Deborah Yaffe's Blog, page 9

Two more newspaper reviews

The Boston Globe: "Amusing."

The Tampa Bay Times: "Fascinating."

Janeite fantasy: Buy Cassandra's Cup

Janeite fantasies don't get much more fantastic than this: Cassandra's Cup, the tea shop located directly opposite Jane Austen's House Museum in Chawton, is for sale, reports Jane Austen's Regency World magazine.

Surely even the most determinedly urban Janeite can't entirely resist the romantic vision of a life lived directly opposite the very country cottage where Austen wrote or revised all her novels. The property even comes with a two-bedroom apartment -- not to mention throngs of tourists dropping in for their mid-pilgrimage cuppas.

"The business might well suit a Janeite looking for a ‘lifestyle’ opportunity," the magazine opines. Or just a Janeite writer hoping some fairy dust will brush off on her.

The catch? (You knew there must be one.) The price tag is 650,000 pounds -- just over $1 million at the current exchange rate. If only I had a few Cisco shares to sell. . .

Kirkus Reviews on Among the Janeites

Kirkus Reviews, a book-trade publication, reviews Among the Janeites in its latest issue, praising yours truly as "a smart reader and a shrewd but sympathetic judge of character." There's a bit more, but you'll have to take my word for it, at least for a week: you can't access the full review without a subscription until next Tuesday.

The Kansas City Star also mentions the book in a roundup of Austen-related news.

Guest post at The Book Rat

I've got a guest post today at The Book Rat, on why Mansfield Park gets so little love, even among Janeites. The blog is also giving away a copy of Among the Janeites and running a series of Janeite conversations in which I'm participating.

Come check it out and leave a comment. ..

Sanditon Summer: "Welcome to Sanditon"

"The Lizzie Bennet Diaries" was always going to be a hard act to follow.

Cleverly written and well-acted, LBD retold the story of Pride and Prejudice through the video diaries of a twenty-something communications grad student in contemporary California, supplemented with videos, Twitter messages and Tumblr posts ascribed to various secondary characters.

I was one of the insanely large number of fans – more than two hundred thousand YouTube subscribers! – who tuned in to LBD’s one hundred three-to-five-minute-long episodes, posted online between April 2012 and March 2013. I helped a Kickstarter campaign last spring raise nearly $460,000 – almost eight times the target amount – to pay for a DVD package. I refuse to admit how excited I was when an LBD panel was added to the program at next month’s conference of the Jane Austen Society of North America. (But – do you think Darcy’s going to be there?)

Against that backdrop, it’s been a tad dispiriting this summer to watch the LBD team’s follow-up Austen-based web series, "Welcome to Sanditon," fall flat.

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Author Feast on Janeites

Want to see what I look like early in the morning? You're in luck -- Luke Abaffy's Author Feast, a web series featuring video chats with writers, has a segment about Among the Janeites. Which was filmed last Sunday morning. Not a pretty sight -- but it was fun to talk about how the book came to be.

Among the Janeites in the press (online and off)

A few more mentions of the book yesterday and today:

--The Daily Beast, in a long and detailed review, calls Among the Janeites "compulsively readable." (And the other book reviewed in the same piece, Roy and Lesley Adkins' Jane Austen's England, sounds very interesting, too.)

--The Dish excerpts last week's Q&A with me in The Hairpin. (Read the whole thing here.)

--The New York Post includes the book in its "Required Reading" column.

--The book blog Effusions of Wit and Humour has posted an insightful review of Among the Janeites. When someone applies Austen's own "light and bright and sparkling" tag to my book, I'm a happy woman.

--The Miami Herald mentions Among the Janeites in a story about Austen's enduring appeal.

Regency fashion disasters: Newsday interview

A fun interview with me in Newsday, in which I talk about Janeites, Austen-love and the fashion disaster that was my attempt to wear a Regency gown to the JASNA ball.

The New York Times tests Janeite mettle

Vowing "to separate the Lizzys from the Lydias," the New York Times is running an online Jane Austen trivia game, which includes some questions I contributed. I did manage to get those right, though I missed two of the questions set by other panelists -- arghh!

The quiz accompanies a roundup of recent Austen-related developments -- from Kelly Clarkson's ring to the banknote/Twitter troll affair -- which mentions Among the Janeites.

The Republic of Pemberley reads Among the Janeites

I'm very excited to report that the Republic of Pemberley, the largest on-line Jane Austen fan community, has scheduled a Group Read of Among the Janeites for September 15-21. (A Group Read is an organized on-line discussion of a book -- details about how it works, as well as a discussion schedule, can be found here.)

This event will be an especially big thrill for me because it was my experiences at the RoP that first got me thinking about Janeite community and, eventually, about writing a book like Among the Janeites. My first-ever post on Pemberley, back in October 2005, was during a Group Read of Persuasion, so I guess these past eight years have brought me full circle.

Please plan on dropping in at the Group Read -- I'll be participating in the conversation throughout the week, and I'm looking forward to discussing the Janeite phenomenon with other Janeites.