Romance is a fun romp of a game that celebrates the world of Jane Austen.”

“I am a ‘Janeite’ of long standing and thrilled to be able to translate my secret obsession into a fun social game,” says Ariella Lehrer, CEO of Legacy Interactive. “We are determined to deliver an experience that passionate Austen fans will love, as well as gameplayers who know of Austen but have never read her novels.”

Jane Austen’s Rogues and Romance is set to launch on Facebook this Spring. The game takes Pride and Prejudice as its starting point following the newly married Elizabeth and Mr Darcy on a hidden object adventure with an intriguing twist. Players will be able to take their place in society leaving calling cards, attending and hosting receptions and pursuing courtships. Each player will have their own manor house and be able to indulge their penchant for fashion with a choice of Regency-era costumes.

For more information, please contact:
apps.facebook.com/janeaustengame
www.austengame.com

About BBC
BBC Worldwide Limited is the main commercial arm and a wholly owned subsidiary of the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC). The company exists to maximise the value of the BBC’s assets for the benefit of the licence fee payer and invest in public service programming in return for rights. The company has six core businesses: Channels, Content & Production, Sales & Distribution, Consumer Products, Brands, Consumers & New Ventures and Magazines, with digital ventures incorporated into each business area. In 2010/11, BBC Worldwide generated profits of £160 million on sales of £1158 million and returned £182m to the BBC. For more detailed performance information please see our Annual Review website:

www.bbcworldwide.com/annualreview

bbcworldwide.com

twitter.com/bbcwpress

So, for all those other Janeites out there, mark your calendars for March!  I know I will be counting the days!  :-)

And do, please, leave a comment for me, as "my idea of good company is the company of clever, well-informed people who have a great deal of conversation; that is what I call good company." (Jane Austen).

Dreaming of Darcy,

Antique Card Catalog

For as long as I can remember, I have had a love affair with books. Not just books, but libraries filled with books. As a child, I enjoyed going to our small town's library and getting lost in the stacks of books, reading the back covers, having a difficult time deciding which I would check out because I wanted to check out all of them. In elementary school, our class would go to the library one day a week. I would check out the maximum books allowed and carry them home with me. My favorites I checked out over and over again. Many years later, the woman who had been my elementary school librarian decided that Harold and the Purple Crayon should be retired. Since she remembered that this was one that I checked out over and over again, she signed the inside of the well worn cover and brought it to me. Of course, I was thrilled. Now that little tattered book is among my collection of first editions and author-signed books, as it is as important to me as any of those...perhaps even more.

Another thing I loved about libraries was the old card catalogs. I loved reading them! So, imagine my delight when poking through an old junk store, I spied in the back corner under piles of "stuff" a dusty antique card catalog that called out to me louder than if it could speak. I got so excited over this scratched old cabinet with it's twelve drawers that I could barely ask the price of the old man who ran the store. Fifty dollars. He actually said fifty dollars. I couldn't believe it. Of course I yelled, "Sold." and went up to immediately pay him, and I couldn't get it loaded in my car fast enough. It barely fit across the back seat, but it did...as if it was meant to be. When I got home and asked my husband to help me unload the car of a true treasure, he looked at me as if I had lost my mind when he saw it. "Where in the world are you going to put it," I remember him asking. "I don't know, but I have to find a place!"

The photo above is not my cabinet, although this one has twelve drawers. Mine is two drawers high and six drawers wide! I love it!

I believe I know the perfect place. In my new studio. It will look wonderful in there and serve as a great cabinet to hold paint brushes, tubes of paint, pencils, etc. I cannot wait to take the orange oil to it and see how that old wood shines. I bet the patina is amazing. For now, it sits among the other furniture all piled in our guest bedroom awaiting the finish of the remodel. I can't even get in there to take a photo of it right now, but soon....

This will be a project that will touch my heart and lift my soul. I can't wait to see it in its new home.

Reading Jane

I have just finished rereading every Jane Austen novel. This was a goal I had set for myself during the summer of 2009, and I just finished with the last of the group, Northanger Abbey. I always save Northanger for last. It is not that I do not love it as I do the others, for I do love it, but I find that the characters of her other novels better suit my personality. The Heroine of Northanger is just a little more passive (I will refuse to say "wimpy") than I could ever imagine, so it is much more difficult for me to identify with her. I once took a test online that told me which of the Austen characters I was most like. The result: Elizabeth Bennett. I have to agree wholeheartedly. I have always admired her spunk and straightforwardness!



Above: Portrait of Jane Austen

At any rate, I adore all of Austen's novels and could read and reread them over and over again. Most recently, I joined the Jane Austen Society of North America (or JASNA), as I am hoping to learn even more about Jane Austen and her works. So far, I have been rather disappointed, but I will reserve my opinion until the end of my first, fledgling year with the group. I just cannot get enough of Jane, and I am excited about this new path upon which I hope to gain even more knowledge and insight!

I am hoping within the next couple of years for an anniversary trip to England. My Dear Husband is not as keen on Jane as I am, you see. In fact, when I rent one of the many movies, perhaps a version I have never seen, and beg him to give it a chance to "speak to his heart," he simply smiles and says he will leave it to speak to my own heart, which I may share with him afterward. He prefers ESPN, Fox News or a good spy mystery to any of Jane's works. He did make it through one hour of Sense and Sensibility, once. I was quite thrilled with his progress. Anyway, back to the hope of a trip to England -- my dream is to visit Jane Country. I would love nothing more than to see where stood Steventon Rectory, where Jane was born and spent 25 years of her life. It was also here that she wrote Pride & Prejudice, Sense & Sensibility and Northanger Abbey. Although the rectory is no longer standing, the 12th century Steventon Church, where Jane worshipped, stands almost unchanged from those days. One can find inside the church memorial tablets to James Austen, Jane's eldest brother, who took over the parish from her father. His grave is in the churchyard. There is also a bronze plaque dedicated to Jane Austen inside the church. In January 1995, members of JASNA paid for the refurbishment of the church bells.

Above: A depiction of Steventon Rectory, birthplace of Jane Austen, as it appeared in the early 1800s

Below: Steventon Church as it appears today

While in England, I would also like to visit some of the countryside and villages mentioned in Jane's novels. I have a feeling that this will be a venture which will take much convincing with DH, but he is very good about that sort of thing. In fact, he even went with me to visit the House of Seven Gables and the birthplace of Nathaniel Hawthorne in Massachusetts, so I do have hope that he will also indulge me this. I will keep you posted!

I am listing below links to some of my favorite Austen sites. Take some time to browse and enjoy yourself! I visit each of these often!

The Republic of Pemberley

If you're interested, please let me know, and I will send you a coupon for $5 off any of the items in the gift shop.

The Jane Austen Society of North America

Jane Austen.Org

Austen.Com

The blessing of peace in all families,

Dreaming Spring

This, the first Monday morning of the New Year, is a foggy one here on the mountain. As I sit typing at my computer and looking out my window at the Sewanee fog, I am listening to Vivaldi and the call of crows so loudly in the woods outside my window that they risk drowning out the sounds of the music. I am taking a very short break from my hectic day; there is always so much to accomplish in our busy office! But what a magnificent backdrop of beauty we all are fortunate to share while we work! Even at its coldest, Sewanee is a magnificent site to see. Over the last century-and-a-half, many things have been written about the beauty of this place. One such work is by a Mississippi-born alumni of the University, William Alexander Percy, who later went on to accomplish much fame with his writing.

The University recently produced a special printing of Percy’s work entitled Sewanee. The piece was first written for the Sewanee Review and was later incorporated as a chapter in the poet’s autobiography, Lanterns on the Levee, published in 1941. The work became a best seller.

Contained within is a beautiful description of Sewanee and all her beauty through the seasons. I share it with you below:

“In winter there is a powder of snow; the pines sag like ladies in ermine, and the other trees are glassy and given to creaking. Later, arbutus is under the dead leaves where they have drifted, but unless you look for it betimes, you’ll find instead puffs of ghost caught under the higher trees, and that’s dogwood, and puffs of the saddest color in the world that’s tender, too, and that’s redbud, which some say is pink and some purple and some give up but simply must write a poem about. The rest of the flowers you shouldn’t believe in if I told you, so I’ll tell you: anemones and hepaticas and blood-root that troop under the cliffs, always together, too ethereal to mix with reds and yellow or even pinks, and violets everywhere, in armies. The gray and purple and blue sort you’ll credit, but not the tiny yellow ones with the bronze throats, nor the jack-rabbit ones with royal purple ears and faces of pale lavender that stare without a bit of violet modesty. If you’ve seen azalea – and miscalled it wild honeysuckle, probably – you still don’t know what it is unless you’ve seen it here, with its incredible range of color from white through shell pink to deep coral (and now and then a tuft of orange that doesn’t match anything else in the whole woods), and its perfume actually dangerous, so pagan it is. After it you’d better hunt for a calacanthus with brown petals (what else likes its petal brown?) and a little melancholy in its scent, to sober you. We call our bluets “innocence,” for that’s what they are. They troop near the iris, which when coarsened by gardens some call fleur-de-lis, and others, who care nothing about names, flags. Our orchids we try to make respectable by christening them “lady-slippers,” but they still look as if they had been designed by D.H. Lawrence – only rose and canary colored.


After Orion has set – in other words, when the most fragile and delicate and wistful things have abandoned loveliness for fructifying – the laurel, rank and magnificent for all its tender pink, starts hanging bouquets as big as hydrangeas on its innumerable bushes. But on moonlight nights there’s no use trying to say it isn’t a glory and a madness! And so the summer starts – summer, when we’re not seraph-eyed enough to see flowers even if there were any. In the fall, when our souls return, a little worse off, a little snivelly, there are foggy wisps of asters whose quality only a spider would hint at aloud, and in the streams where the iris forgathered there are parnassia, the snowdrop’s only kin. Mountain-folk alone have seen their virginal processions, ankle-deep in water, among scarlet leaves, each holding a round green shield and carrying at the end of a spear, no thicker than a broomstraw, a single pale green star. Last, chilly and inaccessible and sorrowful, in the damp of the woods, come the gentians, sea-blue and hushed."

So is the beauty and procession of colors and seasons here on the mountain. Is it any wonder Percy’s book was a best seller? So lovely are his choice of words, and they leave me longing for spring and its fine display…for the fields of daffodils, tiny crocus, the scent of honeysuckle and fresh, soft earth as I walk through Abbo’s Alley. Today, I am content with the dark silhouettes of bare trees vaguely visible through the haunting fog, but in my heart is a longing for the time when the mountain comes alive again after its long winter sleep.

If you are interested in reading more of Percy’s work, the LSU press reprinted Lanterns on the Levee in 2006, ISBN-13: 978-8071-0072-1. Percy also published five books of poetry, listed below:

• Sappho in Levkas, and Other Poems. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1915


• In April Once, and Other Poems. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1920


• Enzio’s Kingdom, and Other Poems. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1930


• Selected Poems. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1930


• Collected Poems. New York: A.A. Knopf, 1943

May you stay warm this cool January day, and may your dreams of spring soon come true!

I LOVE BOOKS!!!

As long as I can remember, I've loved to read. As a child, my mother would have to MAKE me put down a book to go outside to get fresh air. I just simply took the book with me outside. I remember laying in the floor as a young child with my head laid on the back of my German Shepherd, Tuffy, as if he was a pillow, and reading to him. He seemed to like the stories, and I liked reading out loud. Now I read quietly. But I still read. And I still carry my books outside with me when I need fresh air. I've been known to spend an entire afternoon in the peace of our backyard reading in the hammock. What heaven!

I have a great new way of keeping up with my favorite books and books I want to read. Check it out!!

Shelfari: Book reviews on your book blog