Your online source for Jane Austen and her legacy
Mansfield Park is considered (by some) to be the dark horse of Jane Austen’s oeuvre and her heroine Fanny Price intolerable. Poor Fanny. She really gets the bum’s rush in Austenland. The patron saint of the weak, insipid and downtrodden, she is Jane Austen’s most misunderstood heroine. In fact, many dispute if she is the... Continue Reading →
As regular readers of this blog well know, Jane Austen and murder mysteries are my genres of choice. Combine the two, and I’m as giddy as Lydia Bennet with an invitation to Brighton. Last year I discovered a new author who blended both of my favorite flavors into an Austen inspired parfait. Murder at Longbourn... Continue Reading →
From the desk of Laurel Ann Nattress: The 1995 BBC/A&E miniseries of Pride and Prejudice starring Colin Firth and Jennifer Ehle as Jane Austen’s most famous couple, Mr. Darcy and Elizabeth Bennet, is renowned for its period accuracy, sumptuous costuming and stunning locations. Please welcome guest blogger Helen Wilkinson today as she takes us on... Continue Reading →
Stylish, witty and historically accurate, novelist Georgette Heyer has been delighting readers with her romantic comedies for eighty-nine years. In honor of her birthday on August 16th, Austenprose.com will feature a month long event ‘Celebrating Georgette Heyer’ featuring thirty-four book reviews of her romance novels, guest blogs, interviews of Heyer enthusiast from the blog-o-sphere, academia... Continue Reading →
Three quarters into the new to Masterpiece Mystery presentation of Agatha Christie’s Appointment with Death tonight, her detective Hercule Poirot proclaimed to the roundup of suspects “This case mon ami, is full of the red fish.” I couldn’t agree more. In this 2008 ITV/PBS liberal adaptation by screenwriter Guy Andrews there are red herrings leaping... Continue Reading →
Jane Austen Fight Club "No corsets, not hatpins, no crying." OK. This gave a us a roaring case of the giggles and could not wait until Sunday. Enjoy!
Last week a customer presented me with a torn clipping from a newspaper and passionately told me she HAD to read this book! It was a review for The Cookbook Collector, by Allegra Goodman. Ok! I hadn’t read a word about this one yet, but she sure caught my attention. As a bookseller, I love... Continue Reading →
The UK Royal Mint is asking for the public’s help in determining who will be the next Great Briton? Yes gentle readers, they really care. Cast your vote to see whose face will don a commemorative coin being issued later this year. Among the nominees is our own lovely Jane Austen who must vie for... Continue Reading →
If Masterpiece Mystery fans were unsettled by last week’s uncharacteristically dark and moralistic production of Agatha Christie’s Murder on the Orient Express, then absolution is in order with Third Girl, a total turn-around back to the sophisticated Art Deco 1930’s London and country manor house crime dramas that we have come to cherish and expect.... Continue Reading →
Much has been written on the cause of Jane Austen’s lingering illness and untimely death in Winchester on 18 July 1817. I have a stack of biographies that I perused in search of a poignant passage that would express the tenor of this solemn day. Her great biographers Claire Tomalin, David Nokes and Elizabeth Jenkins... Continue Reading →
From the desk of Jane Odiwe: Elizabeth Bennet and Fitzwilliam Darcy are perhaps Jane Austen’s most beloved characters. Pride and Prejudice was written more than two hundred years ago, yet these characters remain as fresh and irresistibly fascinating to us as they were for the first generations that read their tale, and remain the standard... Continue Reading →
Mystery fans were treated to the opening of season X of Poirot on Masterpiece Mystery last Sunday with a new episode of Murder on the Orient Express, one of Agatha Christie’s most famous novels. Amazingly, this new production is only the second time it has been adapted for television and follows the famous and glitzy... Continue Reading →
