Are Pride and Prejudice Movie Adaptations Clouding the Book?

Here’s a great quote from a book review of Pride and Prejudice by Laura MacDonald of Girlebooks.

My overall impression after this time around is that I need to stop watching movie adaptations and read the actual books. I believe I’ve watched the 1995 adaptation so many times that the performances play in my head as I read. This can be good at times–for example, the confrontation scene between Elizabeth and Lady Catherine De Bourgh couldn’t have been enacted better. But there is often room to criticize. While there have been several beautiful and somewhat faithful adaptations of this work, they can never fully represent the three dimensionality of the plot, the characters, their motivations, and their inner struggles that Austen so beautifully constructs.

What do you think readers? When you read Pride and Prejudice, do you visualize one of the movie actors as Mr. Collins, Lady Catherine, Lizzy or Darcy? Have the movie adaptations clouded our perception of the original novel?

To refresh your memory of Jane Austen’s original text, download Girlebooks wonderful ebook edition of Pride and Prejudice for free! Yes – FREE – thank you very much Austen elves at Girlebooks for all that you do to make classic literature available right on our desk tops and ebook readers.

Cheers, Laurel Ann, Austenprose

The Black Moth by Georgette Heyer Available for Free at Girlebooks

Inquiring Readers, In December we offered The Black Moth as an e-book and audio book as the first of the 12 Gifts of Christmas. Girlebooks now offers Georgette Heyer's first book to download on your mobile ebook readers, be they Kimble or Sony or ...? Below is Girlebook's ad for the novel. My only quibble is with the image Girlebooks used for the book. The Black Moth took place during the Georgian era. Here's what the cover hero should look like:
The Black Moth may be downloaded for free from our ebook catalog.

What qualities identify a hero? What qualities identify a villain? Since you read a lot (as your interest in Girlebooks indicates), you feel fairly confident that you can spot one or the other, even when one may be traveling somewhat incognito.

If so, Ms.Heyer’s approach to heroism and villainy may surprise you. The first novel in a four-part series including These Old Shades, Devil’s Cub, and An Infamous Army, The Black Moth comes disguised as an amusing but uncomplicated romance. The story appears so straightforward that you may be inclined to read it with half a mind. As I learned the hard way, that would be a mistake. I read all the way to the end of this fairly lengthy novel and got dropped into a denouement that was anything but uncomplicated. As a result, I reread the whole novel, this time with rapt attention.

When (notice I didn’t say “if”) you read this novel, it is very important that you make note (written, if possible) of the names, appearances and motivations of the various male characters. Since two of the main characters have aliases, it is easy to pigeonhole each character into a “hero / villain” category that may or may not suit his true nature. One of the strengths of The Black Moth is that the characters are multifaceted, making it hard to totally like or dislike any of them.

The Black Moth himself has three aliases, and only once does the novel hint at who The Black Moth really is. Interestingly, it is easy to miss this, because this he appears as somewhat of a peripheral character. Consider the character of The Black Moth to be a puzzle that must be put together. And a puzzle he is. His motivations defy rationalization. At times he is a guardian angel, other times he lives up to his nickname, which is anything but angelic. From descriptions of his countenance, I pictured someone very much like the actor Alan Rickman—not exactly a romantic hero, but an attractive and compelling character who usually manages to upstage the romantic hero and other characters as well.

Hints for more pleasurable reading of The Black Moth: bone up on your fencing terms. The story is pleasurable without knowing the terminology, but with two very interesting fencing matches, it would have been nice to know exactly what was taking place. Also, read the prologue with care. It may seem irrelevant when you start reading the text of the first chapters, but it contains some skillful foreshadowing.

Another Black Moth image more in keeping with the Georgian era. (From Blakeney Manor)

Posted by Vic, Jane Austen's World

The Complete Works of Jane Austen from Girlebooks

Girlebooks has opened up a new area: an ebook store. In the ebook store the gals will offer compilation ebooks and other goodies you can’t get elsewhere.

Their first offering is The Complete Works of Jane Austen. You can enjoy the convenience of all Jane Austen’s writing in one ebook file. It contains all of her major works: Sense and Sensibility, Pride and Prejudice, Mansfield Park, Emma, Northanger Abbey, and Persuasion; Minor and unfinished works: Sanditon, The Watsons, and Lady Susan; and Juvenilia: Frederic & Elfrida, Love and Freindship, Lesley Castle, The History of England, A Collection of Letters, Scraps. You may download your ebook immediately upon purchase.

We have ideas for subsequent offerings including compilations of the Brontë Sisters including all of their novels, poems and juvenilia; The Scarlet Pimpernel series in chronological order; the Anne of Green Gables series also in chronological order; other “complete works” of Elizabeth Gaskell, George Eliot and Fanny Burney; a compilations on different themes like young adult novels and American pioneers stories.

Seen on the Blogosphere

Austenprose and Ellen and Jim Have a Blog Too are cowriting book reviews of the new Oxford World's Classics reissues of Jane Austen's novels. Their diptych review is of Sense and Sensibility, the first of Jane Austen's novels to be published. In honor of these new Oxford editions, this blog is running a contest in which the winner gets to choose their favorite Jane Austen book as a prize. Click here to enter the contest.

Jane Odiwe's Blogspot features the scenes and settings from Jane Austen's novels and movie adaptations. She intersperses her posts with her drawings and paintings. Nicely done, Jane! And congratulations on getting your book, Lydia Bennet's Story, published with SourceBooks in October.

Click here to read the exchange of letters between Lucy (Ms.Place) and Lydia Wickham (Jane).




Girlebooks is now offering free e-texts of Anne of Green Gables and Anne of Avonlea. You can choose several ways to download these books - as an Adobe PDF document, plain text, kindle format, Microsoft reader, or eReader PDB. As the site says, "We publish ebooks by the gals. But much more than a simple ebook resource, Girlebooks aims to make classic and lesser-known works by female writers available to a large audience through the ebook medium."


Austen Blog features an interesting post about Meryton. The comments are just as informative and are definitely worth reading!


Book Club Girl spoke recently on Talk Radio with Confessions of a Jane Austen Addict author Laurie Viera Rigler . Click on the widget to listen to the interview.
Posted by Ms. Place

Seen on the Blogosphere

• Real Gold: Treasures of Auckland City Libraries: this online exhibition shows the range and depth of the library's collections, beginning with the donation of rare books and manuscripts by Sir George Grey in 1887 and developing over the years with further significant gifts and purchases. In this link find information about Northanger Abbey and Persuasion. Click on the back and forth arrows for a peek at other original novels.
  

• Belief Net: A Walk With Jane Austen When Sherry Huang finished reading Lori Smith’s A Walk with Jane Austen, she saw the potential for turning excerpts from her book into a photo gallery. Lori Smith took the photos of her journey.
  

• Girlebooks now offers all of Jane Austen's novels as free, downloadable books. In addition to Pride and Prejudice, Persuasion, Northanger Abbey, Emma, Mansfield Park and Sense and Sensibility, find Cecilia and Evelina by Fanny Burney, The Mysteries of Udolpho by Ann Radcliffe, Belinda by Maria Edgeworth, North and South by Elizabeth Gaskell, and novels written by the Bronte sisters.

• Molland's Circulating Library has added new e-text additions, most notably some of Jane's minor works and juvenilia, James Edward Austen-Leigh’s A Memoir of Jane Austen, and Jane Austen, Her Life and Letters: A Family Record by William Austen-Leigh and Richard Arthur Austen-Leigh.
  

• A Faithful Narrative is a site devoted to Pride and Prejudice fan fiction. 'Nuff said.
  

• Edwardian Promenade: This blog's author is an enthusiast of the Edwardian era (1880-1920), and shares insights and information about fashion, history, and social customs from this short but fascinating period.
  

• Victorian Web is a mega site that is amazingly detailed and complex. The site is definitely worth exploring, but it takes a few moments to figure out exactly how it works. Click here for information on Jane Austen.

Posted by Vic (Ms. Place)

Watch Emma 1996

If you want to read Mr. Knightley's Diary (See my review below), but need a refresher on the plot in Emma, Jane's longest book, here's a quick fix. Emma, the 1996 movie is available in its entirety on YouTube. Click here to see each clip in order.

Also seen on the blogosphere, Girlebooks, free ebooks by the gals. Their latest offering is Pride and Prejudice. Previous ebooks include Northanger Abbey, The Age of Innocence, The Secret Garden, Heidi, The Mysteries of Udolpho, Jane Eyre, Middlemarch and more!