Yet another player in the literary parlor game of re-writing Jane Austen. From the dedication to Colin Firth, Mr. Darcy in the 1995 BBC miniseries, Hale, author of YA novels (River Secrets, 2006, etc.), lets the reader know her tongue is firmly in cheek. Hale's heroine, Jane Hayes, is a single New York professional with a secret passion for Pride and Prejudice-not the novel, but the more over-the-top romantic screen versions, particularly the one starring Firth. Shortly after her Great-Aunt Carolyn discovers Jane's obsession, the old lady conveniently dies, having bequeathed to Jane a three-week stay at Pembrook Park, a fantasy version of a Regency England country estate (modern plumbing, but no cell phones allowed). Temporarily re-christened "Miss Jane Erstwhile," Jane soon finds herself plopped into the center of several Austen novels rolled together. Her fellow guests are the pathetically needy "Miss Charming" and the gentle, genuinely charming "Miss Heartwright." Knowing that the hosts and male guests are clearly actors does not keep Jane from confusing fact with fantasy. As she resists the falseness of the situation, she falls into a contemporary fling with Martin, an actor playing a gardener on the estate, with whom she watches television and makes out. She also finds herself drawn to "Mr. Nobley," a Darcy stand-in. But is it the character being played whom she's attracted to? Or the man playing him? The novel is clever in its depiction of the many ways in which romance can fall away, and Jane is no fool as she attempts to sort out the real from the make-believe. Readers will be as surprised as she is by some of the twists. But ultimately this is a romance novel in which lovers who are meant to be together overcome miscues and misunderstandings before the final clinch. Mindless froth that Austen addicts will love.
Jane Austen has been the gift that keeps on giving—for authors, movie producers, and Colin Firth fans—for ages now. From modern day retellings, to spinoff books that focus on her tertiary characters, to mashups featuring zombies, Austen’s novels have been adapted, updated, and otherwise celebrated to within an inch of their robust lives, and fans still can’t get enough of her elegant, […]
R.A. Montgomery’s Choose Your Own Adventure books were an ever-present part of childhood for ‘80s and ‘90s kids. Popular at both school libraries and book fairs, they were a game as much as they were a book, more accurately described as “interactive fiction”—taking the infinite possibilities idea of video games and applying it to text. […]
Happy birthday, Jane Austen! Everyone’s favorite novelist of manners would be all of…well, a lot of years today, but a lady of a certain era never reveals her age. In celebration, I plan to reread Pride and Prejudice, which has inspired more second looks than an overloaded corset in a crowded ballroom. First, it was a book. […]
Friday marked the release of the movie Austenland, concerning the romantic misadventures of a Jane Austen obsessive visiting a petticoats-and-courtship–themed amusement park. Based on Shannon Hale’s 2008 novel, it’s just one of the many, many (many) offspring of Austen’s original canon. Though only 7 of her works were published, the last in 1818, she maintains […]
Colin Firth’s portrayal of Regency rogue Mr. Darcy in the BBC miniseries Pride and Prejudice ruined an entire generation of women for men who don’t sport waistcoats and rakish grins. (While also single-handedly causing the Great Smelling Salts Shortage of 1995.) Nowhere is this literary-lust more palpable than in Shannon Hale’s 2007 novel Austenland, which […]