Deborah Yaffe's Blog, page 5

Jane Austen movies: not the same as Jane Austen books

Look, it’s fine with me if your knowledge of Jane Austen is based on the movies, not the books. No problem. I love (many of) the movies too.

But could we please remember that the movies are not the same as the books? That just because it’s in a movie adaptation of a Jane Austen novel doesn’t mean it’s in the novel by Jane Austen? Could we please stop attributing movie stuff to Jane Austen without first checking to make sure it’s in the book?

Today’s rant is occasioned by an it’s-Jane-Austen’s-birthday feature that ran this week on Bustle, a web site specializing in allegedly female-centric topics like news, entertainment, fashion and Jane Austen. Our author, Anna Klassen, set out to rank Austen’s men from worst to best. Along the way, she demonstrated that, although she may have read the books, she’s seen the movies a lot more recently.

Exhibit A: Willoughby is a “douchebag” for “seducing a 15-year-old girl and abandoning her when she became pregnant.” Except that in the book, the seduced-and-abandoned Eliza is seventeen. She’s fifteen in the Andrew Davies script for the 2008 TV miniseries of Sense and Sensibility. (Minor detail? Not to us Janeites.)

Exhibit B: Edmund Bertram is Austen’s most romantic hero (yes, you read that right. No accounting for tastes in this world) because, among other things, he “encourages Fanny in her writing pursuits.” Except that in the book, she’s not a writer. It’s Patricia Rozema’s 1999 movie of Mansfield Park that turns Fanny into a Jane Austen prototype and Edmund into her literary mentor.

Exhibit C: “John Knightley and Emma Woodhouse are pretty much BFFs throughout the novel.” OK, this isn’t movie confusion – just a straight-up Journalism 101, if-you-couldn’t-remember-that-his-name-is-George-you-should-have-Googled-till-you-got-it-right lesson.

Exhibit D: “Darcy is seriously moody: He loves her, he hates her, he’s indifferent, and he loves her again. Surely, ‘You have bewitched me, body and soul’ will go down in history as one of the greatest lines in romantic literature, but it took him a while to get to this selfless place.”

Where to begin? Let us break this travesty down.

1. However we may interpret the facial contortions of Messrs. Olivier, Rintoul, Firth and Macfadyen, in the book it is one hundred percent clear that Darcy moves from indifference (“tolerable, but not handsome enough to tempt me”) into love so seamlessly that he is in the middle before he knows that he has begun. After that, no hatred, no indifference, no change of mind. Not moody at all. Just, you know, proud.

2. “You have bewitched me, body and soul” will not go down in history as one of the greatest lines in romantic literature. This will not occur for two reasons.

a) It is a cheesy and cliched line.

b) It is not in the book. Not literature. Cinema. If you love that line, then don’t thank Jane Austen: thank Deborah Moggach, the screenwriter for the 2005 movie of Pride and Prejudice.

All right, back to our reading now. Or our movie-watching. Just no confusing the two, OK?

Happy 238th birthday

Today is Jane Austen’s 238th birthday – cue trumpet flourish – and the public library in Lawrenceville, New Jersey, is throwing a fun party, complete with tea and scones, live period music, and (ahem!) a talk on Among the Janeites by yours truly.

The festivities kick off at 2 pm today at the Lawrence Headquarters Branch, 2175 Brunswick Pike in Lawrenceville, and my talk will probably begin close to 3 pm, after the scones and the singing. Stop by if you can. And wherever you are today, lift a glass in tribute to Jane Austen.

Another Janeite conversation

The first of my back-to-back December events is coming up tomorrow (Friday, December 13). I’ll be speaking about and signing Among the Janeites at 2 pm at the Monroe Township Public Library -- 4 Municipal Plaza, Monroe, NJ.

If you’re in the neighborhood, do stop by for a conversation about our love for Jane Austen, who's just about to celebrate her two hundred and thirty-eighth birthday.

Janeite game-playing

Jane Austen games are breaking out all over. The creators of Ever, Jane, a new massively multi-player online role-playing game (MMORPG) set in Austen’s world, just wrapped up a successful Kickstarter campaign. A mother-daughter team in Utah is still raising money for a board game disarmingly titled The Jane Game. And now comes news of a new iPhone app, Regency Love, with some kind of Austen-y vibe.

I have only the vaguest idea what the app actually does – something about storytelling? With mention of dancing and embroidery and dashing companions? -- but the stills featured on the web site of its creators, Tea For Three Studios, are appealing and painterly. And it’s being issued next Monday, December 16, which confers Janeite street cred.

As the last person in the western hemisphere without a smartphone, I will have to sit out this dance, but if you try out the app, do let me know what you think.

Married to Mr. Darcy?

On-line quizzes claiming to align your personality with that of a literary character are hardly a new phenomenon. (For example, click here to find out if you’re more Emma Woodhouse or Anne Elliot. Or here, to uncover your inner Edmund Bertram or Fitzwilliam Darcy).

The quiz currently making the rounds on Facebook is sponsored by the Scottish Book Trust in honor of Book Week Scotland (which, incidentally, ended on December 1. But never mind). Reportedly, a million people worldwide have answered these dozen questions, which gauge users’ sociability and approach to problem-solving.

Unlike the Austen quizzes, this one casts its net more widely: you may discover you’re the flighty Holly Golightly, the suave James Bond or the cerebral Hercule Poirot. On line, quiz-takers have reported being paired with people from A Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, To Kill a Mockingbird, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, The Hunger Games, Les Miserables, The No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency, The Lord of the Rings, On the Road, The Life of Pi, One Day, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, and the Harry Potter and Sherlock Holmes stories, as well as the Batman and Spiderman comics. I seem to be Clarice Starling, the intrepid investigator in Silence of the Lambs.

But my husband is. . . Mr. Darcy.

Or so he claims: I took the quiz again, entering all the answers he insists he chose the first time round, and could produce only George Smiley, John Le Carre’s rumpled, stubbornly honorable spy. A good man in his way, but no Mr. Darcy.

December events

December is a special month for Janeites, since the 16th is the birthday of our beloved author.

I'll be giving back-to-back talks on Among the Janeites later this month -- on Friday, December 13, at the public library in Monroe Township, NJ; and on Monday, December 16, during an Austen birthday tea party at the public library in Lawrenceville, NJ.

Both talks begin at 2 pm, and more details can be found on the "Events" tab above. Drop in if you're in the neighborhood. . .

Giving thanks for Jane Austen

As a concept, gratitude is important to Jane Austen: Elizabeth feels it for Darcy when she learns what he's done for Lydia; Sir Thomas Bertram reduces Fanny to tears when he accuses her of lacking it. The word “gratitude” appears often in the novels; its close cousin, “thankfulness,” only a handful of times.

Today, as we gather to give thanks for food and family – and, of course, for great literature – here are two of my favorite gratitude-related passages from Austen:

All the surprise and suspense, and every other painful part of the morning dissipated by this conversation, she re-entered the house so happy as to be obliged to find an alloy in some momentary apprehensions of its being impossible to last. An interval of meditation, serious and grateful, was the best corrective of everything dangerous in such high-wrought felicity; and she went to her room, and grew steadfast and fearless in the thankfulness of her enjoyment.

(Persuasion, ch. 23)

She was assured of his affection; and that heart in return was solicited, which, perhaps, they pretty equally knew was already entirely his own; for, though Henry was now sincerely attached to her, though he felt and delighted in all the excellencies of her character and truly loved her society, I must confess that his affection originated in nothing better than gratitude, or, in other words, that a persuasion of her partiality for him had been the only cause of giving her a serious thought. It is a new circumstance in romance, I acknowledge, and dreadfully derogatory of an heroine’s dignity; but if it be as new in common life, the credit of a wild imagination will at least be all my own.

(Northanger Abbey, ch. 30)

The dishes on Austen's table

I ate so much terrible British food during the two years I studied in England – I can’t think of my Oxford college’s rendition of moussaka without shuddering – that I’ve never had much hankering to eat like Jane Austen.

But this recent article by Pen Vogler, the author of a new Austen-themed cookbook, Dinner with Mr. Darcy, inclines me to change my mind. Maybe it’s because Thanksgiving is in the air, but all the talk of roast venison, scalloped oysters, dried cherries and apple pies got my mouth watering.

Vogler’s book is by no means the first effort at bringing the all-powerful Austen brand to the lucrative foodie market. I’m aware of three others – The Jane Austen Cookbook, by Maggie Black & Deirdre LeFaye; Cooking with Jane Austen, by Kirstin Olsen; and Tea with Jane Austen, by Kim Wilson – and there may well be more. None graces the cookbook shelf in my kitchen, but perhaps I should expand my horizons.

After all, none of them is likely to include a moussaka recipe.

Skin-deep Austen-love

The Janeite Meme of the Week title goes to these elegant and hilarious Jane Austen temporary tattoos – so popular, it appears, that they’ve temporarily sold out. No wonder: who could resist a “Captain Wentworth” anchor tattoo for the bicep, or a lower back tattoo reading “Imprudent”?

(Though, of course, those of you who have checked out the non-temporary Janeite tattoos of Alethea White-Previs – see her lower back tattoo on the Among the Janeites Facebook page, under Photos or in the September 6 post – will know that the rest of us are mere amateurs by comparison.)

Meanwhile, I’m intrigued that this same retailer is selling – next to the Jane Austen air freshener and Jane Austen bandages – an apparently brand new version of the revered Jane Austen Action Figure. I was under the impression that this beloved talisman had been discontinued, but if so, she’s ba-a-a-ck, with new packaging and – gasp! – a pink spencer replacing the original green.

Is it necessary to own one in each color? I fear it may be. . .

Cool new web site: Book the Writer

It’s launch day for Book the Writer, a web site that, for a fee, arranges for authors to visit New York City book groups discussing their work. I’m excited to be included on a most illustrious list of novelists, poets, biographers, memoirists and journalists who are available for these visits.

In a world that seems less and less interested in treating writing as real work -- you know, the kind you get paid for -- Book the Writer's business model could represent a new avenue of support for the arts. (Or, actually, a version of an old model: the salons of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, where patrons entertained their friends with the clever conversation of artists whose work they supported financially.)

Will twenty-first-century book groups pay to talk with writers? Time will tell. Meanwhile, I encourage you all to browse at the site. At the very least, you'll get some great ideas for your next book group selection.

Many thanks to novelist Jean Hanff Korelitz, the brains behind Book the Writer, for setting up the site and inviting me to participate. I’m looking forward to discussing Among the Janeites with new readers.